One evening in the autumn of 2012, I got a somewhat urgent phone call from my mom. I was living in a quasi-legal student sublet at the time—the landlord had hooked the electricity up to the street lights outside—and she wanted to recommend a baking show that might distract me from the rats under the floor. Think “MasterChef” but with the pacing of an afternoon spent punting on the Thames. The bakers were normal people: a shop worker, a vicar’s wife, a searingly competitive sixty-three-year-old Buddhist whose coup de grâce was a flock of choux-pastry cygnets. “There’s a Scottish boy on it,” my mom added, offering some enticement. “He wears knitted jumpers.”
The Culture Industry: A Centenary Issue
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In the U.K., if you so much as bring a beat-up homemade carrot cake into the office, you can count on somebody telling you to apply for “The Great British Bake Off.” I was twenty and already had a signature apricot-tart recipe, so I was bound to get the call eventually. My mom would, I’m sure, argue that she meant only for me to watch “Bake Off.” But you can’t watch people doing the thing you love, only worse, and just sit by. Or, at least, I couldn’t.
Within a few weeks, I had not only seen every episode but obsessively studied the format. I took notes when the bakers were challenged to make “hand-raised” meat pies: a topsy-turvy process in which you make the pastry with hot water instead of cold, and press the dough not into a pie dish but around the outside of a wooden mold. I acquainted myself with the judges’ predilections: the delicate Mary Berry favored the classics, whereas Paul Hollywood—a thoroughly suntanned man with the alpha saunter of a prison guard—seemed to have a weakness for piña-colada-flavored bakes. I wasn’t interested in the backstory montages showing the bakers’ home towns, or in the wholesome conversational patter—that was filler. I wanted the uncensored baking, those sweet shots of gelatine leaking from badly molded pastry.
I should probably clear up one thing, which is that my enthusiasm for baking, at that point, exceeded my expertise. My sense of superiority was mostly speculative: I could probably bake this stuff if I bothered to learn. So I learned. When I should have been reading David Hume, I pored over the writings of Paul Hollywood, that other great empiricist, for his thoughts on dough hydration and oven temperature. I made phyllo pastry from scratch in my room, stretching the dough to the thinness of a page of the King James Bible.
What I mean to say—and what any contestant on the show will admit, if they’re honest—is that you don’t make it to the world of competitive televised baking by accident. I sent in an application in early 2013, attaching photos of Viennese whirls, black-currant tarts, and a drum-size brioche à tête. “My repertoire isn’t huge,” I noted judiciously in the comments. “But what it lacks in breadth, I think is counterbalanced in part by its depth.” Midway through the casting process, I sent an e-mail to one of the producers: “It’s all I’ve been thinking about. Waking up at four in the morning to nurse a brioche dough back to life.” The producers are used to this—they get people who want the thing so badly that they apply seven, eight, nine times.
During the next couple of months, I inched closer to the show. I cleared interviews with home economists who quizzed me on the finer points of baking technique—how to tell when a meringue was done cooking, or how to get a thin, shattering crust on a loaf of bread. Next were screen tests, a first date with the camera. Toward the end, in-person baking trials. These days, it’s not until the thousands of applicants have been whittled to a final hundred that anyone even tastes the bakes. “The best amateur bakers in the country” is the line, although I get the sense that even the producers don’t fully buy this. Throughout the process, we were encouraged to practice, to fill in the gaps in our knowledge, to get up to speed with things outside the amateur repertoire of biscuits and cakes. If any of us were truly skilled at baking, it was often because we had sought out “Bake Off,” not the other way around.
It is hard to think of another show that screens so carefully not just for personality type and talent but also for that more slippery variable, purity of intention. Producers find themselves in the position of trying to cast one of the best-known shows on television—one that routinely makes people famous—with people who care about neither television nor fame. They have to sniff out clout-chasers, and pick through government databases for things like criminal convictions and undeclared baking businesses. Even unrealized dreams can be suspect. When I asked Sophia Reid, the head of casting, about Dylan Bachelet, the Pixar-cute twenty-year-old retail assistant from Season 15, she said that she had been nervous about him at first. “I knew Dylan wanted to be a chef,” she told me. “How’s that gonna land?”
