A Long Rambling List of Reasons Why The Great British Bake Off is Incredible
This was supposed to be an article about how TV anti-heroes cope with boredom. Many of the most famous “golden era” shows have an episode or two that pluck our protagonist out of the world that enables their worst behaviors, and I thought it would be fun to examine some of them to see what they have in common. So I wrote a list of episodes I could cover, settled on a few, and I was all ready to get watching. However, a friend then introduced me to The Great British Bake Off, so I watched that instead.
As popularity for the show was picking up steam in the US, I was reluctant to jump on board. It came at a time when I was really getting into cooking shows, so I should’ve given it a chance. However, I filed it in the “precious but disposable stuff the internet likes too much” section of my brain. It didn’t seem like something to take seriously. So I didn’t.
I was wrong. The Great British Bake Off is a fantastic show. And it’s not just a fantastic show because it’s “adorably British” or “nice,” though both of those assertions are certainly true. It’s a fantastic show on just about every possible level when it comes to not only cooking competition shows, but TV in general. Aesthetics. Pace. Narrative design. Everything.
In fact, I made an excessively long list of things I love about the show.
Before we begin, some quick stuff to get out of the way: I’ve only seen what’s on Netflix. I am aware of the fact that PBS/Netflix airs the seasons out of order and labels them differently, and I have not seen any of the new episodes without Mary, Sue, and Mel. The PBS/Netflix cuts also cut out the documentary sections of each episode, so I’m not going to talk about them, mostly because I haven’t seen enough of them to really have an opinion. (Though in theory, they’re a fantastic idea.)
Now let’s get into it!
1. It’s shot outside. (Assuming you agree that tents count as “outside.”)
This may not seem like a big deal, but hear me out.
When I was a kid, I used to stay up late watching dubbed episodes of Iron Chef. Then I forgot about cooking shows for a decade and some change. However, I was introduced to Cutthroat Kitchen and fell head-over-heels in love with it. (It’s still my favorite cooking competition show, but for reasons we’ll get into some other day.) Since my obsession with Cutthroat began, I’ve seen some MasterChef and MasterChef Junior, some Chopped, some Hell’s Kitchen, some Beat Bobby Flay, some of Bobby Flay’s other shows, and a few other examples that are escaping me at the moment.
At a certain point, I realized that I don’t really like most of these shows’ sets. I think the spaces where they’re shot are often dark, sterile, and pointlessly claustrophobic. It makes sense for some of these shows. The sabotages on Cutthroat Kitchen jokingly evoke torture, and thus a dungeon-esque feel works. However, there’s a certain feeling you get when you watch back-to-back episodes of, say, Beat Bobby Flay. It’s a feeling that’s not entirely unlike entering a windowless room during the day and then leaving to discover that the sun’s gone down. You’re disoriented and you’re not sure how much time has passed.
To be fair, these shows are shot like this for good reasons. Mainly, cost, logistics, and the actual minutia of making a television show. But I’m merely a viewer, thus I get to complain and shovel more Skittles into my mouth.
The Great British Bake Off, which from now on we’ll be referring to as Bake Off, is shot in a tent in the gorgeous English countryside. The set, painted in bright Easter colors with earthy accents, provides plenty of space (or at least appears spacious) with a wide gap separating two columns of cooking stations. It’s an open inviting space that feels welcoming and warm.
Most importantly, however, are the transparent plastic panels on the sides of the tent. Because of this small but crucial set choice, we get to look out at the lovely fields in the background. We get sunshine. We get rain. (Something that stirs something in me because I live in Los Angeles and I get actively homesick watching rain in movies or TV shows. This is not a joke.) Unlike most cooking competition shows, we get the sense that the cast and crew are breathing actual oxygen. We get a reminder that the show we’re watching was filmed in the real world, and not some closed off space where time has no meaning. (We also get an element of chaos, as baking often requires strict temperature control, and some dishes become harder to bake when it’s excessively hot or humid outside.)
Ultimately, shooting outside grounds the show in a sense of place. When I watch Beat Bobby Flay, I’m in a stuffy soundstage somewhere in Los Angeles, just like every other show. When I watch Bake Off, I’m transported to a pretty field in the country, and I feel better.
