On Your Marks, Get Set, Baaaaake! A Thread for Great British Baking Show / Bake Off & all of its sundry delights

lol i swear i am not a wow-bot

that’s kinda fascinating. impressively methodical

Forgive the thread spam, but I wanted to note that this show's 2019 season is nominated in the 2019 ILX TV poll:

ILX's Best Television of 2019 Poll / VOTING AND CAMPAIGNING THREAD / Voting Ends January 31

If you like this show and you'd like to see it have a good showing in the poll (running in February) all you need to do is submit a ballot including it and your other favorites (4 minimum, 25 maximum, organized by your favorite to least favorite) to forksclovetofu at gmail by end of day today. It'll take five minutes; get to it!

https://deadline.com/2020/03/matt-lucas-host-the-great-british-bake-off-1202879260/

Great, more Nardwaur or whatever his character was on Who.

otoh no more “sandi is short” joeks

I think he'll be ok. He's very jolly.

yeah i am good w this
will miss wee sandi though

on a rewatch kick this weekend

rewatching the Rahul season

There was news of a new series, specifically how they would have to all quarantine together for a while beforehand because prue is high risk and they can't get insurance otherwise.

(Most links for this news are the Mail or the Express so I won't link them)

This year's Sewing Bee is better than last year's Bake Off

I’ve never seen Sewing Bee!

Ahh you would love it I'm sure, and the current season is great

Unlike Bakeoff it took a few seasons and presenter changes to work itself out tho

Figuring out Sandy's nationality was like watching Inception.

Have you heard her Apollo 11 story?

I have not!

New season starts on Netflix US this Friday 9/25 😃

From Wikipedia

"In 1969, her father covered the landing of the first man on the moon from mission control. Toksvig was holding the hand of Neil Armstrong's secretary during the landing."

(She recounted this, and a bunch of other stuff you wouldn't think would happen to one person, on various QI episodes)

Hooray, actual likeable contestants this year instead of Innocent Smoothie labels in human form

Interesting/edgy that the woman who enjoys scandi metal chose to commit a hate crime with her Louis Theroux cake

the technical accident and the result of that round was good tv.

they must've been quarantined with the presenters and tv people for, what, 2 weeks beforehand. i wonder how much mingling there was. and if they got to go straight home afterwards or faced another fortnight in isolation.

Laura's resemblance to Theodora from I May Destroy You was unnerving.

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/09/22/23/33477066-8761361-Digital_manager_Laura_31_looked_to_be_feeling_the_heat_in_the_ki-a-30_1600814097535.jpg
https://tvarchive2020.bradfordzone.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2020/05/Harriet-Webb.jpg

Anything else would just make it a holiday rather than a bubble, surely? Also bits of the 'journey'/'kids are my life' narrative ring a bit hollow if you leave them at home alone in the middle of a pandemic; I noticed this when they said one of the guys was "part-time carer, full time dad" to two daughters. Does that mean they/he were shielding? If so then leaving them is a big deal.

Interesting to see how this will change the production of the show - if we assume 10 episodes, filming is normally at the weekends so it's 2 1/2 months. Now, assuming back to back filming, it's done and dusted under 3 weeks.

This week I'm not sure anybody's baking stood out so this may be a personality-driven series. Also lol we are old, one of the entrants remembers John Whaite inspiring him "when I was just a kid".

Hats off to the one who said she never wanted to eat baking again, before the first cake was out of the oven.

It was filmed over six weeks: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/sep/20/pizza-by-paul-flowers-by-prue-how-great-british-bake-off-built-its-covid-bubble

Yeah, that Guardian article pretty much agrees with my assumptions and clears up discomfort over home Vs TV bubbling.