The show attempts to present Britain in microcosm, which is why casters have scouted on the street and plugged into Facebook groups—Black dads in London, Irish badminton players, that kind of thing. The holy grail is what Reid calls “the unlikely baker.” To Kieran Smith, the show’s executive producer, that’s someone like Rahul Mandal, the Winnie-the-Pooh-esque nuclear scientist from Season 9. “The moment you get a Rahul . . . ,” Smith mused, bowing his head. “There is someone who is unintentionally funny. There is someone who probably never wanted to be on television in their life.”
At the very end of the audition process, I was sent to Lynn Greenwood, an impish, curly-haired psychotherapist who has also served as a dowsing rod for shows like “The Apprentice.” All bakers-to-be must prove to her that they’re fit for the rigors of reality TV. “I can sniff out someone who’s disturbed within a few minutes,” Greenwood told me when I visited her recently, in the same leafy London neighborhood where we had met twelve years earlier. What she remembers of my assessment, she told me approvingly, was that I was very quiet and not outwardly ambitious, and that I loved baking. I didn’t tell her that, from what I recalled, I cried for half the session, constitutionally incapable of playing it cool. That’s possibly why, a couple of months later, I was on the show.
In the course of the past fifteen years, and seemingly by accident, “The Great British Bake Off” has become one of the most popular shows on TV. In its best years, “Bake Off” has drawn more British viewers than “Downton Abbey,” “Sherlock,” “Doctor Who,” or, indeed, Prince Phillip’s funeral. Paul Hollywood has arguably established himself as the only credible pop-culture inheritor to the title of Ol’ Blue Eyes. The show has even given us new language: it is now possible for laypeople to talk sagaciously about a bake having a “soggy bottom.”
It would have been easy enough for “Bake Off” to ensnare the food crowd, but it has become a phenomenon even among people who have never touched a stand mixer. In the streaming era, “Bake Off” is the standard-setter for ambiently watchable TV; a generation of half-watchers turns to it for its gently sedative properties. Meanwhile, bakers watch it for the craft, thinking that maybe next year they’ll apply. In recent years, as spinoff shows have proliferated, it’s become clear that you can riff on certain incidental details—the “British,” say, or the “Bake Off.” International franchises have included “The Great American Baking Show,” an Uruguayan Bake Off, and the lesser-known “All of Holland Bakes.” We have seen “The Great British Sewing Bee,” “The Great Pottery Throw Down,” and “The Big Blowout” (“Bake Off” for hair stylists).
But the original still dominates. Most Brits don’t do outright patriotism, so when we deploy phrases like “Great British” it is with a certain sardonic flair. The bakers are the kinds of people who will be more upset if they accidentally steal someone else’s custard than if theirs is the custard being nabbed (as happened in the now notorious Custardgate incident). Occasionally, though, the steelier survival instincts kick in, and a pressed baker might be compelled to construct a gingerbread model of the Moulin Rouge on top of a croquembouche. Mix in the pleasurably low-stakes drama of baking, in which nothing rides on success except a baker’s pride, and you’ve struck comfort-TV gold. Even Kylie Jenner is a fan—she posted a video of her watching “Bake Off” on her jet, calling it “my favorite show.” Consider the cultural tectonics involved in bringing the extended Kardashian empire into contact with Nelly Ghaffar, from Season 15, a flirtatious palliative-care assistant from Slovakia by way of Dorset. But this is what makes “Bake Off” so beloved: it is one of the most successful unscripted shows of the century and still feels like an underdog.
