Trio rise to the occasion
SO THE big day has arrived: it’s time for THE GREAT BRITISH BAKE OFF: THE FINAL (C4, 8pm). Ruby versus Kim-Joy versus Rahul (right). Excited? Me too. Of course, to be strictly accurate the big day arrived a while back. This final, as with all Bake Off episodes, is pre-recorded.
So it’s actually something of a miracle, particularly in an age of incessant online prattle, that most of us will have managed to avoid hearing the result beforehand.
Even so, that’ll always be the worry: that some big mouth will leak the winner’s identity and spoil it. So here’s a mad idea I’ve had.
To guarantee in future that the Bake Off champion’s name is never revealed in advance, either intentionally or in a Prue-like style, why not stage the whole final live? I’m serious. Clear the Channel 4 schedules for an entire weekend, summon the finalists to the tent and let us watch them tackle every task in real time. In this case, doughnuts, a technical with a twist and a showstopper that teeters on the brink of madness.
Can you imagine what an eye-opener a live Bake Off final would be? After all, the cleverest thing about the show right now is the ingeniously zippy way it’s edited, making even the messiest, most laborious, most long-winded tasks look a relative breeze.
Imagine if, instead, we could follow those challenges minute by minute, as they really happen.
There’d be nail-biting tension, moments of high drama and long stretches of pure tedium, rather like life itself. But at least it would reflect the real-life baking experience.
And what fun it would be: a 48-hour event-in-a-tent, perfect TV to dip in and out of. Over breakfast, say, we could watch them arrive and receive their first challenge. Then we could tune out for a while, maybe go and do a bit of shopping.
And then we could come home, switch the TV back on and, say, check up on how Ruby’s doughnuts are doing.
Elsewhere tonight, IMAGINE – BECOMING CARY GRANT(BBC1, 10.45pm) sheds remarkable new light on the life of the Hollywood legend, born in 1904 to a working-class family in Bristol and christened Archibald Leach.
Extracts from his unpublished memoirs, read by Jonathan Pryce, reveal how this seemingly selfassured performer was a very different man off camera, a traumatic childhood having left him plagued by self-doubt.
Grant writes of his parents’ troubled marriage and of how he came home from school one day to find his mother had left home without explanation. “There was a void in my life,” he recalls, “a sadness of spirit that affected everything I did. I always felt my mother rejected me.” Earlier in EASTENDERS (BBC1, 7.30pm) we find frantic mum-to-be Hayley, her waters having broken, still at the wheel of the Slater cab, desperately trying to get to Walford General before the baby arrives. But it soon becomes painfully clear she’s not going to make it. Elsewhere, will anyone twig why Keegan is acting so shiftily?