I’m not much of a TV watcher. Like to stream movies and the occasional mini-series, but I lack the attentiveness required to watch a regular series, stretched out over a season.
Except in fall, when the days grow short and nights turn chilly and by Friday night I could really use some comfort food. That’s when my housemate and I watch The Great British Baking Show.
TGBBS is total comfort. A reality show of such good cheer that all the contestants help each other out. The format is exactly the same every episode, every season. We start off with a dozen “of England’s most outstanding amateur bakers.” Fortunately for the DEI crowd, every dozen includes a full array of ages, genders, and skin tones, whose origins include Bangladesh, Jamaica, and Ukraine, as well as Cornwall. Every episode includes three timed bakes over two days. A ‘signature challenge’ that the bakers have had a week to customize and practice, followed by a ‘technical challenge’ in which they face a recipe and ingredients blind. Day two centers on the ‘Showstopper Challenge,’ always an over-the-top concoction. Baker’s signatures are usually elaborate, often enticing. Their technicals vary widely, while the showstoppers are so overblown they scarcely qualify as food. At the end of the weekend, one person is named, ‘Star Baker,’ while another has to leave the tent. Thus, week after week, the group dwindles from twelve to eleven to ten…down to three.
No intellectual muscles overheat watching TGBBS. And you won’t learn how to bake either. The entire point (if there is one) is the jaunty repartee among a pair of wily judges (Good cop Nigella Lawson, Bad Cop Paul Hollywood), their dorkily funny sidekicks Alison Hammond and Noel Fielding, and the good-natured souls trying to bake sumptuous stuff under tight deadlines with those four sticking their noses, and commentary, at every opportunity. And yet, no one ever loses their temper and every fraught cry for assistance gets immediately aid.
Within one or two episodes, my housemate and I have ‘sussed out favorites, though we have no track record of picking winners. Although the show is streamed, we usually watch on Friday nights, when each episode drops. The weekly installment supports the illusion that this old-school, warm entertainment harkens from the days when TV actually occurred at specific times. We pretend to inhabit those good old days. We settle in, and enjoy.