2. The hosts, Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc, are allowed to be human beings.
I’ve always suspected that being a reality show host is a quietly difficult job. On one hand, it’s an easy profession to mock. After all, on the surface, the job is simply looking presentable, smiling, and saying essentially the same shit every week. But think about the particulars. You have to be keenly aware of your body language. You have to know how to speak clearly and communicate directly with the contestants and the audience. In other words, you have to have that undefinable skill that makes people want to watch you on television. (And yes, that's absolutely a skill.)
Competition shows are about the contestants, not the hosts. Thus, most of the time, it’s the host’s job to go relatively unnoticed. This is why we’ve seen so many jokes about TV hosts being generically attractive, robotic, or expendable. Their job is to move the show along, but in practice, they’re essentially mannequins if they’re used improperly or they do a bad job.
Apparently most or all of the “A Ryan Seacrest Type” videos have been taken off Youtube. Oh well.
The same can generally be said for cooking competition show hosts. Some of them are fantastic. Some, less so. Some of them are needed in order for the show to function. Some could probably be edited out and replaced with talking heads and voiceover. Some are Alton Brown. Some are not.
Sue and Mel do all the things that hosts are supposed to do. They explain the rules to the bakers, they prompt commentary from the judges, they tell the audience what each contestant is baking through voiceover, they announce the winners and who’s being eliminated whichever week. If all they did were these normal hosts duties, the show would be fine. Maybe a touch too mechanical, but otherwise, perfectly functional.
However, Sue and Mel imbue the show with a sense of vitality. They make great terrible puns for those of us who enjoy great terrible puns. They make good use of innuendo, which brings a sense of playfulness to the proceedings. They make fun of the judges, gleefully undercutting the show’s attempts at making them seem intimidating. Every once and a while, they’ll accidentally ruin the contestant’s dishes (as when Sue inadvertently leaned on a contestant’s english muffins), which some may find annoying, but I personally find delightful because it injects some humanity into the process. When the contestants seem overwhelmed, Mel and Sue provide comfort and reassurance. Sometimes, they’ll even help with plating or some of the busy work of the baking, and all the while, they continue to make fantastic terrible jokes and I love it.
Whereas most competition cooking show hosts feel superfluous or replaceable, Sue and Mel feel interwoven into the show’s identity. They remind the audience that, in the end, this is a show about baking bread and decorating cakes. We may feel the impulse to project a whole lot of importance onto the show because it’s on TV, but we shouldn’t. Take the show seriously, but not too seriously.
Mel and Sue are no longer the hosts, and I haven’t seen any episodes with their replacements yet. I’m sure the new hosts are great. My only hope is that they’re allowed to be human beings like Sue and Mel, and not just some more hosts.
3. The competitors aren’t professional bakers, and they make cooking/baking seem like an attainable skill.
Most of the cooking shows I watch feature professional chefs, and our standards for them are much higher. Casting amateur bakers instead of professionals is, if nothing else, just a nice change of pace.
However, there’s a broader point to be made, but before I make it, let’s discuss for a second why we like cooking shows in general, let alone cooking competition shows.
You are (probably) a human being, and thus I can reasonably assume that you like food. And since you need food for sustenance, I can also reasonably assume that even looking at food stirs a feeling in you, be it a physical or emotional one. Brain like food. Brain want food. Brain makes you feel things when you see food. This is why some of us like cooking shows.
Writer Jim Harrison once said “You can do actresses. You can do models. But in the end, you come back to waitresses because they smell like food.” (That’s at least how Alton Brown phrased it in this video.) We project a lot onto food, and we can quantify this attachment in the hours we’ve spent watching Food Network or Tasty videos or reading articles on Serious Eats or buying J. Kenji López-Alt’s book (which is fucking incredible) or aimlessly wandering around the farmer’s market that used to be across the street from your apartment complex.
However, I personally think that a lot of food related media makes the actual skill of cooking seem unattainable. A lot of the shows emphasize talents that take years of advanced training and dedication to perfect, and most of them don’t focus on meals one could make with practical home equipment or ingredients. Of course, most cooking competition shows aren’t trying to teach you how to cook. However, they still put cooking on a pedestal, and if you’re someone like me who wants to learn how to make better food, they make it seem like I’m somehow unworthy because I haven’t dedicated my life to the craft.
In the first episode of each season of Bake Off, the show tells us who each contestant is, how old they are, what they do for a living, and where they live. They even show a little bit of footage of their home lives, baking with their families or working their jobs. These are normal people, and we have lower expectations for them. However, over the course of the show, we will watch them bake extraordinary dishes that wow renowned professional bakers who’ve been perfecting their craft their whole lives.
