I’d prefer two people sitting behind desks pretending they have chemistry
PHILIP NOLAN’S TV REVIEW
The appeal of The Great British Bake Off has completely baffled me over the years. The only reason to watch anyone making biscuits or cakes surely is to be allowed to lick the mixing bowl afterwards like we did as children. Nowadays, millions watch from the comfort of their armchairs to see if someone leaves the competition thanks to a soggy bottom or a precariously expanded muffin top.
So baffling has this been to me that, save for a celebrity edition, I’ve never watched it at all until this week’s first episode of the new series. Against all expectations, I enjoyed it immensely, because like all the best reality shows, it’s not about the task at hand at all, but about the people who compete.
My heart went out to Terry, a middle-aged artist. In the filmed insert telling us who he was, he couldn’t even get his horse to move, so my expectations for his baking skills were low, and that’s how it proved. The challenges were all about biscuits, and Terry chose to decorate his work with pictures of lambs in dark and white chocolate. Sadly, the Bake Off tent is hot and not conducive to helping melted chocolate set, and Terry’s lambs ended up looking like they’d been savaged by a fox. In the showpiece challenge, he made a three-dimensional cast of his face with brandy snaps, and I can’t remember the last time I saw anything quite as terrifying. It looked like Edvard Munch’s The Scream crossed with what a lifer in solitary confinement might draw on the wall of his cell.
Judges Prue Leith and Paul Hollywood liked it enough to save him, despite the lambs debacle and an attempt to make Wagon Wheels that left them looking like burst tyres. Instead, they dismissed Imelda from Co. Tyrone. My heart went out to her, too. Sitting waiting for the results, and surely aware of her fate, she was trembling like a leaf, and burst into tears afterwards.
She looked like she needed a hug and a cup of tea, though it would be a brave man who suggested she might like a biscuit to go with that.
TV3 rebranded as Virgin Media One on Thursday and offered a fresh line-up that night. First up was its new week-nightly News At
8. I have no idea who designed the set, but as one friend said, he or she must have spent a lot of time in Dublin Airport, it looked just like Terminal 2 and is all too busy and too fussy, the shiny black floor grabbing your attention while a video wall the size of the Cusack Stand dwarfs presenter Claire Brock. Like so many news anchors nowadays, Claire stands and walks around while delivering the news, and there’s just no need for it.
Call me old-fashioned, but I’m happy to get the news from a man and woman behind desks pretending they have chemistry. Anything else makes adult bulletins feel like John Craven’s Newsround. Later that night, David McWilliams returned to our screens. Having already given us The Pope’s
Children and Breakfast Roll Man, and dubbing the middle-class suburbs Deckland, because everyone has one, his latest neologism was the Crash Kids, those who came of age just as the economy went off the high diving board.
It was all over the place, as David suggested that millennials’ failure to commit to buying property was linked to their failure to commit romantically, when dating apps (well, ‘dating’ – wink, wink) such as Tinder allow for instant gratification and feed the notion there’s no point taking the first train when a second might be along any minute.
It wasn’t helped by chats between David, scriptwriter Stefanie Preissner and spin-doctor Terry Prone. Preissner is a good guest, a thirtysomething with something of substance to say, and a quizzical look that speaks volumes. Her face was a picture as she listened to Prone, whose role appeared to be that of a participant in a Monty
Python sketch, telling young people they never had it so good because her generation had 27 kids and lived in a shoe. The programme ended up a bit like an economic boom itself – glossy and enjoyable while it lasted, but built on sand.
On Friday, Netflix dropped the entire second series (sorry, I refuse to use the word ‘season’ – we’re Irish, not American) of Ozark, the delightfully dark drama about an accountant and his family who are forced to move to backwoods America to launder $500m for a Mexican drugs cartel.
The joy of the show comes in watching ordinary people abandon personal moral compasses and do whatever it takes, no matter how illegal, to survive. It is astonishingly violent, and in the first episode there was one gruesome murder with a poker that would keep you awake all night – though, it wasn’t as disturbing as Terry’s brandy-snap face on a biscuit.
News At 8 The shiny floor and the Cusack Standsized video wall were grabbing our distracted attention