IDuring the final round of the first week of the new “Great British Bake Off,” Georgie, a paediatric nurse from rural Wales, steps forward with the cake she's spent four hours making. It's the moment presenter Alison Hammond has been waiting for. As the show's judges, Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith, solemnly take bites of the cake, Hammond turns to them and asks: “How does Fanny taste, guys?”
Let's dive right in. This week's Showstopper round sees the bakers have to create a lifelike “illusion” cake. It's been mentioned for some time that Georgie has a pet hen called Fanny. Georgie decides to create a cake that resembles her pet hen. It's all set up for a quintessential Bake Off moment – a crude insinuation that would be unthinkable on primetime TV, except said in a big tent on a beautiful British lawn, with lovely people munching on delicious food. The Great British Bake Off is officially back.
But this year marks GBBO's 15th year, and it's been showing signs of fatigue for some time now. As the annual Grand Final approaches, the last few seasons have lost steam, as it becomes clear that there are once again no stars among that year's phalanx of elite amateur bakers. It doesn't matter whether a contestant wins their own cooking show, even if the show has only produced one big-name TV personality in Nadia Hussain over 14 attempts, as long as they have enough personality to craft 10 weeks of thrilling, inspiring bake-offs. But that hasn't been the case for a while. The contestants are nice enough, and bake well enough, but the big moments the show once produced are rare.
It's been a while since we've had a contestant who loves baking more than he loves being on The Great British Bake Off, which makes things worse. Not all the new recruits are as keen to conform as Andy, the mechanic from Essex who leans into regional stereotypes with his joke about running Paul's car over a brick, or Mike, the Wiltshire farmer who seems more interested in joking with the presenters and judges than baking. Everyone knows what to do. The love-hate relationship with Hollywood and the hilarious exchanges with Hammond have been thoroughly rethought at this point, before the cameras even start rolling. It used to be that a really great bake would earn you a silent, manly handshake from Hollywood. But now Hollywood hands out these treats like cheap mini-muffins. Ilya, the Norfolk midwife, gets one for her first bake.
The wild card is Hammond's co-host Noel Fielding, whose inclusion in 2017 has become less baffling and obnoxious by degrees. Watching him is like enduring an uneasy dream about accidentally getting a job you're not qualified for, and the signs of his discomfort are still there: the funny little voice he uses when he says “Ready!” and “Bake!”, and many of his comments to the contestants are about himself, as if he's trying to explain and excuse his existence. “Think of me as a kind of gothic therapist,” he tells one baker. Another is given an unnecessarily bizarre monologue about Fielding living with a goat that walks on its hind legs, followed by an attempt to reframe this one-sided exchange as a friendship. “This is a really strange conversation.”
But Bake Off's diminishing returns need to get worse before it stops working altogether. It's still fundamentally a joy to welcome 12 new bakers into the tent, and they're all cheerful, camaraderie and helpful. Getting to know them, at least in the first episode, remains a pleasure.
The opening bake of the year is a decorated loaf cake, which has the problem of icing slipping; it's a race against the clock to get the cake fully baked and then chilled long enough for the decorations to stick. Over the years, many nervous bakers have concocted things like painter's radios, while a few of 2024's newcomers have produced amusingly sloppy messes. In the second round, the bakers will recreate a Battenberg cake without a recipe; some of the marzipan-encased sponge batons are Mr Kipling perfect, while others look like firewood rolled up in an old carpet.
In the middle is Hammond, who is in her second year in the role and clearly has a natural talent for it. She's effortlessly approachable, just the right amount of mischievous, and at ease with everyone, putting them at ease. She saves Fielding by remaking him into a straight man with her own pretty eyes. With her on board, Bake Off should be happily stable for a while longer.
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