I have also taken another step up the Ladder of Adulthood and I'm now an Aunt! My niece has just turned one, and is adorable. Which is a relief, given that I'm generally pretty rubbish with babies. Weirdly, she looks exactly like I did when I was her age (blonde, blue eyes), rather than anything like either of her parents, who both have dark hair. My mum delights in teaching her a crazy new face to pull each week, which she takes to with alacrity. It's often a challenge trying to feed her because she is making me laugh so much. I'm looking forward to when she starts talking, as I think she's going to be even more hilarious.
But enough of all that big, important stuff, because it's my favourite time of year - fire off a confetti cannon, and hoist the bunting, it's the return of COMPETITIVE REALITY TV. The nights are about to get a whole lot colder and darker (I don't care that it's not even September yet, I've already been sneakily putting on the electric blanket before bed. Don't judge me. I'm a spinster. I live alone. I have nothing to keep me warm at night apart from the electric blanket. Nothing, I tell you.) They're already trailing Strictly, but for the moment, the nation is gripped by the Great British Bake Off. Which, owing to its massive popularity, has been moved from the incredibly-challenging-to-find BBC2 onto the hey-it's-at-the-top-of-the-channels-list BBC1.
I have no idea why they do this. Wouldn't it be better for BBC2 to have a super-popular show which might then result in people remaining tuned in to whatever's on afterwards, thus boosting the channel's ratings? Do they really think that viewers think of BBC2 as, what, hopelessly elitist and too intellectually challenging? It's a programme about cake, leavened with massive measures of innuendo, for heaven's sake. Anyway, this year, I've joined in the office sweepstake for added excitement and am now avoiding any social engagements on a Wednesday. Here are my thoughts so far.
Week 1
It is always fun seeing which ‘characters’ have been
drafted in, who mirror the most popular/controversial ones from yesteryear. Strictly tends to do this as well (‘really
old one who’ll get a sympathy vote for 3 weeks then go’; ‘really overweight one
who will either be so disastrous the nation will keep them in for an
unnecessarily long time, for a laugh, or who will be surprisingly good’; ‘young
woman who used to be on Hollyoaks/Emmerdale/Eastenders/Corrie’; ‘person who is
famous for literally one thing – mainly being in a Bond film/married to someone
more famous but who refused to do it’; ‘man/woman who is currently on BBC
Breakfast and thus has to do nearly 3 days’ work every day with the training,
whilst promoting Strictly every morning’, etc).
So, we have:
This year's Ruby:
Martha. She's only 17 (she should just be the oldest one on Junior GBBO,
surely? It's practically child labour). She is unnervingly good. She's less
obviously gorgeous than Ruby last year, so hopefully should avoid any
Twitchfork mobs online accusing her of flirting with Paul.
This year's
Brendan: a Scottish man called Norman, who is excellent. (I think he keeps
bees; expect everything to have honey in it, even in Pork Pie week).
This year's clear
winner (whom I have in our sweepstake - YES): Nancy. She came prepared with
a cake guillotine which her husband had fashioned for her. She is the Marie
Antoinette of baking.
This year's token
weirdo: Jordan. A man who is so ugly he makes my eyes hurt. Yet,
inexplicably, he HAS A GIRLFRIEND. He was sporting a shirt that was uncannily
like a duvet cover I had in the 1980s. He looks like God collected all the
different sorts of teeth and decided to jam them all in one person’s mouth.
Entirely haphazardly. He has a cackly nervous laugh, which he deploys after
saying anything at all. In summary: URGH, get him off my telly. He should've
left first. His mini cakes looked as though he'd taken on board the nation's
efforts to commemorate the First World War and created a homage to the Battle
of the Somme in sponge.
This year's potentially
most annoying woman: Kate-from-Brighton, who apparently refuses to weigh
anything and has, I think, slightly wacky curly hair (looks to have pink
streaks in it). She's very, very thin, which always makes me mistrustful in a
baker. She looks a bit like Kate Garraway.
This year's 'oh, I
suppose I'll have to fancy him, there's no-one else': Iain. Who originally
hails from Belfast (and so sounds exactly like my erstwhile trainer, Cheerful
James), but now lives in London, and so has an alarming ginger hipster beard, a
mustard cardigan, tight trousers and gravity-defying hair. He was also revealed
to be, when the camera pulled back for the 'group hug' shot at the end, as tall
as the Shard. Depending on how next week goes, he might make it to week 3.
There was, however, a (funny to me) cut directly from
Lovely Richard (who is a builder), who is only about 38 but bald in a way that
looks physically painful, to Iain's luxuriant bouffant. Cruel, but amusing.
