The Great British Bake-Off

A slightly tounge in cheek commentary. All opinions gratefully received.

Ta,

Jim

The Great British Bake Off – The Best Reality Television Programme. Ever.
By Jim Bryant

Reality television isn’t quite what it used to be. It remains a cost effective way to create what is entertainment for some and ‘entertainment’ for others and is still one of the most prolific of outputs by most mainstream channels. Whatever you think about it, it’s here to stay. Consequently, television exec-u-bots are trying their hardest to think of new formats, new contestants and different ways to humiliate, attack and expose them and preferably keep them in a hot tub for as much time as possible.

As such, all reality television now falls into one of three categories:

1. The forgettable. Think ‘Big Brother’; once a genuinely interesting social experiment (and I’m thinking of the first series here) but now a way for preening ‘celebrities’ and non-celebrities alike to remind the World why they should probably be locked up for longer than ten weeks.

2. The shocking. ‘Big Fat Gypsy Weddings’ anyone? No, me neither...

3. The bizarre. Anyone seen ‘My Best Friend is a Smurf, a Figment of My Imagination and is Dating My Mother’? Well no, because I made it up. However it is a lot more plausible than most of the rest that fall into this category.

There is one programme that, try as I might, I cannot fit into any of the three categories above. ‘The Great British Bake-Off’ is simply an anomaly, mainly because it’s charming, instantly watchable and very funny. For anyone who hasn’t seen it, essentially it’s the X-Factor of the baking world. Twelve contestants are gently whittled down to the winner who is (and this is truly rare in the reality television World) not the most bizarre, not necessarily the most entertaining but the most skilled in their field. It’s very much like Masterchef, although it doesn’t suffer from presenters yelling, “THIS IS THE TOUGHEST CHALLENGE OF THEIR LIVES” whenever they have to boil an egg. And, perhaps most surprisingly of all, you can learn how to bake throughout the show!

All of human life is in ‘Bake-Off’. The selection of participants is surprisingly varied, and predictably strange. There are one or two middle-aged women as I guess you might expect, but beyond that there are musicians and lawyers and even a P.E. teacher. Who’d have thunk it? What’s more, the contestants are, by and large, fairly likeable. We live through their trials and tribulations, through the oven-staring, the over-flouring and the purple icing that should really have been a light aqua-marine. Take note ‘Big Brother’/’I’m Not a Celebrity’ producers; you don’t have to fill your programmes with preening morons in order to sell a show to the public. Look at what happened to ‘Big Brother’. Its appeal is so lost on mainstream audiences that it’s now on the same channel that shows ‘Ice Road Truckers’.

What we also find with ‘Bake-Off’ are two seriously likeable presenters in Mel and Sue who gently poke fun at the bakers and judges alike. They don’t scandalise or imply anything about their contestants who, if we’re honest, are free and therefore ensuring them a higher salary. The judges are also fantastic. Mary Berry, a stern baking diva, keeps everything very centred and Paul Hollywood, the young scamp (in comparison) is Hollywood in nothing but name.

If reality television has to continue, then it could do far worse than to look at ‘The Great British Bake-Off’ as an example. We don’t need additional shows like ‘Big Brother’s Little Brother’s Dog’. We don’t need to watch ridiculous people doing ridiculous things. We don’t actually need to live the programme. We just need to enjoy it for an hour a week. In that sense, ‘The Great British Bake-Off’ is as perfect as light entertainment gets. Now if only it had a hot tub...

Nice work

Thanks Pete.

Jim

I love it.

It's amazing how tense it is when they remove something from the oven that might have gone wrong.

Pure pastry adrenaline rush.

Anybody been watching this series? Each year I watch the first couple as my gf watches it and always find myself completely drawn in! Yet again I am loving it!