The Great British Bake Off is back. Although for many housebounds "Bake Off" is just what they call 2020. Yes, much has changed since the last season. The Bake Off is now being broadcast in a world beset by two plagues: Covid and, arguably, something worse: children baking. The pastry-loving denizens of the Bake Off marquee have fled these disasters much like the characters in the Masque of the Red Death and here they are now, creating a new world, a better one, with well-made cakes.
Much has changed since the early days of this television programme. Back then, a nice old lady, an eccentric uncle with an exotic name ("Paul") and my television parents, the gently chortley Mel and Sue, ruled over the marquee. Over time – Bake Off has been on for aeons now – the nice old lady was replaced with Prue Leith, a bubbly cakemonger who dresses a little like the Riddler, and Mel and Sue were replaced with more outré television stepmothers, wacky Noel Fielding and wry Sandi Toksvig. And then they decided this wasn't freaky enough so now the wry Toksvig has been replaced with the wacky Matt Lucas and so we have two wacky people at once, which no one has tried before.
This is basically throwing caution to the wind and saying why can't we have "Costello and Costello"? "Morecambe and Morecambe"? "Ernie and Ernie"? "Zag and Zag"? The problem, as any chemist knows, is put two wacky people in close contact with each other and they start to outwacky one another. Before you know it you're neck deep in childish whimsy and looking around desperately for a dry wit to use as a lifebuoy.
It’s terrifying, to be honest. Fielding and Lucas greet us at the outset of this week’s episode holding hands and looking for all the world like a goth Wurzel Gummidge and a bereaved but sedated Tweedledee. They don’t seem like celebrities so much as folk creatures who want us to answer some riddles in return for a magic horse.
Eye-burningly white
Paul Hollywood, the only thing remaining from the before times, has changed too. His hair has somehow become even more eye-burningly white, the whitest white you have ever seen, whiter than the crispest snow, so white that even Donald Trump wants to give it a postal vote. And his eyes are more hair-scorchingly blue, bluer than the bluest sea or the bluest movie or the Smurfiest Smurf. As for the hand with which he delivers those much-coveted handshakes, it's lurking there like the gun in act one of a Chekhovf play. Our eyes are drawn to it. It's large and grasping, much like Gollum's as he clutched for the ring. Yes, Paul Hollywood has emerged from his slumber and is hungry for power and hungry for cakes.
Anyway, as this dayglo quartet stand in a row together, it’s clear what has happened. It happens to every franchise at some point in the life cycle. It’s become a cartoon. It has become Joel Schumacher’s Great British Bake Off.
Fair enough, says you. I mean, apart from this, the premise is basically the same. The plain people of Britain, solid yeomen and women, are here to bake. They do so competitively but politely and kindly because they are the pleasant, diverse open-minded Britons, the ones that are held up like a human shield whenever human rights lawyers or people with an interest in history call round.
From their lofty eyrie, Hollywood and Leith set difficult tasks. The worst thing that’s going to happen here is that someone will bake a slightly less delicious cake than planned. The contestants are facing mild peril but, given how shell shocking the world is right now, that’s about as much peril as we can take. This week’s theme is “biscuits” and they set to work creating florentines and unholy cakes that look like other things in a floury mockery of platonic ideals. A cake that looks like a tea set? A biscuit that looks like a waistcoat? A scone that mimics the face of God? You’ve got the gist.
Massive hand
Things are, in many ways, comfortingly familiar. As prophesised, Hollywood makes a production of offering his massive hand to those who have achieved favour. “I will never wash this hand,” says the young woman who receives this week’s manual affirmation, unwisely, really, given the current circumstances.
Noel and Matt are a tad more anarchic and seem to be eyeing each other suspiciously in the manner of rival smalltown eccentrics
Meanwhile, Leith says things like “[I’m] worrying a bit about your very large nuts” and everyone laughs, because they take this to be a reference to that baker’s presumably humongous testicles. They’ve really begun stretching the unintentional single entrendres in recent years. Eventually things will devolve to the point where Prue will just be yelling swearwords while we smile indulgently.
The bakers are also sporadically interrupted by "the twins", Fielding and Lucas, now devoid of ballast and wackying up the joint something terrible. Unlike Mel and Sue and even Noel and Sandi, whose interruptions were a form of pastoral care, Noel and Matt are a tad more anarchic and seem to be eyeing each other suspiciously in the manner of rival smalltown eccentrics. The bakers sometimes smile wearily and ask them to leave so they can continue baking. It's not their fault they're too goddamned wacky. They're just as God made them. If it was God.
All in all, despite the ravages of time, having the Bake Off back is a good thing. We have a choice between plague, Brexit and a divisive US election or cakes in a tent. I for one, choose cakes in a tent.
Glitzy Birr
Let's see what another "star baker" has cooked up. Darren "Sex and the City" Star's latest production is the story of a young American being wowed by the sights, sounds, tastes and smells of glitzy Birr while blundering around Instagraming and being generally amazed by everything. When I say Birr, I mean of course, Paris (Birr is the Paris of Offaly, after all). The eponymous Emily in Paris (Netflix) is played by Lily Collins, daughter of Phil. Emily is a branding expert and fashionista with a hereditary love for excellently smooth AOR grooves and she is dispatched to bring peppy American can-do-it-ive-ness to the slumped, sexy, blasé Europeans (Parisians/Offaly people). It feels simultaneously camply cliched and enthusiastically sincere. I've noticed this recently with cultural phenomena aimed at Generation Z, how all the knowing self-reflexivity is distilled into a strangely non-satirical earnest camp like it's a decaffeinated coffee or non-alcoholic beer.
I guess that unironic knowingness is appealing when you have the world at your fingertips and before you’re world weary. Also, there are a lot of very tasty non-alcoholic beers these days so stop being so cynical, you tired old Generation Xer (I’m talking to myself now).