You can read a bit of condescension into the previous point, but I don’t mean it to be. What I mean is that I watch the show and think, “Oh. These are skills normal people have. Maybe I can learn them too.” I may not be able to ever do them well enough to win a reality show. But maybe I can at least learn to make a decent loaf of bread.
4. The first round gives everyone a chance to show you what they’re about.
The first round of Bake Off is called the “Signature Challenge.” In this round, everyone has to bake the same dish, there are no rules other than a time limit, and the contestants can use whatever ingredients they please. In other words, this is the “Here’s how I would make this at home” round.
Also, if this is the first episode of the season, it’s the perfect opportunity to form a first impression.
Of course, The Great British Bake Off is a pleasant show about nice people who bake things. However, if we’re being totally honest, we watch it just like any other reality show, and that means on some level, we watch for the perverse joy that comes from judging people. How do we judge people on a show like Bake Off? Simple: We see what they bake. Case in point: In the first episode of what PBS calls “season five” (it’s actually season three), the opening challenge is upside down cake. One of the contestants makes an upside down cake with tomatoes. "Clearly this guy is a fucking moron." I thought. (I mean this in jest, of course. Kind of.)
However, some of the contestants show a lot of promise. For every tomato upside down cake, there’s a pear and chocolate upside down cake or a toffee apple and orange upside down cake. Some of the cakes are cool in conception, but poorly executed. Some of the ideas are poor in concept, but apparently taste great. Some of them are just tomato cake.
The point is that the signature challenge says a lot about the contestants. Where their strengths lie. How their background effects their philosophy on baking. What they prioritize and what they don’t. More importantly, we can form our allegiances and root for the bakers that value what we care about when we think about a loaf of bread or a pastry. I always root for the bakers that show an adventurous side or a flair for the overly-indulgent. (If you ask me to buy dessert for your dinner party, I will pick the stupidest looking thing I can.)
This is where we find out who we like and why we like them. Or you can just like everyone.
Normally, we judge people on reality shows based on their personalities. We still do that on Bake Off. But for the most part, we judge them on their talent and their philosophy when it comes to baking. You know… actual things that matter.
And the first round doesn’t stop being informative after the first episode either. Come tart week, we may discover that the baker we thought was the most talented can’t do pie crusts to save their lives or that another baker couldn’t practice throughout the week because she had exams to study for or some sort of family emergency. Even when we think we know everyone, there’s still something that can surprise you, and the first round always brings that element out.
5. The narration and the editing do a great job of emphasizing process over "drama."
At some point in your cooking competition show, you’ve got to actually show some cooking.
To be fair to a lot of the American cooking shows, the ones I would like to remind you at this point that I like quite a bit despite how I’m talking about them, when it comes to shooting the cooking, most of them look fantastic. I may not like the sets and the aesthetic of a lot of these shows, but generally speaking, they’re lit well, they’re shot well, and most of them have a good eye for visual flare, considering that they’re shot in the midst of chaos.
However, when it comes to showing the actual cooking, it’s all about the editing, and this is where Bake Off thrives.
Let’s assume for a second that you know absolutely nothing about cooking or baking. Most cooking shows will show you what each chef is doing, and maybe they’ll add a talking head or some voiceover from the contestant to say something as simple as, “I am making a steak” or “I am chopping up my vegetables” or “I’m reducing a sauce.” However, rarely does the show explain how or why they’re doing what they’re doing or the various ways they can screw up.
Of course, if the competition is “make a steak,” you don’t need the show to explain to the audience why the chef is making a steak. However, if a chef decides to make a steak with an unusual method or there’s an obstacle such as a sabotage from my beloved Cutthroat Kitchen, we’d want to know what they’re going to do and why they’re going to do it. It would also be nice to know how to mess up a steak, that way, we know the difference between watching footage of someone preparing a steak well and someone who’s in the process of fucking it up. (If you cook a steak that’s more than medium, for example, you have fucked up.)
Without this context, we might as well be watching stock footage. Most shows figure out ways to get around this problem, and to some viewers, it may not matter. However, I see no reason to deprive the audience of another layer of enjoyment, and in this case, as the goal is to connect the viewer’s attention span to their stomach, we’d want to create the illusion that there’s one less step between seeing food on screen and being able to enjoy it in person if we can learn how to make it.