It was 2009 when BBC Two got a pitch from Love Productions for a kind of “X Factor” for cakes, inspired by the Pillsbury Bake-Off. Love was in the habit of throwing out ideas like this—a “see what sticks” approach that has resulted in shows like “Filthy Rich and Homeless” (rich people learn empathy by sleeping on the street) and “Cirque de Celebrité” (B-list stars learn competitive corde lisse and the pyrotechnic arts). The company had honed this idea over several years: what if, instead of hosting the bake-off in a TV studio, they did it in an English country house? Producers searched for historic manors with the electrical capacity to support twelve ovens and an entire crew. No dice. How about a “baking circus comes to town” concept, inspired by the judging marquees at English village shows? There would be pastels and bunting. They could put the bakers in a really, really big tent.
When it came to finding judges, producers settled on Mary Berry, a cookery writer in her mid-seventies and a pioneer of the all-in-one cake method. (Instead of creaming butter and sugar together before adding eggs and flour, you blend the whole lot at once.) She had been a charismatic champion of the Aga—a brand of British range cooker favored by exactly the people who tend to nuke the competition at village fêtes. For her co-judge, they chose Paul Hollywood, at that time a virtually unknown bread baker. He came from a line of bakers and had been the youngest ever head baker at the Dorchester hotel, but viewers of his cable show, “Use Your Loaf,” would have known him as the innovator of the “breast test”: proofed bread dough, when prodded, should feel like a woman’s breast.
The first episode of “The Great British Bake Off” aired on BBC Two on August 17, 2010. It’s difficult to find the inaugural season to stream now, which may be for the best. Much of the show is given to ponderous historical segues. Passersby from a nearby village fair peek into the tent. And most of the jokes made by the presenters, the comedians Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins, have been edited out.
It wasn’t until Season 3 that the show came together. One day, Perkins was filming an introductory segment when she tripped on a divot, worked through the fall, and kept talking like nothing had happened. It was slapstick, not exactly BBC-documentary house style, but it worked. Anyone trying to get a reality show off the ground eventually has to reckon with an essentially Shakespearean question: Are we making a play here, or a play within a play? Is the format—the set, the show structure, the million contrivances—part of the joke? Love decided that it was. The pratfall was, in one producer’s memory, a small eureka moment. The real “Great British Bake Off” was born.
The filming weekends started early. At dawn on Saturdays, we would be driven in a convoy of minibuses from a soothingly nondescript hotel in Bristol to Harptree Court, a classical Georgian-era country home, on the grounds of which the tent had been put up. “Put up” doesn’t really do it justice—across from a walled garden and some shepherds’ huts, a huge, tri-peaked white zeppelin would come into view, like something a trickster god had set down in the grass and forgotten about.
The woman who lived in the house, Linda, fixed us tea. She would wear pearls with an apron and made a lemon drizzle cake better than anything I tasted in the tent. As the morning picked up pace, we bakers ran through our recipes one last time. Techy guys in high-pocket-density cargo shorts milled about, doing what techy guys in high-pocket-density cargo shorts do. Paul Hollywood was presumably in his dressing room, putting on a crisp oxford shirt in a shade of blue meant to make his eyes pop—a vivid cerulean, a chilly Arctic sky, or, occasionally, a fuller, velvety navy just across the color wheel from his tan.
Before the cameras started rolling, we were miked and aproned up, and I would pop an ineffective herbal anti-anxiety candy. Frances, another baker taking the competition too seriously, had got me onto the stuff; she had it in liquid form and was dropping it like acid. Howard, a tenderhearted council worker with a voice like a creaky door, would quietly glitch out. On the director’s cue, Mary Berry was tenderly extricated from her thermal gilet and the floor was purged of its few dozen researchers, home economists, sound recordists, camera operators, technicians, producers, and researchers. There was quiet. Then Paul Hollywood would close in across the lawn, his silver quiff cutting the air like a fin.
What follows is a simple three-act format. First is the Signature challenge, in which bakers make a recipe they’ve already developed. The “signature” is rhetorical—no one has a go-to mini decorative jelly roll—the point is to reacquaint viewers with who’s who. Next is the Technical, which is judged blind: bakers are presented with a thinly sketched out recipe and have to use their baking instincts to fill in the gaps. This is where the serious competition begins. There are people who showboat in the challenges they’ve had months to prepare for but flunk the technicals, and then there are likable anoraks—like James Morton, from Season 3, with the jumpers—who lack organization but have unassailable technical nous.
