Just as autumn brings sweatshirts and frigid dawns, leaf-scaled streets, still wet with rain, that threaten to slip from beneath your feet with each uncertain step, it also brings the true beginning of the baking season. To accompany your earthen loaves of pumpkin bread (well-spiced, I should hope) and jagged wedges of apple pie (à la mode, unless you’re boring), the Great British Bake Off has returned for its fourteenth season. And to my great delight, it is simply fabulous. But I must admit that as I awaited the arrival of the new season on Netflix, I felt no small degree of anxiety about my beloved show — and with considerable reason.
In the past few seasons of the Great British Bake Off (which I shall refer to as the GBBO from here on out), the show became less and less enjoyable to watch. No longer was it a tranquil Eden, apart from a world of tumult and tremors, but a creation plagued by mismanagement and polluted with drama. The reasons for this transformation were multitude, and I will address them all in turn. But to understand what went wrong, it is first necessary to understand what makes the show so enjoyable to watch in the first place.
Several ingredients set the GBBO apart from other cooking shows, the first being that all of the contestants are amateur bakers, not professionals, and the second being the notable lack of a cash prize. As a result, there is little cutthroat competition or backhanded animosity between the bakers, but instead an atmosphere of overwhelming kindness and congeniality. The stakes are low, and the entire affair, backdropped with pictorial English countryside and close-up shots of flora and fauna, is wonderfully joyous.
The presenters are comedians, who, when the show is at its best, ease the bakers’ nerves and keep the competition lighthearted. Judging is fair and to the point, yet not in the least bit meanspirited; no one is trying to make anyone feel bad about themselves. Mary Berry, and later Prue Leith, balance out Paul Hollywood’s exacting critiques by searching for the “scrumptious flavors” in even the most burnt of biscuits. Berry and Leith, seemingly quite deliberately, take on the image of a loving granny who will still tell you when your sponge is a bit too dry, or when (infamously) the bottom of your tart is just too soggy.
The technical challenges, while occasionally venturing into more obscure provinces of the Victorian baking canon (such as a “Tennis Cake” from the 1890s), largely stay within the realm of techniques that a British home baker could be expected to know. Signature challenges, in asking for much simpler bakes, allow the bakers to express themselves, often yielding unusual flavors and innovative spins on classic (read: boring) baked goods. The showstopper challenge, perhaps preposterous at times (on what occasion, exactly, does anyone require a 3D bread sculpture?), remains feasible, allowing bakers to combine their artistic and technical abilities to create bakes that are, well, showstoppers!
In contrast to most reality shows, drama is kept to a minimum, making for a stress-free, comforting watching experience, perhaps capable of staving off even the worst case of Sunday Scaries. That none of the bakers are professionals also lends a down-to-earth quality to the show. You could easily imagine a marginally gifted relative or friend appearing on the show, in a way that you never could with a show like Top Chef. The baked goods featured on the show can even be sampled at home — the website for the GBBO includes recipes for all of the technical challenges and many of the best signature bakes.
So what went wrong? What disturbed the idyllic reality that once was? Somewhere along the line, the producers seem to have decided that the show just wasn’t exciting enough and that they couldn’t repeat the same challenge twice. Soon, they began to run out of conventional baked goods and resorted to more and more absurd challenges. These absurd challenges were not only unenjoyable to watch, but also unfair to the bakers, and sometimes, even offensive.
In searching for novel challenges, the bakers were increasingly asked to make things that they could not reasonably be expected to be acquainted with or capable of making. That the bakers were a collection of amateurs in friendly competition, united by a common love of baking, was the chief conceit of the show. And yet, for the sake of novelty, and I suspect drama (something a bit antithetical to the original point of the show), many of the challenges become almost impossible for home bakers, to the point of being unfair. In one notable instance, when the bakers were tasked with making a “Summer Pudding Bombe” for the technical challenge, they had to know the obscure fact that vegetarian gelatin must be boiled in order to set.
Perhaps nothing exemplified the developing problems more than the disastrous “Mexican Week” of last year’s season 13 of the GBBO. The presenters, in a vague attempt at humor, donned stereotypical Mexican garb and told a series of borderline racist jokes. The judges were far out of their depth, the episode of a once educational show containing many inaccuracies about Mexican baking. Such offenses might have been forgivable if the “Mexican” baked goods produced were actually any good, if inauthentic; they were neither.
If nothing else, the week was incredibly unfair to the bakers. To task a field of bakers from Britain — a country with vanishingly little exposure to Mexican food, especially compared to the US — with baking Mexican foods, was simply absurd. With so little knowledge of Mexican food, as was clearly evident in their bumblings (many of the contestants lacking knowledge of even guacamole), how well could they really be expected to make Mexican bakes?
The absurdity of the technical challenge was especially noteworthy; the bakers were tasked with making “Paul Hollywood’s Spicy Beef Tacos”, a challenge which, notably, lacked any baking at all. The technical challenge is supposed to test the technical baking skill of the bakers; who, when preparing for the GBBO, would practice making tortillas? The showstopper challenge was a layered tres leches cake — something which, by the very moist and tender nature of a tres leches cake, doesn’t really work at all, as evidenced by the fact that a tres leches cake is almost always a single-layered cake. The point was — the challenge was poorly thought out and unfair to the bakers.
This was hardly the first time a national week went awry. In season twelve’s German Week, the German contestant on the show was baffled by a supposedly German-yeasted cake challenge. Season eleven’s Japan week notably wasn’t very Japanese at all, with many of the bakes the product of Chinese techniques, and consisting of Chinese or Indian flavors. Even when a given week wasn’t offensive (which, to be fair, was most of the time), it asked the bakers to complete challenges that strayed far from the show’s home-baking roots (an edible Halloween pinata filled with sweet treats, all in four hours?)
Often, the bakers were simply not given enough time, especially for challenges with time-inelastic steps, such as proving a dough or setting a mousse. There can be no doubt that this was an intentional effort to heighten the tension, and therefore drama of the show. Unlike in the case of many other reality shows, the viewer of the GBBO tends to want the baker to succeed. If a viewer is celebrating a failure, it is because something about the show has gone terribly wrong. After all, aren’t we all friends here?
The producers seemed to have missed the point of the GBBO. No one watches the GBBO for the drama. No one watches the GBBO to see people fail. In many ways, the GBBO is selling a fiction, perhaps even a dream, of a picturesque tent in picturesque countryside, where everyone is friends with everyone, and the only drama is whether or not a loaf of bread is overproved. This is a heartwarming and optimistic vision of the world, especially when contrasted with the brutal dynamics that characterize most reality shows.
The new season of the GBBO has returned to what made the show a success in the first place. National weeks have been removed, and for the most part, the challenges are back to normal — chocolate tortes, Devonshire splits, drizzle cakes, and biscuit displays. Everything is again feasible to the home baker, without the sort of surprises that no contestant could reasonable be expected to be prepared for. It is not as if the show has gone stodgy, to borrow a term from the judges, but by contrast, the return to simplicity has allowed for ever greater expressions of personality and creativity by the bakers.
I don’t wish to delve into the murky terrain of the quality of the presenters, and thus my discussion of them will remain quite limited, but suffice it to say that Alison Hammond has been a welcome replacement for Matt Lucas, who perhaps did not quite fit the jovial atmosphere of the show. And on another minor note, one of the most welcome changes in the new season has been deflation in the handshake supply from Paul Hollywood. The once rare and prized handshake became somewhat commonplace in the last few seasons; no longer are they so easily attained.
Once again, I can look forward to Friday nights for another soothing injection of pretty pastries and good-natured fun. There isn’t quite enough of that in our world nowadays.