What, if anything, has changed, in the switch from BBC2
(cult audience of millions) to BBC1 (mainstream audience of millions)? There’s
still an abundance of puns. Squirrels have been replaced by black lambs
(diversity edict, now they've moved to BBC1?) The Rain of Judgement dutifully
cascaded onto the tent halfway through, drenching the bunting. The incidental
music was cranked up very high for an opening episode. The 'technical
challenge' was cherry cake, which seemed a bit basic. Someone CRIED OVER A
SWISS ROLL. Which, for week 1, was a bit X-Factor.
Week 2 & Week 3
Biscuits vs Bread. Neither was
particularly dramatic (and I’ve never made either, so both are a bit lost on
me), but high/low points were:
Norman heroically eschewing any
kind of flavour in anything he makes. He proclaimed pesto, which the average middle-class
two year-old these days consumes by the bucket-load, ‘exotic’ and literally didn’t add anything to his
savoury biscuits other than the ingredients to make them technically ‘biscuits’
(flour, butter and lard. Yuck). I’m not sure if the producers have put him in
just to see how much he can rile Paul and Mary by cooking food that is so plain
it’s indicative that he’s not only Scottish, but also has some kind of
digestive condition that’s led him to a really extreme exclusion diet. A bit like
being at the Mayr Clinic, where the only thing you’re given to eat for a week
is dry bread, which you have to chew about 100 times per mouthful.
Nancy produced a second baking
gizmo made by her husband, which was kind of like a tiny Iron Maiden (torture
device, not metal group) for pricking holes in biscuits. She is morphing from
Marie Antoinette to the Marquis de Sade. I was surprised she hadn’t
commissioned him to make her a biscuit jigsaw, given that most of the others
were making tiny horses, and even a Biscuit St George and the Dragon, which
were actually slotted together.
Enwezor got booted out just as a
Guardian Liveblog commenter had
finally revealed who he sounded exactly like: Moss from The IT Crowd. Dammit, that’d
been bugging me. He got binned for using shop-bought fondant. Mary’s expression
when he ‘fessed up to that could’ve created its own sourdough starter.
Kate is growing on me. There
seems to be little evidence for this idea that she doesn’t weigh anything or
use recipes, and my worry that she was going to be ‘whacky’ seems to be
unfounded. Apologies for being knee-jerkingly judgy, just because you have
curly hair with some pink in it, Kate.
Someone should, however, tell
Iain that if he’s going to get really hot (he will, there are ovens blasting
away for hours on end in a fairly enclosed space in the middle of summer) and
thus go quite a violent shade of red all over, he shouldn’t wear a scarlet
cardi. Which also clashes with his ginger beard. Also, is he doing a bit of a
Samson thing with his hair/beard and refusing to trim either for fear that it’ll
be his downfall? We reached Peak Beard some time ago now, and I can’t help
thinking that under that lot is a really handsome man. Liberate your chin from
its ginger hair-prison, Iain!
Jordan decided that for a bread
showstopper, he’d fuse a cheesecake with a loaf, and then stick what looked
like a whole jar of strawberry jam into it. Um, even I can tell you that’s
going to give you a soggy bottom, and is going to look like something Carrie
would’ve baked for her GCSE Home Ec assessment. Mary could take no more: bye, Jordan!
Week 4
Week 4 will henceforth be known
as Alaska-gate. It was Pudding Week, and the showstoppers were Baked Alaska. A pudding
which even I and my friend Dawn, who are hardcore sweettooths, have never
actually eaten, and we’re both children of the '70s. It seems like it’s only
there to be difficult; why would you try to bake something that has ice cream
in it? If I really had to make one, then I reckon I’d just buy a Swiss Roll and
stick a Viennetta on top of it, then crumble a meringue nest over the top.
Ta-da!
Anyway, to add to the impossibility
of the task, it was the Hottest Day of the Year when they were filming (in
June, so about 25 degrees. Feel free to laugh, people who live anywhere other
than Scotland or, er, actual Alaska). Though, having been in a marquee on a
really hot day a few weeks back for a wedding, I can certify that the
temperature inside, especially if you add in a load of hot ovens, would’ve been
appreciably higher than that. You might even have been able to fry an egg just
on the demonstration table.
Things were Not Going Well. No-one
was allowed to use an ice-cream maker, even though quite a lot of ‘home cooks’
have them. Probably more than have a ‘proving drawer’, which the cooks are provided with, at any rate. Everyone
was running around like headless chickens, trying to do fancy sponges and get
their ice-cream to freeze (with seemingly one freezer too few – is it like musical
chairs, GBBO – every time a contestant leaves, they take away two freezers?),
whilst also panicking about then having to blow-torch a meringue on top of it.
