Chef’s life no cakewalk

I’M not sure if winning THE GREAT BRITISH BAKE

OFF (C4, 8pm) is necessarily a good idea. I’ve spent the last few weeks watching the latest food series from Nadiya Hussain, whose triumph on that programme four years ago has allowed her to make a living from her kitchen creativity, and frankly she’s been making it sound like a right pain in the neck.

“Cooking can sometimes feel like a chore,” she’s been repeatedly telling us. “When my to-do list is endless,” she said in one show a couple of weeks ago,“I want to cook as little as possible…”

But I guess when you’re caught

up in the drama of a full-blown competition – as 13 new contestants will be when Bake Off returns tonight for, goodness me, its 10th series – such concerns get pushed to the back of your mind.

Never mind the soul-sapping drudgery you’ll apparently be letting yourself in for if you become Bake Off champion and get to write and broadcast about food full-time, all that matters for now is wowing judges Prue Leith and Paul Hollywood.

That, and obviously earning yourself one of those coveted Hollywood handshakes, should you pull off something extra special.

For this latest series, I was rather hoping Prue would have come up with her own equivalent gesture to Paul’s, such as a high five or a fist bump, but sadly there’s no evidence so far.

What we do have is a fresh baker’s dozen of hopefuls, whose various levels of loveability we’ll be gauging, as per usual, over this opening 90 minutes, to determine who we will root for.

Week one is cake week, with a surprisingly challenging fruit cake, a retro-themed technical and a showstopper for which they must create “the birthday cake of their childhood dreams”.

The latter assumes, of course, that the cakes that featured in those dreams were nice ones, and not the sort that had them waking in a cold sweat, the marzipan having morphed into a papiermâché mask of Jim Davidson, as still so often happens in the dreams I have myself.

Straight after Bake Off comes a new four-parter, SINK OR SWIM FOR STAND UPTO CANCER (C4, 9.30pm), where celebs are training for a charity cross-channel relay.

The “sink or swim” isn’t meant literally, I’m relieved to report.

But it does reflect the fact that these people aren’t exactly naturals.

Those giving it a go include Olympians Linford Christie, Tessa Sanderson and Greg Rutherford, plus Corrie’s Sair Khan and Blue singer Simon Webbe.

Easing themselves into it nice and gently-ish, the training starts with a 500m swim in Lake Windermere.