Finally, the Showstopper. This is probably the “Bake Off” you know: a lion made from bread, a cake bust in honor of Lupita Nyong’o, an edible hanging Halloween piñata. It’s here that bakers showcase their true personalities, often to disastrous effect. Take the incident known as Bingate, from Season 5, in which Iain, a construction engineer from Northern Ireland, sets out to make a chocolate-and-coffee-caramel Baked Alaska. Diana, a jovial sixty-nine-year-old grandmother, moves Iain’s ice cream out of the freezer. Iain throws the whole melting thing in the trash, and then—in a truly delectable call by the producers—is made to walk the garbage can to the judging table. The Showstopper is the sink-or-swim challenge. “We hope that they swim,” Smith, the executive producer, told me. “Or . . .” He paused. “We hope that they sink a bit. And then they swim.”
It was an hour into the first challenge of the first episode on the first day of filming when I started crying. We were making sandwich cakes, the simplest thing. Mine was vanilla cake, rhubarb jam, and crème pâtissière, a custard reinforced with starch so it could support a second tier of cake. While I was cooking it, the custard turned a green-ash color. Except it wasn’t my fault. I could have sworn that the pan had discolored the milk somehow. I tried to impress this upon the producers, but nobody listened, not that I blame them. To make compelling unscripted television, they have to rely on that potent mixture of incompetence and luck.
How quickly I fell apart. One minute, I was explaining to Mary how I was going to dip the thinnest ribbons of raw, blush rhubarb in sugar syrup, dry them in a low oven, and coil them into tiny, chewy rhubarb roses to decorate the top of the cake. The next thing you see, I’m spinning out. The producers have the tightly honed intuition of storm chasers; they can spot a trembling hand from across the tent. They swooped in on me and my now split custard, with backup from a pack of cameramen and sound guys. My only real defense was Sue, one of the jesterlike presenters, who shielded me and did a remarkable, jazzlike expletive improv until everyone gave up trying to film. (Sometimes, she told me, she tried a different tack: libelling pharmaceutical companies to make embarrassing footage unusable.)
I want to say that I don’t know why I got so upset when things went wrong, but that would be a lie. I didn’t want to go home to my floorboard rats—I was pretty sure one of them had died down there. And then there was the thought of all that convivial, cutthroat baking going on without me: I wasn’t ready for the one demonstrable show of brilliance in my life so far to turn out to be a joke. What are you if you’re not even good at the thing you got good at, like, four months ago? I didn’t get eliminated that day, anyway. Toby mixed up the sugar and the salt, and I went through to Bread Week. I felt terrible for him, and I was glad.
In the listless couple of hours between challenges, we’d sit in a sofa-crowded snug in the east wing of the house, talking shit and selectively sharing baking tips. Rob, a guy who toted an infrared kitchen thermometer the way others carry Chapstick, gave me a heavy-duty anodized sheet pan—excellent for heat diffusion. Kimberley, an ebullient psychologist, tried to encourage me to “take up my space.” Christine, the grandmother of the tent, was often found gabbing with the twenty-five-year-old Ali, with whom she’d become best friends. “The boring thing that everyone talks about is that [‘Bake Off’] is kind,” Smith, the producer, told me. “We didn’t start off by going, ‘We want to make a really kind, warm show.’ Bakers are quite unusual television characters. It came from them.”
I often went outside for a cigarette with Glenn, a rambunctious bear of a man who, after our season was done, went on to tour a “Bake Off”-themed comedy show. We moaned about the challenges and the ambushes from producers—their overeager commiserations, the way they’d bait you into narrating your downfall in real time. We took slow drags, discussing the merits of poaching meringue in custard as producers scurried across the lawn with ingredients veiled under gingham. Mary was usually stowed in some discreet corner of the manor, but sometimes we observed Paul from afar, smoking alone near the meadows’ edge, pacing like a bull.