Really enjoyed the new episode

The cake busts challenge was v good tv!

poor Freddy Mercury & David Bowie
https://townsquare.media/site/295/files/2020/09/Mercury-Bowie-GBBO.jpg

Tom DeLonge cake was a) lol and b) terrifying
https://www.nme.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/TD-and-cake-696x442.jpg

Marie Antoinette came out surprisingly awesome tho!

tbf, the mercury and delonge cakes are pretty recognizable!

It was all good tv and I felt so bad for the lady who bumped into the guy at the end of the technical challenge

We’ve really missed Noel’s voiceover giving the contestants’ bios, always the best part of any season

It was pointed out on Extra Slice last night that Marie Antoinette was actually David Cameron.

yeah that was rough

(xpost re the woman that bumped into the guy)

re Noel’s voiceovers the one where the woman was a pantomime producer who did yoga in her spare time & enjoyed listening to Scandi metal
made us fully crack up laughing

i made up my own contestant voiceover script feel free to play along

“VG is a chicken sexer from North Whistlington. She worships the Outer God Yog-Sothoth in her spare time & lives with her half sister in a haunted bakery where they enjoy listening to calliope music.”

guy who got his cakes bumped seems a little socially awkward, he seemed to be having a hard time acting anything other than really pissed
been on both sides of that problem of course

plus the stress of being on-camera for the whole thing cant be easy to deal with

oh yeah, there's no way i would ever go near a reality show.
hollywood's "you signed up for it mate" about the closest i've gotten to empathizing with him

It was all good tv and I felt so bad for the lady who bumped into the guy at the end of the technical challenge

i know he'd just had his cakes knocked over but that guy (who is in the tent days after his wife has given birth, iirc) was really ungracious about it and had a bad energy imo

Oh yeah to be clear I think that guy is probably Qanon-curious at a minimum

ah the internet, where you can go from "guy-who-wasn't-happy-about-having-his-cakes-carelessly-knocked-to-the-ground" to "yeah, he's probably a 9-11 truther" in twenty minutes

i made up my own contestant voiceover script feel free to play along


We do this too!

cmon i dont think he deserves that level of flaming. humiliation & disappointment are pretty hard feelings to mask in the moment, even for a Britisher.

As they also pointed out on extra slice, she was flailing long before he got anywhere near her. But she was obvious gutted and moreso when she won.

There was no joke about what the judges were about to get up to either.

No judge chat before announcing the winner either

cmon i dont think he deserves that level of flaming. humiliation & disappointment are pretty hard feelings to mask in the moment, even for a Britisher.

trust me i know pass/agg arsehole British blokes, this guy is almost definitely oe of them [prepares to have assumptions destroyed next week when he turns out to be good egg, I honestly don't think there's ever been a bake-off contestant i didn't like]

I feel like I watched a different show from the rest of you! I barely noticed the man whose cakes fell; he was like the intact paste of other chewed-up humans.

Meanwhile, the lady who knocked down the cakes seemed (to me) rude throughout the episode and then shed crocodile tears to make the drama about herself, followed by visible embarassment. I thought she was very selfish! Suffer in impotent shame like the rest or us, geez.

What are examples of her rudeness?

Rudeness maybe the wrong word – maybe 'ungracious' is a better one. "I feel sorry for whoever has to clean up after me," (smirk); "I don't like Battenburgs" ; "I don't want to eat cake again" ; "half of the Batttenburg is in the oven, it's like toast, it's horrible." eyeroll, sneer, turning her back on the bland guy right in the middle of him saying, "it's okay, accidents happen."

"I don't like Battenburgs" ; "I don't want to eat cake again" ; "half of the Batttenburg is in the oven, it's like toast, it's horrible."

i don't think ungracious is really the word for this but maybe the typical brit sense of humour doesn't travel very well? she just seemed funny to me

I thought she came across as mostly nice, smart and funny so idk

Yeah, my partner had already said "Okay, I like her" before the cake nudging incident - and I think she was genuinely mortified over it.

Sura is VERY London - I was sold on her when they showed footage of her walking a leashed cat in front of her estate.