The Great Celebrity Bake Off For Stand Up To Cancer
Channel 4/All 4
Iwas certainly looking forward to this series of The Great Celebrity Bake Off For Stand Up To Cancer, or Celeb Bake Off as everyone surely calls it, but I wasn’t expecting the first episode to be one of the TV highlights of the year. It had laughter, tears, baked butter cream, tasty balls and a 3D biscuit rendition of a day at the beach with Camilla Parker Bowles. The casting of the first batch of famouses could not have been more inspired: loveable breakfast TV legend Bill Turnbull, Spandau Ballet hunk Martin Kemp, the always amusing Roisin Conaty, and best of all, TV’S greatest living anarchist, Harry Hill. Harry actually stuck to the rules and pulled off some classic cupcakes in the opening round, though he did fill them with handwritten promises of special prizes for the judges, including a very cheeky “copy of Mary Berry’s birth certificate, printed on the original vellum”. Kemp was superbly incompetent in the cupcake round, cooking his cream instead of his cakes, then came good in the showstopper, while Roisin went the opposite way, with an early red velvet triumph followed by the worst gingerbread Paul had ever tasted. The final round was all about creating a biscuit representation of the best day of the contestants’ lives. Which is where Harry’s fantasy beach holiday with Camilla came in. He reduced Prue and Paul to giggling wrecks, but the final twist was that his surreal creation tasted delicious. The show ended in deeply moving style, as Bill explained how he had been diagnosed with cancer after the show had been filmed and paid tribute to his family. This Bake Off really did have it all.