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I’m a little worried about Noel Fielding. During his first few years on Channel 4’s The Great British Bake Off, he enjoyed a virtual monopoly on smut and pushing at the boundaries of obscene but broadcastable innuendo. But that all changed when breakfast telly favourite Alison Hammond turned up as a co-host last year, replacing the relatively understated Matt Lucas. Now, poor old Noel has some stiff, if you’ll pardon the expression, competition. The boy’s been relegated to wandering around the Bake Off tent, engaging in weak banter while Hammond steals the show. At one point in the first episode of the 2024 series, she gives the goth such a smacker of a kiss, for no good reason, that she inflicts a mild flesh wound.
Hammond’s real shocker, you might even say showstopper, comes courtesy of a pet hen owned by one of the contestants, Georgie, a children’s nurse who lives on a farm in Carmarthenshire. You see, for unexplained reasons, Georgie has named her “favourite chicken” Fanny. Now, as talented a cook as Georgie is, I can’t help wondering if the discovery of Fanny made her a certainty to enter the GBBO tent. All too predictably come the references to a “demented and deformed Fanny”, a Fanny “with a slightly odd shape” and various other pudenda addenda. It climaxes when Georgie recreates Fanny in sponge loaf cake form, complete with lemon curd filling, and 300 individual fondant feathers. As Paul Hollywood and Noel are concentrating on sampling the cake, Hammond bellows at them in broad Brummie: “How does Fanny taste, guys?”
The presenter thus proves herself to be not only a worthy successor to Lucas, but to Barry Humphries and Kenneth Williams as well. It is possible, I put it no higher, that Channel 4 is trying to outrage middle England and make GBBO an unlikely champion in the Ofcom complaints league table – the fight for ratings can create some desperate publicity stunts. I feel almost nostalgic about the time when Mel and Sue would scold the bakers for their soggy bottoms.
This brings us to the rest of the fruit-cakery. “Overbaked” is a phrase that comes up a lot and I have to question whether the same dry and flaky quality applies to the show itself. The generally high standard of baking deprives us of some of the more emotional/hilarious moments that we have witnessed in previous series. For example, the wannabe baking megastars are asked to bake a battenberg without a recipe. They all use their common sense to produce fairly recognisable examples of the marzipan-covered treat (Prue Leith’s favourite), which means that there are no entertainingly inedible Frankensteinish concoctions, just a crop of delicious pink and yellow mini cakes.
We can see that Hazel (despite some moments of brilliance) and Christiaan (misguidedly obsessed with umami cake-making) are probably doomed, and Georgie and Sumaya are possible series champions, but they’re all so sweet and gifted that pretty much any of them would be worthy winners. The contestants are so good that it also means there’s less drama. Unlike in previous shows, no one sabotages a rival’s trifle, no food mixer explodes, and not a single scone, bun or biscuit is dropped on the floor. Instead, the “amateur” bakers are effortlessly accomplished. The creativity is sometimes breathtaking – cakes fashioned into incredibly lifelike reproductions of a leather overnight bag, a vase of flowers, a shoe and even a pair of jeans. It’s John, who creates the latter, who most deservedly wins star baker.
Lovely people, too, but it is, in truth, a bit dull, a bit too wholemeal wholesome, and I’m not sure what they would have done without that chicken with a funny name to vary the pace a bit. I have a leaked GBBO story, though, to share with you. Next week: Fanny ends up in a pie.
‘The Great British Bake Off’ is on Channel 4
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