Preening Paul’s so cocky, we may just lose our appetite for Bake Off
Paul Hollywood was at his most thoroughly dislikeable during Bread week on The Great British Bake Off (BBC1). ‘ It’s like wallpaper paste,’ he snarled at poor Benjamina, dismissing her undercooked dough. ‘you’re making a right pig’s ear of that,’ he barked, rounding on Michael.
Convinced that he was more talented and knowledgable than any baker since flour first met yeast, Paul was literally throwing his weight about — leaning across counters in the marquee to intimidate contestants and puffing out his chest more than ever as he hooked his fingers into his belt.
when a naturally arrogant man is especially pleased with himself, his cocky swagger takes on an ugly edge. He thinks he’s untouchable — everyone else reckons he’s plain unpleasant.
He was patronising to Candice: ‘I’m not gonna eat it,’ he said, eyeing her plaited loaf. ‘It’s nothing to be embarrassed about.’
and he bullied Tom, telling him: ‘when you fail, you fail catastrophically,’ before the unlucky fellow had even made his dough.
To make the point that he knew more about bread than all the amateurs combined, he set them the task in the technical round of making dampfnudel, a sort of steamed dumpling from Germany.
Never mind that you’d have to be either Bavarian or starving before you ate it, Paul was confident that his ability to cook these pallid puffballs made him a superior human being. awarding first prize, he smirked: ‘The winner was the one I thought was closest to mine — still a million miles away.’
The worst of this was how he elbowed fellow judge Mary Berry aside. His opinions overpowered anything she had to say, as well as drowning out presenter Mel Giedroyc.
Sue Perkins obviously didn’t want anything to do with him — she rolled her eyes and muttered, ‘oh God,’ at one of his early displays, and after that they barely appeared in the same frame.
all this macho pride spoiled the show in a couple of ways. For one thing, it’s not much fun to watch a preening chauvinist shout his own praises, particularly on a programme that’s supposed to be about lighthearted rivalry and shared fun. For another, it spoils our confidence in Paul himself.
For Bake off to work, we need to believe that the judges are practically perfect in the kitchen. That’s why we love Mary’s kindly criticisms — they come from her great experience. But nobody can stand a braggart. The louder Paul blows his trumpet, the more we’ll wish he’d leave the tent.
For sheer nastiness, though, there was no beating an illegal immigrant who called himself Romi, in Undercover: Nailing The Fraudsters (C5). He boasted how he was earning £800 a week by staging car crashes for insurance scams.
Romi reckoned that, since no one was offering him free food and lodging, he was entitled to make money any way he could, no matter whom he hurt. He targeted young women driving alone and elderly people, since they were the easiest to intimidate.
Journalist Paul Connolly did a superb job of goading Romi’s ego, to make him talk more. He neither flattered nor challenged him, but applied just the right amount of needle to make the nervous young migrant, who claimed to be from India, feel the need to justify himself. By the end of the interview, Romi had climbed into the cameracar and was pointing out the sites of his most successful ‘accidents’. He chose roundabouts because drivers were often distracted or confused — the best targets would be on their phones.
If he had several passengers with him, all claiming for injuries, one crash could net Romi’s gang bosses £15,000 in fake personal injury claims, he said.
He was dismissive of the damage he did to the lives of a dozen or more people every week: after one of his crashes on the M25, the air ambulance had to be called out for a seriously injured victim.
‘lots of blood . . . I don’t care,’ he said. we can only hope this repulsive idiot has handed the police enough evidence to get him found, jailed and then deported.