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

Yeah they're chasing drama that the core audience of the show doesn't want. We want to see people stretching themselves and performing at their best, not sweating a time limit or some absurd decoration exercise which is more suited to a Lego challenge than a baking contest. The core values are amateur spirit, and the generosity of contestants to each other. Also baking, which seems pretty negotiable these days.

Yeah, the show has basically become the professionalization of amateur baking!

Paul?

https://alafoss.is/collections/sweaters-for-men

Junior Bake Off mon-fri the next 3 weeks.

today's "9 robot fondant fancies" probably the worst mess i've ever seen

Can't wait. Glad I don't have to clean up after it.

Immy is chaos personified

This programme is chaos this year. I love how the challenges are all liquid and tall and precarious and runny and full of dye and colouring and MESS. Like, watching the kids break off their intense challenge to help catch the "burglar" had strong Tiswas vibes.

Immy telling Harry conversation about what she liked about Charlie wasn't appropriate for children's television was my highlight of week one but the burglar was a close second.

Pottery Throwdown is hitting a really sweet spot for me this year: likeable contestants, chilled vibes, the tasks are challenging rather than impossible,and (what I like most of all) the focus is on doing and trying rather than *winning*. Plus Siobhan McSweeney, not exactly a subtle host, spends more time showcasing the contestants rather than prattling though ironically bad comedy skits. Also, the pottery is great!

beg to differ but i may be looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place

The adult version would be so much better with Rav and Liam as judges, none of that stares and handshakes and 'are you sure you want to do that' crap which only makes the show worse.

Liam's been giving out fistbumps

the junior one is so good! but why does anyone have to get kicked out :( :(

i do not like the posh boy. it is unnatural for a child's favourite cheese to be gruyere.

(the correct answer is dairylea)

Do we care about GABS? https://people.com/food/the-great-american-baking-show-names-ellie-kemper-and-zach-cherry-as-co-hosts/

I like Ellie Kemper but do we really need Paul/Prue?

it's on the roku channel?

I’ve seen some of this and I guarantee you Paul and/or Prue will have a line of bakeware or similar launching in the US soon. Hollywood in particular must have been coached to be kinder and more positive.

It was interesting that on yesterday's Sewing Bee (made by the same production company), they did exactly what people in this thread were suggesting for Bake Off: had an expert guest judge in for West Africa week. They brought in Nigerian designer Banke Kuku to throw her eye over the proceedings and take the White/British look off it all. Obviously she's not a TV presenter, so the regular two still did most of the talking, but she seemed pretty relaxed and certainly classed up the joint. I would love to see them do something similar on Bake Off.

bump

i'd have figured it was Noel that was leaving...

oh god, a sketch

Still not sure how Noel hasn't been Branded over Pixie Geldof.

Beaver beaver beaver, oh fuck off.

I like Dan and Abbi and Tasha. Saku's endearing battiness is going to get very annoying very quickly and the rest of the country is going to love her.

Drinking game - shot every time Alison says "babes". You'll be dead by the first ad break and not have to listen to this shit innuendo.

always fun in episode 1 to guess who's off by the amount of coverage they get during the show: the skimmed-over people are obviously going to hang around.

i have never noticed the missing raspberry.

Abbi looks shockingly like ilxor csharpmajor.

In unsurprising rural news, Saku is the wife of a friend of our neighbour.

We thought you may have crossed paths.

xpost - yes!

carry on up yr beaver and what have you

dan giving me a bit of a richard the builder vibes, he’s quite good & v charming

loved amos :(

one of my friends used to bang on about the missing raspberry but it always just seemed like some sort of faux-“ocd” dogwhistle so i ignored her lol

kinda loved that everyone hurdled the technical pretty nicely, i like when that happens

I'm surprised it took this long to do the title sequence cake as a technical, a really nice idea which they all executed reasonably well.

always fun in episode 1 to guess who's off by the amount of coverage they get during the show: the skimmed-over people are obviously going to hang around

They also do this in the Apprentice, someone always shows up in a task in about week 3 and me and my husband both look at each other and go "where did that person come from?". Cristy was that person tonight, I swear she just popped up halfway through the show and we were all "no, wait, she hasn't been in it all the way through, has she? Did she just sneak in?"

