Paul’s barbed tongue is at work again

REVIEW ★★★★✩

IS that the sound of patisserie-themed double entendres in the air? All half-baked puns about saucy stiffness and sunken soggy bottoms?

Yup, it’s Bake Off time: the seventh series kicked off last night, with Paul Hollywood glinting roguishly before plunging in his verbal knife, while Mary Berry continued to eat her own weight in pastry without gaining so much as a pound.

All the usual ingredients were present and correct: a carefully picked grouping of culturally diverse contestants, including the token middle-class white professional male, Lee, a church minister from Bolton.

Last night was cake night and the first challenge was to prepare a drizzle cake, which is apparently Paul’s favourite. “We want to take it back to basics,” he threatened. “It won’t get easier. It will get harder.” Yes, well… And there’s more to play for now, the top prize being a new career in television, as last year’s winner Nadiya Hussain can testify.

Her new show kicked off right after Bake Off.

Not bad for a wife and mum most of whose life has been tending the family home. Our 12 contestants (not a baker’s dozen) got down to their drizzling with Tom, a project manager from Rochdale producing something that sounded quite vile: a gin and tonic drizzle cake. Paul clearly felt the same. “There’s no flavour. It’s been killed off by the alcohol,” he protested.

The result was that when Tom took the last challenge, he didn’t put anything like enough kirsch in his mirror cake.

Before they got round to those, however, there was the technical challenge – making 12 uniform Jaffa cakes – and as someone who can’t stand the things, I could only look on and grimace.

Paul’s barbed tongue was at work again: “They are all uniform (pause) …ly bad!”

Lee, who was not doing well, was looking increasingly miserable.

Endurance

He said, sadly, “You can’t turn the clock back. You can only move on.”

For a nation like ours which, as Emma Thompson recently observed, is rather keen on the cake side of life, this programme really is an endurance test.

Benjamina, a teaching assistant from London, let the pressure get to her and broke down in tears, while Val, a retired primary school head from Somerset, relieved the tension by doing a work-out on the spot.

Only Selasi, a City of London bank worker, kept his cool throughout and I’d put odds on him winning.

Other strong contenders include Andrew, an aerospace engineer from Derby.

He did very badly at the outset but redeemed himself with a superb mirror cake.

And there’s Jane, the garden designer from Kent, last night’s star baker. The rejected contestant was Lee.

But then he’s the token white, middle-class professional male.

You could have forecast that outcome.