They’ve got one of the most enduring on-screen sponsored_longforms, but Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc are firm friends beyond the TV shows, having first met each other almost 30 years ago.

Now Perkins has delivered a touching tribute to platonic friendships during this month’s appearance on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs – and revealed the very moment she fell in friend-love with fellow Bake Off host Giedroyc was largely down to a pair of beautiful Dr. Martens.

“The first thing I noticed was she had some dusky pink DMs, eight-hole DMs, and I just thought, ‘I want those, I want those more than I’ve wanted anything in this world’,” she tells Kirsty Young, when asked what her first impressions of Giedroyc were.

“Then I looked up and I saw this shock of sort of bleach-blonde hair, this profusion of teeth, like a sort of broken piano, and this hearty laugh, and I just felt compelled – I’d never met her before – to just move into her orbit and I just knew we’d know each other forever. From that moment really.”

Sue Perkins on the moment she fell in friend-love with Mel Giedroyc