On Bake Off, rather than having the contestants simply state their approach, Sue and Mel provide voiceover that explains what each contestant is baking, as well as the particulars of making the dish, including any potential pitfalls. For example, there are some dishes that require the bakers to roll out dough to a precise point. Mel or Sue will then explain to the audience what the consequences will be if the contestants roll out their dough too thin or too thick. That way, when we see footage of the dough rolling, we can see who’s doing well and who isn’t. Now we have context, and an added layer of drama and knowledge.
Another aspect of the editing of Bake Off that I adore is the pacing. We’re getting into the realm of personal taste here, but if you watch a lot of American cooking competition shows, you wouldn’t be wrong to think that you were watching a war movie. This is because the editing philosophy behind most cooking competition shows is to cut as much as possible and create so much editing chaos that the audience is fooled into believing that something dramatic is happening.
To be fair, Bake Off often indulges in the same tactics, but usually not until the bakers are running out of time and have to scramble to finish their dishes. This is when a little chaos actually works.
Other than that, Bake Off’s editing is relatively tame, and again, this is in service of methodology. When we’re not cutting away from someone piping their frosting, we get to focus on the act itself, watching every swirl and evaluating the thickness or the symmetry. Or at the very least, we’re not focusing on the angry chefs shouting at each other or franticness that doesn’t actually exist.
In other words, that food porn you wanted? This is where you’ll find it.
6. People help each other.
No, the contestants don’t bake dishes for one another. But on occasion, if a fellow baker is in trouble or seems overwhelmed, another will occasionally step in and take a dish out of the oven or help out with the plating. Sometimes, they simply provide an opinion or some advice.
And it’s not only the contestants. As we’ve discussed, Mel and Sue will occasionally step in and help out as well. In fact, they’ll even go one step further and help out with kneading or the rolling of a dough. (Though, yes, sometimes it’s to make up for an unintentional sabotage on one of their parts.)
As much as I love a lot of the traditional American cooking competition shows, chefs are not actors, and a lot of the forced trash talk the contestants of these shows are forced to partake of clearly doesn’t come natural to them. And granted, sincerity is probably easier to fake than aggressiveness. However, Bake Off successfully creates the illusion that everybody likes each other. Whether it’s real, I don’t know. But for the sake of maintaining my illusion, I choose to believe it so.
There’s no greater point to belabor here. People helping each other. It’s just nice.
7. Paul and Mary’s judging is honest, but not brutal. Thus it’s actually helpful.
For as long as there have been multiple judges on competition shows, we’ve had the intimidating judge, the “nice” judge, and maybe one or two who fall in between. Though there’s precedent of this dynamic before the modern era of reality shows, the most famous example can be found in American Idol, where we had Simon Cowell, the famously harsh judge, Paula Abdul, the famously kind judge, and Randy Jackson, the middle ground between the two. Good singers were praised by all three. Bad singers would be let down gently by Paula, told a simple “no” by Randy, and eviscerated by Simon.
If we look at the lineage of reality competition programs after American Idol, one could conclude that Simon Cowell was the most impactful aspect of the show. After all, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that after the peak of American Idol came the rise of Gordon Ramsay and a whole slew of harsher reality show judges.
There’s a lot to be said about the role these kinds of personalities have in 2018, a world that’s thankfully becoming less tolerant of toxic behavior in professional environments. (Or at least appears like it is.) After all, I have zero doubt that some asshole chef watched Ramsay scream at some chef and decided it was okay for him to do the same. (We’ll be talking about Ramsay a little later, but just to say it now, I like Ramsay a lot, though I won’t deny the negative connotations of his shtick.)
However, while the miasmic impact of these personalities is by far the more important issue, personally, I’ve become bored with the “harsh judge” reality character. We’ve been oversaturated, and it’s not that they’re any less fun to watch. It’s that I want something new.
In this sense, Bake Off is no different. Our "scary" judge is Paul Hollywood and our "nice" judge is Mary Berry. Though Paul is positioned to be the “intimidating” judge, in reality, Paul is actually just a decent judge. He’ll say something harsh here and there, but it’s never for harshness’s sake. Case in point: A baker once presented Paul with what was essentially raw dough. Paul called it a “disaster.” It was. After all, it’s not a good idea to present a food judge with something potentially dangerous to eat.
