I have a confession: one that my colleagues know – and consider aberrant – but the wider world does not.
I don’t like the Great British Bake Off.
I’m not even a cooking show skeptic. I fancy Michel Roux Jr as much as the next person (or at least I did, until my mum professed he reminded her of my dad and I suddenly felt a bit weird about the whole thing). I even went through a phase, as an undergraduate, of watching River Cottage on Channel 4 catch up – as good a way of avoiding reading WB Yeats as any.
No: It’s worse than that. I’m a true heretic. I hate Bake Off not for its concept, but for its very Bake Off-ness. I hate it for its unique style. I hate it for the things my colleague Anna uses to assess how Bake Off each episode of the Bake Off is.
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Here’s why.
Mel and Sue
I am very fond of both Mel and Sue, individually and on different programs. The news that they worked hard to keep Bake Off nice, partially by standing, swearing, near crying contestants in order to make the footage impossible to broadcast, endears them further.
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And yet: it is hard to escape the fact that the most damaging lie in English culture is that middle-class innuendo is funny.
My colleagues tell me this is my fault and that I do not get the joke, which is that Mel and Sue are not funny. I am not sophisticated enough to find something funny because it is not funny. I just find it not funny.
Paul Hollywood
I don’t love to hate him; I just hate him. Mediocre, snidey men in public life make me depressed.
If I wanted to watch a man ramble on, having incomprehensibly been given a role for which he is no way qualified, I’d watch Derek Acorah’s back catalogue of Most Haunted.
Again.
Mary Berry
Nominative determinism: suspect.
Boring contestants
Nadiya Hussain and Tamal Ray were fantastic – I’m not a monster – but why not just read Nadiya in the Times, or follow them on Twitter? You can get all the joy of the show’s more compelling characters without having to watch some blandly attractive man called Tim or Eoin – I don’t know their names; they could all be the same man in different shirts as far as I’m concerned – cock up a profiterole and talk about his “journey”.
On that note.
People going on “journeys”
I hate journeys. Ban this word from television.
Cakes are not that great. . .
. . .and they cannot save us. People who have tried to convince me about the Bake Off say they see it as a gorgeous ray of sunshine in our dark times. It is not, because cake is nothing.
Cf the best response to today’s news:
I won’t be hosting new #GBBO & you won’t be watching. Why? Because Trump will be president so we’re all going to fucking die!
— kath (@KathyBurke) September 22, 2016
Perhaps I’ll enjoy it more on Channel 4.