Friday, March 29, 2024

That custard will never set! Bake Off has turned us all into armchair experts

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We might not know who is going to win this year’s final, but one thing is certain: we’ve become a nation of back-seat bakers

One day, a hundred thousand aeons ago, back in the BBC-and-Mel-&-Sue days, The Great British Bake Off (Tuesday, 8pm, Channel 4) was simple event-reality TV, The X Factor but made exclusively for people who composted aggressively and used to be prefects. Somewhere along the line, though, it evolved: no longer the humble domain of normal people competing on TV, it became something sensational, larger than the hard confines of the flatscreen around it. The first Bake Off final, 10 years ago, felt like a totaliser episode of Blue Peter. In 2020, it seems as seismic as a Wimbledon final.

Paul Hollywood is there, of course, a sex wolf in the body of a mature catalogue model; Prue Leith, as well, wincing her way through plates of food that, if I ate them, I would find so transcendent they would change my life. Pairing Matt Lucas with Noel Fielding was an inspired idea – Fielding’s dual energies (“Unkillable vampire allergic to light” and “Boy who gets detention for mooning too many trucks on the way back from a school coach trip”) mesh perfectly with Lucas’s (“Cuddly village fete mother” and “Untameable toddler who’s slightly too large for his cot”) – and, as the final three bakers sweat fretfully in a roiling marquee tent, the duo’s levity works as a perfect foil to the serious baking going on in front of them. I never thought I’d get a tension headache from watching a 20-year-old Scottish boy try to carry a cake from one workbench to another, but Bake Off, like no other programme on TV, knows how to stop my heart.

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