Marzipan in liquid spinach? It’s a recipe for tasty telly!
NEVER mind your soggy bottom, what contestants on The Great British Bake Off
( C4) must perfect now is the deep curtsey. Half the presenters appear to regard themselves as royalty.
Noel Fielding was parading around the marquee, on one of the hottest days of the year, in full fig as Queen Marie antoinette, balancing a wig the size of a threetier wedding cake on his bonce. He looked about as comfortable as Frank Bruno in drag: i don’t think we’ll be seeing Noel as a panto dame any time soon.
it was Paul Hollywood who wore his regal pretensions with ease. after the final round, he summoned shy baker Rahul, with all the condescension of louis XiV beckoning a terrified courtier.
Then he proffered a hand. Poor Rahul didn’t know whether to shake it or fall to his knees and kiss it.
‘i’ve never given a handshake for a showstopper before,’ Paul announced, as though he was inventing a new sort of honour. arise, Sir Rahul, knight of the gateaux.
Paul was so pleased with the effect this achieved that he offered the fabled Hollywood Handshake to the next baker too.
Honestly, he has to be careful: if he keeps bestowing them so casually, the soulless cynics among us might start to suspect these handshakes are just meaningless flimflam, and not royal benisons at all.
Despite the show’s former reputation for filthy double entendres, the bakers have never been foulmouthed. That’s one of the quiet joys of the Bake Off.
But French patissier Manon spoiled that, when she casually used a forbidden expletive while talking about her fondant figurines and had to be bleeped. as Bretonborn Manon appears to speak no recognisable English, it’s hard to imagine what she said that upset the censor so. ‘Zut alors!’ perhaps.
Continuing the French theme of the episode, Prue leith asked the bakers to make a Claude Monet gateau vert for the Technical Challenge. This involved marzipan covered in liquid spinach. Continental arty-types often have peculiar tastes, of course, but that was disgusting.
Such silliness just adds to the pleasure. For all its archness, its ludicrous recipes and the pomposity of Paul Hollywood, Bake Off is a continual delight — and this year’s contest is already looking like one of the best ever. Pass another slice of that spinachy marzipan, i can’t get enough!
The pleasure of The Horizon Guide To AI (BBC4) lay in silliness too — not just the wild predictions about artificial intelligence by the scientists in Sixties and Seventies archive clips, but their outlandish hair styles. The bizarre beards and combovers were hypnotic. So was their dentistry. Once i had noticed how many robotics engineers from the premicrochip era had black teeth, i couldn’t stop seeing it. lord knows what they were waffling on about — but crikey, those teeth.
Some of their pronouncements were outrageous enough to make you spit out your cocoa. One unnamed american explained that robots would never fully replace the working classes, or ‘morons’ as he termed them, because even morons were really quite complex. it took a robot scientist to appreciate that, he added modestly.
Other insights were spot on. One scifi writer imagined an age when people would order their groceries by pushing a few buttons on a handheld computer, which would pay the supermarket electronically.
Whether this was real foresight or just a lucky guess, there’s no knowing. Surely any scientist who could truly see into the future would never wear a combover like that.
UNIQUE VOICE OF THE NIGHT: Melvyn Bragg is looking back on his best interviews in The South Bank Originals (Sky Arts). Say what you like about the old peacock, there’s no one on TV now talking about literature and music with half his authority.