The judges fascinated me. Mary dispensed praise prudently, but with a certain twinkly delight, as if pressing a toffee into your palm. But, really, the judging was Paul’s game. He is a truly excellent bread baker. When he is of a mind to, Paul Hollywood can entwine seven strands of dough into an ornamental wreath with the dexterity of a concert pianist. The rest of the time, he will handle your bread like he is airport security. He flips it upside down, knocks on its bottom, interrogates it with sausage fingers. He squeezes a crumb with accusatory zeal. Underproofed. He raps a crust against a hard surface. Overbaked. When he is done, he dusts his hands and sheaths them in his denim carapace.
Yet there was something vulnerable about seeing the two of them up close. “What does he know?” Mel and Sue would say, if Paul hated something. “He smokes forty a day. He hasn’t tasted since 1984.” As the seasons have rolled on, producers have had to contend with the fact that the bakers often have more adventurous tastes than the judges do. Paul on gochujang: “Never tried this.” On peanut butter and grape jelly: “Not totally convinced about the flavor combinations.” Mary’s repertoire seemed to have lain almost untouched since 1976. In an old master-class episode, she makes a cake with an “unusual ingredient,” and it turns out the ingredient is an orange.
I am pleased to say that none of this stopped my limited successes on the show from going to my head. If Paul thumbed a twisted Swedish kanelbullar and found the crumb to his pleasing, I took this seriously. For the Showstopper challenge in Bread Week, I made a sweet bread in the shape of a peacock, with braided plumage and hand-painted chocolate eggs for the iridescent feather eyes. He looked upon it, and saw that it was good. Years later, I still consider myself talented in the discipline of enriched dough. Anyway, that week I got Star Baker.
It’s funny how I spent my weekends surrounded by cameramen but it was the Star Baker gimmick that impressed on me that I was there to make television. Television about cake, to be sure, but also about the very idea of televised contests, and the intense and sometimes misdirected passions of the people who go on them. When I was in the tent, I could imagine how the footage would be metabolized in the edit: there would be longer clips of the front-runners and the people at risk of going home; the rest of us would serve as the rhythm section, reading the recipes, putting things into the oven and taking them out, hitting the major beats of any particular challenge. Somebody would be set up as a dark horse. Somebody else would be tripped up by their pride. When I won Star Baker for that peacock bread, I tried to channel a certain gracious surprise. The edit would not flatter the boastful.
As the weeks passed and bakers were picked off, two factions emerged: the people who went to the bar after filming and those who went straight to their rooms. I don’t need to name names, but you can tell at a glance who was up on the sauvignon blanc and who was reading “Mary Berry’s Baking Bible” under the covers. Nobody talked about the furtive ambition of the swots. There is a special censure among “Bake Off” alumni for bakers who want it too bad, bakers who seem lovely—but did you know they applied, like, five times? No show does so much to hide its true nature: namely, that it is a competition people desperately want to win. This is the essential hypocrisy of “Bake Off,” and it remains the most British thing about it. Years passed before I found out that, on the eve of the decorative-loaf challenge, Frances had brought ropes of dough to her hotel room and spent the night practicing her sailor’s knots.
I mostly spent my evenings Googling things like exactly how many layers puff pastry should have, although by then I’d also developed a distracting crush on a researcher on the show, a sweet, eager guy who startled every time his walkie-talkie went off. That kept me busy. None of the bar crowd made it to the last week, although I had to wonder—in the taxi on the way to the final, popping another anti-anxiety lozenge while Kimberley meditated and a tendril of “Viva la Vida” slipped from Frances’s headphones—whether they had not taken the nobler path. After the last cake had been tasted, and when it was time for one of us three to be crowned, the other bakers returned and watched. I had missed them. I will not tell you who won, except to say that they deserved it, and it wasn’t me.
