One day on the Great British Bake Off, experienced judges Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry are suddenly and without warning, replaced by a mysterious hairy man called “Patrick Hollyberry.”
“Um, what do you know about baking, Patrick Hollyberry?” Mel and Sue ask.
“Nothing, Mel and Sue,” says Patrick Hollyberry, who coincidentally looks and talks a lot like me. “I am a cake-loving everyman. We have no need of experts any more,” – he pauses to stuff a slab of pie into his mouth – “because of the internet or something.”
Then he walks, or depending how far into the series we are, is rolled, around the tent, where ethnically diverse, generationally disparate and generally delightful bakers await his advice (“add more cake”), teaching (“this cake could be bigger”), and judgment (“very cakey”).
He has an interesting tasting technique. While Mary and Paul gently nibble and savour, Patrick Hollyberry crams whole fistfuls of cake into his head or has baked goods shot at his mug by a specially devised “cake-cannon”. While Mary and Paul delicately fork pieces of cake to their lips, Patrick Hollyberry slams himself face first into them and remains there, face-down, making a sort of gurgling noise as the circumference of the cake shrinks around him.
His catchphrase, which he utters regularly through a spray of crumbs, is “what has two thumbs and likes cake?” Then he gestures at himself with his two thumbs (if they’re not busy clutching cake).
In every episode, at some point, he says: “And now, Mel and Sue, I wish to be alone with the cakes.”
Then he shoos everyone from the tent as only a rapidly expanding man on a segway can.
After some time, during which Mel and Sue conduct enlightening character interviews and play cards, Patrick Hollyberry stumbles from the tent, topless but for a pelican bib, covered in cake residue: crumbs in his hair, chocolate smeared across his face and a glassy look in his eyes.
“So who won, Patrick Hollyberry?” ask Mel and Sue.
“You are all winners,” he says.
And this happens every week until Patrick Hollberry’s premature but happy death by cake-based asphyxiation.
“Totally worth it,” he gasps through a throat-constricting lemon drizzle. His final words: “What has two thumbs and likes cake?”
“This show has gone downhill since we moved to Channel 5,” mutter Mel and Sue.
I love the Great British Bake Off which returns tonight (8pm, BBC 1) even though, like Patrick Hollyberry, I’m more familiar with the latter part of the cake lifecycle and cake production is basically sorcery to me.
The main reason I like Bake Off, apart from the cake voyeurism, is what it says about humanity. Whereas many reality-television programmes specialise in the sort of attention-seeking, theatrical cruelty that is redolent of end times, Bake Off evokes a garden-fete themed Utopian future in which people are nice and everything works out fine and there is cake.
Little has changed since earlier seasons. Twelve people who are all good at a thing compete to be considered better at that thing, out of quiet pride, and not because they want exposure for their singing/modelling career/personality disorders. The 12 are ushered along by the kindly witticisms of comedic duo Mel and Sue, the most every of everywomen. Their labour is overseen by cake-demagogues Paul Hollywood, who has the clear blue eyes and snowy white hair of a young Santa, and Mary Berry, who is an ageless, weightless angel of cake, and is quite possibly made out of cake.
This year’s bakers are a typically eclectic bunch. There’s Ugne, a Lithuanian body-builder, Stu, a tattooed musician, Flora, a “young person”, and Paul, “a prison governor with a penchant for sugar craft” (I don’t know what that is, but I’m game if Paul is).
Their professional expertise is occasionally demonstrated. We see Tamal, an anaesthesiologist, syringing syrup into a cake much like he might do with a syrup-deprived patient (I know as much about medicine as I do about baking). And Fireman Mat douses his offering in gin (this is how you stop fires, right?).
There’s a lot of tastefully shot cakerotica and there are plenty of things that sound like double entendres but probably aren’t. For example: when Paul queries the dispersal of the fruit chunks in a contestant’s Madeira cake.
“Paul is obsessed with dispersal of chunks,” says Sue.
“Oh, my chunks are well dispersed,” says the Madeira cake-baker, who constantly seems on the cusp of disaster, but I suspect is one of those people who pretends not to study but always gets As.
As television judges go, Paul and Mary are softly-spoken and benign, but experiencing their disappointment is like being cast out of the presence of God.
One contestant feels their gentle wrath when Paul likens his Madeira to “wallpaper paste”.
My preview copy runs out before I find out who is ejected (the BBC fear spoilers) but in a way, it’s beside the point. While a lot of drama is wrung from bakers under pressure, the main message that lingers after each episode is that people are nice, creativity is worthwhile and there is no such thing as an ordinary person. Bake Off is a celebration of quiet unheralded individuality.
It’s more than a competition. So when another contestant becomes tearful because her gateaux has collapsed, Sue puts her arm around her and says: “It’s just a cake.”
“It’s not just a cake,” she says.
But it is, and Sue and Mel always want us to know that. We are safe. Making things is fun. Life is good. There’s nothing on the line. Let us eat cake.
Great British Bake Off, BBC1, Wednesday 8pm
