Too many cooks are spoiling the broth at the BBC
Is the BBC eating itself? I only ask because an announcement this week hinted that the BBC was indulging in cannibalistic commissioning. Britain’s Best Cook (working title) is a new television show, presented by Mary Berry, in which 10 contestants, to quote the press release, will be “asked to serve the most perfect version of dishes that define modern British home cooking”.
I love the anachronistic gentleness of Berry, but reading these words made me fit to burst. Britain’s Best Cook was announced weeks before BBC Two airs its new cookery competition, The Big Family Cooking Showdown, which will celebrate “favourite family recipes being made in kitchens up and down the country”. Another former Great British Bake Off name, Nadiya Hussain, will co-host. I am not sure how these shows will be distinct enough from the BBC’s existing cookery competitions – Great British Menu and the seemingly unbreakable MasterChef franchise.
I recently watched the first episode of The Big Family Cooking Showdown and could not quite believe the boldness with which it imitates every single cookery competition show that has gone before it. Hosts Hussain and Zoë Ball – looking about as comfortable in each other’s company as Barack Obama and Raúl Castro at the Summit of the Americas – introduced the show in stately grounds that looked very similar to Bake Off’s. Judge Rosemary Shrager outlined what she was “looking for” in her competitors à la Berry and Paul Hollywood, and MasterChef’s John Torode and Gregg Wallace. The families, an amiable enough lot admittedly, broke into a collective sweat in a race against time that felt horribly familiar.
I guarantee that each episode will be the same and that is, of course, the point. Viewers have always used television to unwind, and shows such as this are a sort of embodiment of Freud’s Fort-Da theory, a term that the psychiatrist used as shorthand for the reassurance of repetition in childhood which, as adults, we still return to. It’s not for nothing that these programmes are littered with catchphrases: “Cooking doesn’t get tougher than this”; “On your marks, get set, bake!” which then lodge themselves in our reflexive memories.
There are two distinctly worrying things about this format fatigue. First, these shows give us a weirdly distorted relationship with food (not to mention promoting food waste, but let’s not go there) that verges on the fetishistic. In certain circles, food has always been presented as theatre, and that attitude has its place but it should not be the norm.
The Great British Bake Off is an example of a series where the efforts of the contestants have become more and more bombastic, with show-stoppers such as a re-creation of the Colosseum in gingerbread, and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream on three tiers being laid at Berry’s and Hollywood’s table in a sort of camp paean to cake.
In previous decades, we had much humbler ambitions. Remember the original MasterChef with Loyd Grossman, then the only cookery competition on television, in which chartered surveyors from Leicestershire proudly unveiled their signature salmon en papillote? This was British society before it began to define itself in hyperbolic terms.
In the old days, the British were meek when they appeared on television, and anyone who tried to dash their mundane dreams was pilloried. Take the cautionary tale of Fanny Cradock. Her career was ruined when, in 1976, she faux-retched and grimaced as amateur cook Gwen Troake reeled off her menu of seafood cocktail, duckling with bramble sauce, and coffee cream dessert on the BBC’s The Big Time. Today, fearsome Fanny’s attitude would be applauded.
And that leads to the other problem. Distorting our relationship with food is one thing, but more disturbing is the fact that these new shows offer a distorted view of reality. The search for gastronomic perfection perpetuates a sort of neurosis and also a sort of idiocy; boasting about your croquembouche on Instagram, for example. They deal in heightened, ultimately synthetic emotions and normalise them – something that has been learned from big reality bonanzas such as
The X Factor.
You really shouldn’t be reduced to tears if your chocolate soufflé fails to rise; but neither should you become euphoric on producing a perfect crème Anglaise. Everything is relative, but if Wallace is barking at you like a hyperactive hard-boiled egg, it probably doesn’t seem that way.
It’s not just cookery that has been placed within an arena of cruelty. The Great British Sewing Bee, The Big Painting Challenge and The Great Pottery Throw Down prove that the most innocuous hobbies can be amplified for television. And note how many of these programmes have “British” in the title. It’s as if the marketeers – and, goodness, do these programmes have the fingerprints of marketeers all over them – have decided that our national identity can help to sell the most unexciting of commodities. And, in the case of these cookery competitions, they have decreed that everything must take place in beautiful but blandly appointed kitchens, with contestants who tick the right demographic boxes for the target audience.
I can’t comment on the quality of Britain’s Best Cook, but I doubt that whoever wins will be allowed to get away with salmon en papillote – even with kindly Mary Berry in charge.
The search for gastronomic perfection perpetuates a sort of neurosis and also a sort of idiocy