The show also makes a show of him going around and inspecting everyone’s dish. Of course, it's harder to cook when anyone's watching, let alone a world famous baker. However, these segments aren’t shown to add more drama. They’re there because they’re funny. This is where Paul demonstrates some self-awareness.
Paul’s a famous baker with decades of experience, but part of the reason he seems scarier than he appears is because of the presence of Mary. True, Paul is more physically intimidating. However, as far as critical distinction and truth-telling are concerned, I would say that Mary and Paul are on more or less the same page. She’s honest about what she thinks, but she’s not brutal and she’s not as prone to more severe adjectives. If we go back to the American Idol standard, Mary has more in common with Randy than Paula.
If you fucked up, you fucked up, and she doesn’t coddle or try to make anyone feel better. But she also doesn’t go out of her way to make you feel worse either. Simply put, Mary is a professional. She has a warmer personality, but it doesn’t get in the way of her job.
Together, they form a great team because they not only value the same aspects of baking, but also the same elements of criticisms. If you watch an American cooking competition show, the message you get from the judges is usually, “You cooked this wrong because you’re an incompetent asshole who doesn’t deserve to live.” Paul and Mary, on the other hand, will tell you exactly what you’ve done wrong not to make you feel bad, but so that the contestants, and by extension we the audience, can learn. When bad singers walk away from Simon Cowell, they walk away demoralized. When bakers walk away from Paul and Mary, they walk away better at their craft.
8. The second round gives you a good barometer of each contestant’s skills, weaknesses, and whether or not they’re improving.
The second round is called the “technical challenge.” Like the previous round, all the bakers make the same dish. This time, however, they’re not told what they’re making beforehand, everyone is given the exact same ingredients, they’re given the exact same recipe to follow with certain steps left intentionally vague or outright missing, and after time runs out, Paul and Mary judge each dish without knowing who made what, and ranking each dish from worst to best.
In other words, round two is a pure demonstration of skill that puts everyone on an even playing field.
Showmanship and the use of unusual ingredients can bring you far in Bake Off, but round two strips everyone of everything, leaving them only their talents. Some bakers are fantastic at tarts and cakes, but they can’t do breads. Some can think of incredibly outlandish designs, but they don’t excel when stripped of their signature skills, and since Paul and Mary don’t take the previous weeks into account, anyone can be in danger at anytime.
However, the part of the second round I like the most is the fact that it demonstrates who’s getting better and who isn’t. An underappreciated aspect of Bake Off is that it essentially acts as a kind of cooking school. Everyone who goes in leaves better at baking, even those who get eliminated in the first round.
If Bake Off is school, then round two is a test. Which students are prepared? Who’s improving? Who isn’t?
The round also feeds into the narrative more effectively than the other two rounds. Some bakers show a lot of skill, but screw-up the fundamentals. If they improve, then we root for them even harder.
There was a contestant in one of the later seasons that always demonstrated a lot of talent in the first round, but would often place towards the bottom in the technical challenge. However, every week, this contestant did a little better, and not only did I find myself rooting for this baker more than I already was, but Paul and Mary liked this baker more every week in the technical round.
Eventually, this baker won the whole competition.
In traditional story structure, the beginning of act two is the road of trials. The part of the story where the protagonist adapts to the world they’ve found themselves in and progresses under new circumstances. This is where goals start to seem achievable.
It doesn’t get more second act-y than the technical challenge.
9. The third round lets the bakers go nuts.
The third round is called the “showstopper” round. It’s a lot like the previous rounds in that everyone has to bake the same dish, only instead of being asked to bake something simple, they’re asked to bake something extraordinarily elaborate. Sometimes this means baking thirty six miniature cakes. Sometimes it means baking a 3D food sculpture.
This is the category where the leash truly comes off. Everyone ups their game, but this is really the category where the bakers prone to complex ideas and creative presentation get to shine.
In other words, this is an excuse to talk about that the bread lion.
The bread lion is impressive on every conceivable level, from presentation to the level of detail to the methodology of making it. Just look at the fucking thing.
Look, you clearly don’t need me to tell you why a challenge where the contestants get to show off is cool. Estimate how much time you’d want to read about that, and instead, invest that time in staring at the bread lion some more.
