Sue Perkins is about to be shot in Bogotá. She meets her gunman at an armoured clothing factory that sells its bulletproof vests to 38 presidents all over the world. “I shoot my lawyer,” says the kind-eyed, mild-mannered Miguel Caballero. “I shoot my wife. I shoot 800 times … many people.” Now, at point blank range, he’s going to shoot Sue. “The problem is I don’t do danger,” she explains, as she will many times in Sue Perkins: Perfectly Legal (Netflix), usually right before she does something really dangerous again. “I specialise in making elaborate puns on baking shows.”
The moment has come. Both Perkins and Caballero take deep breaths. He raises the gun to her belly (which I wish she would stop making “gelatinous” jokes about because it’s just your average middle-aged, medium-sized belly). Fires the shot. Perkins looks shocked. Afterwards she reflects on the difference between shaking things up a bit – the premise of her maiden voyage into the high-octane seas of Netflix miniseries – and getting a .38 calibre bullet in your guts. “They say the closer you are to death the more alive you feel,” she says. “I can now say that the closer you are to death … the closer you are to death.”