For all the hype about Alison Hammond, I thought she was... fine? Maybe she comes across better in the later episodes when there's more room for her shenanigans in the final edit. (I say this as someone who likes Alison Hammond enormously.)

that extra slice table looks *tiny* after 3 years of social distancing

This is such inessential viewing this year, I completely forgot to watch it last night.

I watched it and still don't think I could tell you who was star baker and who left. It's just TV wallpaper this year.

Noel is really annoying this year, like he's really ramped up the mischievous pranking to compensate for Alison just being *nice*. Honestly I'd just tell him to fuck off if he was standing there breaking stuff while I'm trying to win a competition.

Haha, I honestly can't remember who left either. Was it Dana? There's no obvious winner this year at all. It's just so nothingy.

Can't remember her name but it was the young 'fur baby mummy'.

Saw a thing on twitter yesterday from a friend who's rewatching old Blankety Blank episodes (who says we don't know how to have fun) and a contestant says to Wogan "can you just be quiet for a bit Terry, I'm trying to concentrate". Would be refreshing if someone said that to Noel.

Actually that's telling in and of itself that over halfway through the series I still don't think I know anyone's name except Dan.

dana left
star baker was some bloke

I like Tasha.

Also like Tasha a lot, she seems nice in an unstudied, not practicing-for-TV kind of way.

Alison's USP is her "realness", but it feels like she's trying to keep the hardworking showbiz striver part of her personality under wraps, and (to me, anyway) the dissonance is a bit off-putting. And, like Matt and Noel, she seems curiously uncurious about the contestants - this was Mel and Sue's key strength and what's been horribly missing since they left

When Noel takes himself seriously, which is almost never, he's a decent host. But his unboundaried creepiness is quite ugly to watch

On the other hand I'm very glad there are fewer comic bits since Matt left. And weird Paul is still weird Paul, which is good.

Sewing Bee and Pottery Throwdown are much more enjoyable IMO, perhaps because they don't have to flatten it out for overseas sales

i like the way tash signs under her breath (as it were) when she's talking

and how when she was stressed the mix of talking and signing flipped.

(Woodworker is back on ch4 by the way. and there's always Forged in Fire on one of the fives)

Sewing Bee and Pottery Throwdown are much more enjoyable IMO, perhaps because they don't have to flatten it out for overseas sales

Do you think that's what it is? I never considered that. But you're right that we don't seem to be learning much about the contestants this year. I wonder if that's a deliberate policy to try to protect them on social media? Not be seen to be too intrusive?

Anyway, I half-watched it last night while doing something else. As is the way.

we don't seem to be learning much about the contestants this year

I'm not sure if this isn't a function of escalating 'journeys' and to a degree kayfabe in previous years.

This year we have had the one whose life is defined by foraging, the dead acceptance journey has had a reasonable amount of airtime, we knew quite a lot about Nicky and her love of animals, there's the one doing his PhD who is clearly on the spectrum (flagged by taking a cuddly toy to the rugby), Matty(?) is being pushed as a LAD as they mention being a football fan most weeks, Christy can barely get through a sentence without pointing out she's a mother... so the narrative is there, it's just either more mundane than usual or the stories have been repeated through so many stories they now just feel like lazy tropes.

I think that's it. It's just the same one or two things over and over so you can identify people. There's nothing really there.
I don't know if that's even the reason it seems so dull. Maybe they are all just too hot to be bothered chatting properly. Everyone's concentrating too hard on not fainting, and that includes the presenters and crew.

i agree that I'm finding it less compelling TV than in the past, but am struggling to put my finger on exactly why. is it that the baking itself is getting just a smidge less attention? there's the usual flurry from step to step, mixing this, proving that, but i feel like the percentage of airtime that used to go to people walking through their process and decisions has been cut back, just a smidge.

but probably it's more the casting/characterization stuff. it all does feel a bit flatter.

or maybe I've just run out of ways to be fully invested in the structure of somebody's dough after all these seasons!

I love Saku a lot

Saku is lovely! … I loved Rohan and Maree so their double elim was rough

I guess I’m going for Tash now