10. The season ends with these lovely documentary pieces about the finalists. And also a big party.
In the season finale, the last three bakers square off in the toughest rounds of the whole series. In the first round, they have to bake something more difficult than any of the previous rounds have called for, in the second round, the contestants are barely given instructions, and the showstopper round forces our contestants to bake the most elaborate dish they’ve baked all season, be it a wedding cake or a “royal picnic.” (A chocolate cake, twelve sausage rolls, 12 mini quiches, twelve scones, and twelve tarts.)
However, despite the inherent challenge and the tension, the season finales are also the most hangout-y episodes of the season. For starters, interspersed throughout the episodes, we're shown short documentary pieces that go into further detail about the lives of our finalists. (Apart from the seconds long clips we get throughout the beginning of the seasons.) Usually, this means we get more detailed footage of our contestant's homes and where they work, and we get an interview with the contestant’s spouse or their parent or their friends.
It’s a reminder of what we actually care about when we watch Bake Off, and that’s the people. Sure, it’s a transparent trick to tug at our heartstrings, but just because a manipulation is obvious doesn’t mean it can't be affective. With these segments, we get something resembling a complete picture of the people we’ve been watching for ten weeks. (Or two days if you’ve been watching the show nonstop on Netflix.) This is where they come from. This is how they got here, and why.
And if that weren’t enough, the season also ends with a giant party where everyone brings their friends and family, and all the previously eliminated contestants show up as well to cheer the finalists on.
I look forward to the finales because they’re essentially giant love fests. Who doesn’t want that?
11. Nobody is positioned to be a villain…
Back when I was living with my mother, I used to enjoy watching Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares on BBC America. These were the episodes that were produced before Ramsay moved the show to America, and thus they struck a much different tone. Ramsay would yell at you and unleash his signature brand of brutal honesty, but rarely would it devolve into screaming matches or contrived drama or the usual reality show bullshit. It was always a streamlined “Here’s a sweary-but-honest assessment of how you are running your business, and now we’re going to calmly fix these problems while I curse some more” kind of tone. I was a fan.
When the show came to America, however, that tone was abandoned. The new show put a greater emphasis on unsanitary kitchen conditions, more time was shifted towards the personal stories of the staff, and most of all, it was about finding the most obnoxious jackass for Ramsay to spar with and milking the ensuing shout-offs for all their worth.
Sure, these changes upped the level of conflict and injected the show with a healthy dose of enjoyable stupidity. But for me at least, they also killed what was special about it. Once, this was a show about how to run a restaurant. Now it’s about Ramsay squaring off with assholes.
I make the distinction because American reality TV loves villains. It loves getting people to act like antagonists, even if that's not what they're like in real life. It loves editing footage to contrive villainy when it clearly wasn’t there during the actual filming. It loves giving you someone to love, but more so, it loves giving you someone to hate. It loves "drama."
Most of the time, it’s forced bullshit, and whether or not you want to admit it, you can tell.
Bake Off, thankfully, rarely indulges in “drama.” I’ve yet to see anything resembling interpersonal conflicts or fights. The only thing I’ve seen that comes close is the infamous “bingate” incident. However, most of the real “fallout” was fan backlash, and really, the whole incident came about because of a bad editing call.
The show doesn’t need the drama, and if it ever resorted to arguments or casting huge personalities, then we’ll know that it’s truly over. For now at least, any drama you feel comes from the competition and only the competition, which is honestly all you need.
12. …and because of that, aside from weird personal biases, you root for whoever’s the most talented and you’re eventually sad to see people go…
Bake Off doesn’t have sabotages or gimmicks. Each contest is given a reasonable amount of time to make their dish, and they’re given more leeway as far as ingredients are concerned than most cooking competition shows. Thus we focus purely on talent. And because none of the contestants are intentionally vilified, our affections follow the bakers we perceive as the most skillful, as opposed to the most devious or the ones who are put at a disadvantage.
As we’ve talked about before, reality television allows us to gleefully indulge in our most primal emotion responses, meaning that while we’re encouraged to root for the most adroit, sometimes you don’t like this baker because of the cut of his jib or that baker because he makes an upside down cake with tomatoes. Remember the bread lion? It was made by contestant Paul Jagger. Paul is a prison governor, and because of that, I’ll admit that I immediately assumed that he was an asshole. And hell, maybe he is an asshole in real life. However, it became clear how talented he was, and thus I eventually found it in myself to root for him.
