It’s the final round in week one of the new Great British Bake Off and Georgie, a paediatric nurse from rural Wales, has stepped forward with a cake that took her four hours to make. This is the moment presenter Alison Hammond has been waiting for. As the show’s judges, Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith, solemnly take a bite, Hammond turns to them and asks: “How does Fanny taste, guys?”
Let me hastily explain. The showstopper round this week requires bakers to make a realistic “illusion” cake. Previously we have been told that Georgie is the owner of a hen named Fanny. Georgie has chosen to make a cake that looks like her pet chicken. Everything has been set up for the archetypal Bake Off moment: an innuendo so filthy it would be unthinkable on primetime TV if it weren’t being said in a marquee on a fine English lawn, among nice people munching on nice food. The Great British Bake Off is officially back.
This, however, is GBBO’s 15th year, and it has been showing signs of fatigue for some time. Several recent seasons have fizzled out as the annual grand final has grown closer, because it has become obvious that that year’s batch of elite amateur bakers once again do not contain a star. It doesn’t matter that from 14 attempts, the show has only produced one big TV personality, Nadiya Hussain – whether or not the contestants go on to land their own cookery show isn’t important if they have enough character to create 10 thrilling, moving weeks of Bake Off itself. But for a while now that has not been the case. They’re nice enough, they bake well enough, but the big moments the show used to produce are rare.
It doesn’t help that it has been a long time since anyone applied who likes baking more than they like the idea of being on The Great British Bake Off. Not everyone in the new intake is as eager to conform as Andy, a mechanic from Essex who leans in to the regional stereotype with a joke about putting Paul’s car up on bricks, or Wiltshire farmer Mike, who looks more ready to trade gags with the presenters and judges than he is to bake buns. Everyone knows the beats to hit: the love-hate relationship with Hollywood and the jovial interactions with Hammond are, by this point, thoroughly second-guessed before the cameras start rolling. A truly exceptional bake used to earn a silent, manly handshake from Hollywood, but he doles these rewards out like cheap mini-muffins now: Norfolk midwife Illiyin gets one for her first bake.
The wild card is Hammond’s co-presenter Noel Fielding, whose hiring in 2017 is only slowly getting less inexplicable and jarring. Watching him has been like enduring an anxiety dream in which you’ve accidentally been given a job you’re not qualified for, and signs of his discomfort are still there: in the funny little voice he does when he says “get set!” or “bake!”, and in how many of his comments to contestants are about him, as if he’s trying to explain and excuse his presence. “See me as a sort of gothic therapist,” he says to one baker. Another receives a gratuitously odd monologue about Fielding cohabiting with a goat that walks on its hind legs, followed by him trying to recast this one-way interaction as camaraderie: “This is a well weird conversation, isn’t it?”
But Bake Off’s diminishing returns will have to get a lot worse before it stops working altogether. It is still fundamentally a pleasure to welcome a fresh dozen bakers into the tent, all sunny and comradely and kind; getting to know them is still, in the early episodes at least, a delight.
The opening bake this year is a decorated loaf cake, which brings the problem of slipped icing: against the clock, it’s hard to fully bake a cake then cool it enough for the decoration to stick. Over the years, many a nervous baker has ended up with something that looks like a painter’s radio, and a couple of the 2024 newbies produce an amusingly sloppy mess. Round two challenges the bakers to recreate a battenberg cake with no recipe at all: some of the sponge batons encased in marzipan are Mr Kipling perfection, while others resemble firewood rolled in old carpet.
In the middle is Hammond, who in her second year in the role is clearly a natural. Effortlessly friendly and just naughty enough, she’s at ease with everyone, and puts everyone at ease. She is even rescuing Fielding by remoulding him as her doe-eyed straight man. With her on board, Bake Off can happily plateau for a while longer.
• The Great British Bake Off is on Channel 4
