There was a moment in the Great British Bake Off spin-off (Bake Off: Crème de la Crème, BBC2) when I thought it had offed itself. Only to rise like a tempered chocolate phoenix from the ashes as The Apprentice, with patissiers instead of financers. In the flashy new series, teams of professional pastry chefs compete to create the best desserts and, more importantly, convince the nation that a hi-spec kitchen on a Nottinghamshire estate and some of the most outlandish sugarwork known to humankind can compete with a tent housing a bunch of amateurs and Mary Berry. (It can’t.)
In portentous tones, presenter Tom Kerridge told us the first team were “the secret agents of the pastry world”. The camera cut not to Mel and Sue double entendre-ing over buns, but to the City, gliding up the Shard and caressing the flanks of the Gherkin. Was Alan Sugar about to show up in a helicopter? No, it turned out to be lots of actual sugar.
This is what happens when the Great British Bake Off goes pro. It gets serious, which means it gets silly. It’s so famous now, watched by viewers in 200 countries and the BBC’s third most popular TV format sold abroad, that it’s known simply as Bake Off. Like Dickens or Madonna. The logical consequence of this is #GBBO the franchise: The Great Sport Relief Bake Off, Junior Bake Off, Paul Hollywood off to Food Network, Mary Berry everywhere, and now this.
All the ingredients are present for another big hit and Kerridge reels them off one by one. Fifteen teams of top patissiers; three of the greatest pastry chefs in the world judging; one of Britain’s grandest stately homes, towering showpieces that have to be seen to be believed… not to mention a Michelin-starred presenter, who apparently refused to sample any desserts on account of his low-carb diet. The crème de la crème of the world, basically. This is the problem. Bake Off was a surprise hit, the surprise being that something so simple, boring and crap could be so good. Like all spin-offs, this hit is calculated: too big, glossy, and Mastercheffy to be really loveable.
It’s also like the Masterchef quarter final that never ends. I found the format convoluted, which telly like this should never be. “I didn’t have a clue what was going on,” one of the chefs whispered after the judges had awarded about nine squillion points at the end of a round. Me neither.
Anyway, there were three teams of three: the secret agents, the one led by some of the youngest pastry chefs in the world, and the messy team who got chocolate all over their aprons. “I feel like I’m in a car crash!” barked Cherish Finden, executive pastry chef at the Langham and the most Bruno Tonioli-ish of the judges.
They had three hours to make three sets of miniatures. (The fashion for trios in food has clearly not gone away.) I learned about craquelin, dacquoise and what two different shades of orange mousse can do to a pastry chef. “Be like a mad scientist!” Finden commanded. They did their best. Later they had to reinvent apple crumble and custard, which meant a lot of tree concepts, chocolate soil, a princess crafted out of sugar, edible glue and stress, and, in one team’s case, part of an actual apple tree. Impressive, but nothing like apple crumble and custard. “I want Mary Berry!” a chef whimpered, her words conveyed through subtitles to give the whole thing an incongruous fly-on-the-wall feel. I knew exactly what she meant. The secret job of all spin-offs is to make you pine for the original. No matter how good Frasier was, it always made me homesick for the bar in Cheers.
The Beginning and End of the Universe (BBC4) took scale to a whole different level. A two-parter tackling the biggest questions about the biggest subject of all. The first episode explored how the universe began 13.8bn years ago, and this one how it might end. The verdict was delivered by Professor Jim Al-Khalili, a comforting and not overly enthusiastic presenter who makes statements about whether the universe will end with a “big crunch” bearable.
We don’t know what’s going to happen, which I find a relief. Imagine knowing? Terrifying. Nevertheless the race to find continues. The last 100 years have seen science become obsessed with how the universe might end, and Al-Khalili walks us through subjects as grandiose and mysterious as the life cycle of stars, dark matter and dark energy, which could make up 70% of the universe and about which we know nothing. He recreates a few key experiments revealing how the universe has changed over time, all the while picking his way through forests, looking out to sea, and walking down candlelit tunnels, revealing that it’s really hard to represent the most complex questions in astrophysics on telly.
I learned lots about critical density, which sounds like a phrase the Bake-Off judges might use to analyse the layers of a framboisier, but is actually a threshold in the universe based on all the stuff it contains. If the contents of the universe are below the critical density, it will continue to expand forever. If they are above it, we’ll end up with the big crunch. So which one is it? Above or below? Life or death? We don’t yet know. Still, I guess it puts all the chocolate, sweat and tears playing out on a miniscule speck of our planet for our entertainment into perspective.