There are the people you immediately like and those you don’t. However, because of the lack of a villain and the good nature of the show, I often find my petty bullshit usually melts away by the end of the first or second episode of the season. The only people I go out of my way to dislike are the ones that I feel make it too far because they rely on others to do slightly worse.
Other than those rare cases, I grow to like every cast member. Thus when they get eliminated, I’m sad to see them go. However, after a contestant it eliminated, it always ends in a reassuring pep talk and a big hug session. We never leave an episode salty.
13. …but the most talented person wins the tournament.
I love Cutthroat Kitchen. I always will love Cutthroat Kitchen, provided it’s hosted by Alton Brown. However, there’s an unsolvable problem with the core of the show, and that’s the fact that the most talented chef isn’t guaranteed to win. True, one could argue that “talent” means that any chef should be able to overcome any sabotage because they know the ins and outs of cooking so well that they can make anything on anything in any circumstance. However, because Cutthroat is a show that involves strategic elements that have nothing to do with cooking, one could also argue that Cutthroat doesn’t always reward talent, but the chefs who can play the game the best.
(Again, this doesn’t make Cutthroat a bad cooking show. Someday, I’ll write an even longer article about my love for it.)
Bake Off doesn’t have this problem. You need to be talented to make it onto the show in the first place, you need to be talented to make it to the end, and you need to be particularly talented in order to win the tournament.
Granted, this is true for many different shows. However, unlike a lot of similar shows, Bake Off also does an outstanding job rewarding other talents beyond pure technical knowhow. Tournament winners don’t just bake you a cake. They bake you a complex and creative cake that nobody else could’ve thought of that tastes incredible. They go far beyond what is asked of them, and they put a lot of themselves into what they bake.
It’s nice when a show can reward the elements of baking that go beyond the simple math. Bake Off winners have a vision, and they can use their abilities to bring it to life. And when their name is announced, you’re relieved and happy because you know they deserved to win.
14. I’ve been spending more time in the bakery section and looking up more baking recipes.
When I buy bread, I usually buy buttermilk bread from the bread aisle. It’s cheap and shitty, but nine times out of ten, the only reason I have bread in the first place is to have a vessel to scoop up runny egg yolks during breakfast. I could be eating better, but the cheap bread is, you know… cheap. Small costs add up, and before Bake Off, I didn’t think the extra few dollars were worth it.
Nowadays, I’m buying more loafs from the bakery section. Sure, it’s the bakery section of Ralphs, so the jump in quality probably isn’t as much as I think it is. But I appreciate what I’m eating more, and for the self-respect alone, it’s worth it.
As for the recipes, I haven’t actually pulled the trigger on one yet. The last time I baked, I made one of those dumb cookie dough cheesecake recipes from Tasty. (I have a go-to cookie dough recipe as well.) But I do own a dutch oven, and most of the loaf recipes seem doable.
The point is I will try one someday, and it’s thanks to the The Great British Bake Off. Can’t ask for a show to do more than that.
15. It’s a point that’s been made a million times, but it’s worth making again: It’s a nice show with a nice message and nice people that is nice.
Part of the viral nature of Bake Off is its reputation for being the most pleasant show on television. Why something can gain a massive cult following just for being amiable, especially in these times, has rather dark implications about the state of the world. However, no matter the times, it's a reputation that’s well-earned.
Sure, the stakes of Bake Off are low. Our contestants aren’t competing for money and nothing really hinges on them winning or not. And sure, even at it’s most dramatic, Bake Off isn’t all that dramatic. Or at least it’s not dramatic in the sense of how things are usually supposed to go on reality television, let alone television in general.
On paper, Bake Off seems like a boring anti-show where nothing happens. In execution, however, it provides the same kind of escapism and indulgence as most reality television, but it doesn’t feed on our base impulses and it doesn’t treat us like we’re stupid.
Many a sitcom or popular drama relies on universal storytelling techniques to win our emotions. Root for the sympathetic characters, and hopefully, we’ll be rewarded for doing so. And sometimes we want that. But sometimes we want candy. Something indulgent that’s there when we need it. We don’t have to worry about the good guy defeating the bad guy on Bake Off. Everyone on Bake Off is the good guy.
Bake Off doesn’t ask us to invest in beef or fighting. All it wants is for us to hang out and have a good time with good people. It’s perfect. Except for the guy who made the tomato cake.