Really, this is the world’s most ridiculous pudding. Richard should’ve been at
an advantage, as his was a Tiramisu version, and the technical the day before
was a Tiramisu cake, but he was worrying that he was going to be marked down
for essentially doing the same thing twice. (Don’t see why, it wasn’t his fault
that’s what the technical was; although maybe he should’ve done better on that, given he’d essentially been
practising making it all week.) Chetna was clearly wondering how to get mango
chutney into hers (she puts it in everything), whilst Norman was wondering if
he could get away with my Swiss Roll/Viennetta idea (a vanilla one, no exotic mint
choc chip aberrations here, thanks
very much.) He seems still not to be in receipt of the memo that Bake Off is
about flair as well as technical baking ability. Iain, on the other hand, was
making ice cream with a paste of black sesame seeds, which looked more like
tapenade.
Tempers, and possibly bunting,
were fraying, when Diana embarked on an act of sabotage so grievous that in days
gone by she’d be stoned in the middle of the village for being a witch. She
took Iain’s cake’n’ice-cream-combo out of the freezer. And left it on the side. According to Twitter, which nearly broke
under the Avalanche of Alaskan outrage afterwards, Iain’s not-so-icey-cream was
only out of the freezer for 40 seconds. But 1/ I don’t believe it’s possible
for something to be that ruddy liquid if left on a counter for less than a minute,
even in the extreme heat of the Bake Off tent on The Hottest Day of the Year
and 2/ even if it is true, if you take someone else’s shit out of a
freezer, you surely CALL THEM OVER and say, ‘hey, Iain, is it OK if I move your
stuff out of the freezer? I think you were originally using some other
freezer, is that right?’ Rather than, when your fellow contestant has a
(rightful) freak-out that his Santorini ice-cream has gone all lava-like,
blithely telling him that he should’ve been using ‘his’ freezer.
Iain went mental, lobbed it all
in a bin and strode off across a field. Probably to have a spliff or something
to try to calm down and avoid decking Diana. I did think he was a tad hasty,
chucking it in the bin, although, being a dramatic and flouncy type myself when
something goes wrong, I’d have done exactly the same thing, whilst screaming ‘FUCK
IT!!’ into a waiting boom-operator’s mike at close range. But if I hadn’t been
swelteringly hot, in a tent and stressed to hell, I might’ve thought,
‘well, I’ll scrape the ice-cream off, shove on some meringue and serve the
ice-cream as a sauce, in a kind of inversion of a Baked Alaska’ (which, given
no-one was actually ‘baking’ theirs, merely blasting them with blowtorches, like
something out of Alien, wouldn’t have
been such a major deal. Spin it as a Heston Blumenthal idea, Iain! Tell Mary
you’ve ‘deconstructed’ it!)
Major props to him for not
dobbing in Diana, though – he is a man with way more honour than I
could’ve possessed. Also, the air would’ve turned blue if that’d been my sh*t she’d
messed with. Did she really not apologise to him at all, or was that
editing? I’d like to think if that was me, I’d have defended him and spoken up
about it, and, if I’d had the wherewithal to make an appeal to the judges,
reminded them of the time 2 years ago when John cut half his hand off and was
given a free pass on the judging when he couldn’t produce anything because he
was bleeding profusely into a KitchenAid...
Whoever’s paying the string
section on that show really got their money’s worth, though, the Violins of
Doom were going mental. I was shrieking at the telly and my heart-rate didn’t
go down for about an hour afterwards! Poor Iain, Norman should’ve gone (someone
on the Guardian blog or Twitter, can’t remember which, posted the most
hilarious comment, saying ‘if Norman gets any more basic, next week he’ll be
presenting a bag of flour with a smiley face drawn on it.’)
I’m hoping next week they’ll
have a ‘double eviction’ and get rid of Norman and Diana. A Baked Alaska
Swan FFS. Surely only the Queen can eat that? Also, Martha should’ve been
star baker, not Richard. And Nancy needs to get her husband to produce more
S&M baking gadgets; she’s slipping down the ranks, and my £24 sweepstake
money is looking in danger. I think Richard and Kate may be battling it out in
the final. Possibly with Luis.
Farewell, then, the Russet
Gandalf – you’d only just earned a nickname, and now you are gone. But at least
you’ve guaranteed an audience for Friday’s rubbish Bake Off spin-off show, and
made sure EVERYONE is talking about it. I also liked Mary’s comment that, re:
the ill-advised binning, thus giving them nothing to judge, ‘It’s a moment of
madness in your life, that you’ll just want to forget about’. Um, yes, Mary,
it’s on national telly, and about 7 million people have just had the entire
thing seared into their memories and are taking to social media to spread the
word even further. The morality of ‘a woman taking a thing out of a freezer’
will be debated across acres of newsprint and online for the next 3 days. Make
friends with the editors on your show, Mary, they clearly wield more power than
Pol Pot and Stalin put together.
Is next week's pie-fest going to turn Sweeney Todd, as the contestants all round on Diana? Or will she compound her villainy by surrepticiously turning down Norman's oven or lobbing a handful of Scotch Bonnet chilies into his steak and kidney when he's not looking?
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