Television Russell Brown

New Zealand finally gets its own version of the popular and big-hearted British baking competition.

It’s taken a while and it’s not actually the country’s first competitive baking show (we don’t talk about the other one), but New Zealand joins the Bake Off club of nations this week with the premiere of The Great Kiwi Bake Off (TVNZ 2, Tuesday, 7.30pm).

If you’re not familiar with the British-born TV juggernaut, it’s an elimination cooking show that, in a reality-television landscape riven with cruelty, is actually nice to people. And it works. Over nine seasons, The Great British Bake Off has won the kind of mass audiences usually the preserve of football internationals and become part of British culture. There have been sewing and pottery versions and the original show has been screened in

200 countries. This week, New Zealand becomes the 28th territory to license the format and make its own Bake Off.

Madeleine Sami takes on a key unwritten part of the format: the funny and relatable lesbian, as played by Sue Perkins and Sandi Toksvig in The Great British Bake Off and Mel Buttle in the Australian version. We trust she’ll approach this important role with the lack of gravity it deserves – and that she and her co-cost Hayley Sproull will represent New Zealand well in delivering another key element of the format: the gently smutty innuendo.

The pair didn’t know each other well before the show, but have now become, according to Sproull, “inseparable sisters who hate it when the other person goes to the toilet because it means we can’t hang out”. So, that’s going well.

They’re joined by the judges, global baking impresario Dean Brettschneider and catering queen Sue Fleischl, who, according to Sami, offer “a perfect mix of professionalism and naughtiness”.

The 12 bakers who line up in the first show hail from Invercargill to Auckland.