RICHARD MADELEY MY VIEW

Bake Off is risking disaster by moving to Channel 4, says the presenter – and he should know

What was it someone once said about on-screen TV chemistry? ‘It’s not rocket science… it’s a bit more complicated than that.’ Now the flour dust has settled on the news the BBC has lost The Great British Bake Off to Channel 4, we can make some predictions about how it might all pan out.

I should know a little about how on-screen chemistry works – my wife Judy and I hosted ITV’s This Morning for 13 years and Channel 4’s Richard & Judy for seven – but actually, I don’t have a clue. The formula is that ephemeral. You can’t design or create it; it just happens. So when a programme has it, the channel concerned needs to nurture and protect it like a fragile orchid.

I’m astonished Ch4 agreed to pay £75m over three years for Bake Off without securing ‘the talent’ which had the on- screen chemistry. TGBBO has worked so brilliantly because of the relationship between hosts Mel and Sue and judges Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood. But I know from experience that even if all the stars had gone to Ch4, success would not be guaranteed.

In 2001 Judy and I left ITV for… yes, Ch4, when we swapped our mid-morning slot for an early evening one. We took our editor with us, our best producers, even our PA. We had over a decade of network success behind us, and we had our ‘chemistry’, didn’t we? It was a sure thing…

Nope. It was, to begin with, a near-total disaster. We just couldn’t get the show right. Ratings were, if not a catastrophe, not what Ch4 were paying us for. The critics piled in, saying how useless we were. But our ace in the hole was this: we were on live, five nights a week. It meant we could finetune the show, learn what worked and what didn’t. After three months we had a hit that ran for years.

Bake Off doesn’t have that luxury. The first series for Ch4 will have to be ‘in the can’ before transmission. If it doesn’t work for the viewers, there’ll be nothing to be done until the next series. And there’s only Paul from the original team. In my view, Bake Off has worked because Mel and Sue gently take the mickey – out of themselves, the judges and the show. The audience lets them, it has been ‘their’ show. But I think whoever takes over now won’t be allowed to do that. So they’ll have to do it straight and risk being boring.

Then there’s Mary, loyally staying with the Beeb. Bake Off without her? I’ll leave the last word to my daughter Chloe, an aficionado of the show: ‘It’ll be like Doctor Who without the Doctor.’ Richard’s psychological thriller The Night Book is out in paperback and on Kindle. He’ll be back on Radio 2’s Sunday brunch slot, and hosting Channel 5’s The Wright Stuff, later in the autumn.