Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
C4’s half-baked Bake Off figures
THEY paid £75million to poach The Great British Bake Off from the BBC, but Channel 4 will be happy if ratings hit “anything north” of three million.
The last BBC Bake Off had an average of 13.6 million viewers, and 15.9 million watched the final.
But speaking at her last TV festival as Channel 4 boss, Jay Hunt said if it got “five, six, seven” million she would be “absolutely delighted”.
She said: “I can be very clear this show is break even for Channel 4 at around three million, so anything north of that will be fantastic.”
A BBC insider said: “So C4 are happy if Bake Off gets a fifth of the BBC audience? Very low bar. More limbo than hurdle.”
Jay also revealed a letter from a seven-year-old fan of the E4 show Noel’s Luxury Comedy persuaded her to hire Noel Fielding. She said: “Noel has the ability to communicate with children as well in the way he comes across and I thought he would be an interesting flavour in the mix. Something magical has happened with Sandi and Noel.”
When we caught up with Noel on the set of Bake Off, he joked that he got the job due to an “admin error”.
Noel said: “I mean, it was a mistake, obviously. I said, ‘Have you got the right number?’ They did say, ‘Would you like to come and work and do something with Sandi?’. We’d done QI together and had worked really well together. I was like ‘Yeah, definitely’, but I didn’t know it was Bake Off at that point.”
He got the seal approval from pal Mel Giedroyc, who has told him she misses working on the series.
She even texted Noel asking him to “pinch Paul’s bum for me”.
Cheeky. characters Ronnie and Roxy Mitchell, above, causing some controversy.
Producer Sean O’connor left in June after just a year in charge.
But Santer admitted the success of the show was “cyclical”.
He said: “It’s about balance. It always has to walk a line and this is where I think it has gone the wrong way lately.
“It has to walk the line between social realism and stuff that is exciting, stuff that grips you and makes you gasp – and you have to tune tomorrow to see it.”