Can there be anything more delightful than a giant penis rendered in pink royal icing? Hours later, I’m still laughing to myself about it. “What are you holding?” Kim-Joy asks fellow baker Dan. “A baby,” says the stay-at-home dad, referring to the showstopper tableau of almond sugar cookie that supposedly depicts him carefully cradling his first child. It doesn’t look like a baby. “It looks like …” says Paul Hollywood, with a smirk, when Dan brings the baked portrait up to be judged. Go on, say penis. “A massive prawn.”
The Great British Bake Off (Channel 4, 8pm) is back, and it is still a joy. Now in its ninth series, and the second in its new Channel 4 home, it shows no sign of getting stale. Aside from a few nods to evolving trends – there will be a vegan week, the makers announced – it is unchanged. Because why change a recipe as good as this? New judge Prue Leith, her confidence grown – despite a good joke at the start of the show about her gaffe last year when she tweeted the name of the winner ahead of the final – has proved to be a great successor to Mary Berry. She is tarter, to Berry’s icing-sugar sweetness. The presenters, Sandi Toksvig (enough of an anarchic edge to stop her going full head girl) and Noel Fielding (kind-natured, with a new Elvis/Shakin’ Stevens haircut) are endearing and more assured this year. Hollywood, the only survivor from the original, seems to have weathered the lingering feel over the last series that he was being grabby by staying with the show. Sun and birdsong drench the famous tent (“Like, the actual tent,” says Briony, from Bristol, and one of my favourites): the producers continue to resist updating the pastel fantasy farmhouse kitchen decor, and one or both of the judges will turn their nose up at any inclusion of rosewater. It is all comfortingly familiar.
The three patisserie-under-pressure challenges begin. We kick off with biscuit – rather than cake – week, which is apparently what passes for controversy in the Bake Off tent. The bakers have to make 24 identical “regional biscuits”. The 12 contestants seem an intriguing bunch, but could be more representative (there’s a weirdly large number of people from Yorkshire). Rahul, a nuclear scientist, says his mum loves his biscuits; mental health worker Kim-Joy’s orange blossom-flavoured biscuits are inspired by a hair conditioner she likes; Terry, an artist with one of those pleasingly twiddly moustaches, is decorating his ginger shortbread biscuits with pictures of lambs. Everyone finds it all very stressful, of course, except for Karen, who works in a supermarket; she easily finishes her Yorkshire parkin biscuits and has time to sit down with a celebratory packet of salt and vinegar crisps. “Would you like a crisp?” she asks Dan, clearly trying to put him off his game under the guise of generosity.
One of the enjoyable tensions of Bake Off is the feeling of gentle, cosy unity, when everyone really just wants to win. Spot the sour faces when someone’s bake is praised. The psychology of the bakers is endlessly fascinating. What makes someone like Terry seem to sag like a sunken sponge when his biscuits are criticised (“It’s a rough old biscuit,” says Hollywood), when Ruby, a project manager, comes out fighting? “I thought biscuits were meant to be dry,” she says, punchily.
The technical challenge is to make a Wagon Wheel, which immediately put those not born in Britain at a disadvantage. Antony, an Indian-born banker, has never heard of them; Manon, from France, calls it a “wheely wagon”, although she manages to comes third. Toksvig confesses she has never eaten a Wagon Wheel – but then again, she adds, she didn’t have a Pot Noodle until she was 55.
The showstopper challenge seems unusually difficult for a first episode: the bakers have to make a picture using several layers of biscuit and icing, depicting themselves in a memorable scene. It is stressful to watch – there’s a lot of huffing, red faces and shaky hands. “I’m losing it,” says Ruby of her triple-layer, 40-piece marathon – literal and metaphorical – scene. She confesses she has never managed to finish it in time during her practice runs at home, and she can’t get this one done.
One of the best things about Bake Off is that it values effort and pride in one’s work; compare this with, say, the tiresome Celebrity MasterChef, which started last week, where the contestants like to boast about how rubbish at cooking they are. Yes, it is cosy and mostly middle class, and the catastrophes – a dropped baking tray, a rubbery marshmallow – are safely contained within this little bucolic world, but for an hour a week, it is the television equivalent of comfort food. As we slide into winter and beyond, it feels like a valuable public service. A treat.