As “Bake Off” reaches its sixteenth season, it faces an inevitable problem: it would seem that there’s nothing left to bake. Since the show started, the bakers have cumulatively made something like twenty-five hundred distinct creations in every discipline, from the common cake arts to hard-core viennoiserie. There have been about a hundred and fifty technical challenges. Every usable baking pun had been exhausted by the end of my season.
To keep things fresh, producers have ventured into hitherto uncharted baking grottoes. They’ve had the bakers make “anti-gravity illusion cakes” and “3-D storybook pie scenes,” encroaching on the Dadaist niche of shows like “Is It Cake?” The assignments have also stretched farther afield culturally, including to experiments like “Japanese Week,” with its Chinese-style-steamed-bun challenge, or “Mexican Week,” featuring a truly avant-garde pronunciation of “guacamole.” It has been tempting, at moments, to say that “Bake Off” has gone off the rails, but these misadventures are exactly in the spirit of the show. The provinciality of “Bake Off”—its goofy, slightly blinkered vision of the world—has always been part of its D.N.A. Thankfully, though, the show’s food producers have started pulling things back, reconfiguring the technical challenges to prioritize actual baking instincts over, say, the ability to imagine how a Prinzregententorte should look.
The difficulty is trying to keep “Bake Off” feeling small, feeling “Bake Off,” despite it being a real cultural force. Know-how from the bakers themselves, tapped from internet sourdough forums and untranslated pâtisserie books, has been seeping into prime-time television for the past fifteen years, presenting “Bake Off” with the same paradox that plagues “RuPaul’s Drag Race”: there are no real amateurs anymore. Peter Sawkins, the fastidious young winner of Season 11, was only thirteen when my season was on television; he is one of a number of bakers not just inspired by the show but, in some sense, created by it. And the “Bake Off” effect has snowballed as its disciples have formed baking sub-cults of their own. Ruby Bhogal, a finalist in 2018, is a genuine baking celebrity—when my partner’s family friends heard he was going out with “Ruby from ‘Bake Off,’ ” I got the sense they were disappointed it was me.
One could argue that “Bake Off” initiated the single biggest transfer of power in the history of Britain’s food culture. The show opened up a field that used to be the stronghold of the white upper-middle classes, people like Elizabeth David or Mary Berry herself. For decades, Britain’s food-writing scene was mainly limited to Francophile hobbyists with second homes in Provence; even now, we have only half a dozen mainstream restaurant critics, and one of them is the King’s stepson. But “Bake Off” has given us people like Benjamina Ebuehi, a former teaching assistant who now writes recipes for the Guardian. Nadiya Hussain, the Season 6 winner, who has since had multiple cookery TV shows of her own, has experienced a level of underdog stardom last enjoyed by Princess Di. Now that social media allows anyone to take fame into their own hands, you might think it’s normal to have a democracy of experts, but that’s because you are living in the world “Bake Off” built.
That the show is a food-star factory is not exactly in the spirit of the bake-offs that inspired it, which were vicious routs among just-above-average home bakers, for almost no measurable reward. Have you ever made Albina Flieller’s Quick Crescent Pecan Pie Bar, which made her a co-winner of the 1973 Pillsbury Bake Off? Of course you haven’t. Even the best carrot cake at the village show is only the best carrot cake at the village show. The succor of small-time hubris is what good bake-offs are about—bakers driven only by that elegant, unimpeachable motive, to be the best.
After my season of “The Great British Bake Off” aired, I got a recipe column, then wrote cookbooks. A few people online said I must have flirted with Paul Hollywood to get to the final, so I spent a few years, in my early twenties, being rude about him on Twitter by way of a rebuttal. And I told anyone who would listen that I didn’t know why I’d applied to “Bake Off”: “Like, it was so out of character.” I didn’t have big ambitions, I insisted; I just really, really loved baking. But, as I was reminiscing with Glenn recently about that fateful season in our lives, he reminded me—with a touch of judgment, I thought—that I’d been talking about writing a cookbook since the moment we entered the tent. ♦
