You may as well spell D.O.O.M.E.D in sultanas on Hollywood’s soggy bottom

AS every baker worth their pinch of salt knows, there is no point in crying over spilt milk or weeping because your cream has curdled. The deal has been done. The cake of cupidity has been iced and sliced, the scones dusted with powdered bullion. Now, there is no going back.

After this current series, The Great British Bake Off is leaving the cosy embrace of the BBC for the mercantile clutches of Channel 4. Protracted negotiations between the BBC and Love Productions, the company which makes the programme, collapsed following a row over money.

The Corporation reportedly refused to pay £25million a year to keep it, despite the fact that it is now the biggest television show in Britain with more than 13million tuning in to watch amateur baker Nadiya Hussain triumph in last year’s finale - and more than 11million watching the current series every Wednesday evening.

Perhaps the BBC are simply too bent on dishing out grotesque, million-pound payments to departing executives or cramming millions more into the bank accounts of pampered, overpaid Beeb favourites such as Gary Lineker and Chris Evans to realise just what they have done. Which is to sign the death warrant for the most popular programme on the box.

You might as well spell out the word D.O.O.M.E.D in sultanas across judge Paul Hollywood’s soggy bottom and you might as well hang up your apron and cry. For, like a lovely, fluffy duckie being plucked from a tranquil village pond and tossed into the roaring maw of some white water rapids, The Great British Bake Off simply cannot survive the awful journey from the premier channel of our glorious public service broadcaster to the trashy backwaters of a niche commercial station.

Let us not forget that C4 are the guilty party who launched Big Brother on an unsuspecting nation, then brought us programmes such as the explicit Sex Box, the dim-witted reality show Made In Chelsea and the prurient Naked Attraction, a pimple-bottomed nude dating fiesta shown over the summer which was widely – and rightly – regarded as the worst thing ever shown on UK television.

The thing is, from its linen aprons to its jaunty bunting, the Great British Bake Off is the quintessential BBC show. Gentle, well-mannered and irrefutably middleclass, it sits foursquare on that snug, Middle Britain landscape along with the Archers, ice and a slice, galoshes, whoopsadaisy, pork pie picnics, wisteria around the front door and vicars accepting more tea and another biscuit, don’t mind if I do.

LIKE Shangri-La and Brigadoon, this rosy vision of our national lifestyle might not really exist, but perhaps that’s why GBBO’s nostalgic world of sugared sponge cake and warm custard has proved such a hit and a comfort.

We need to believe in the buttery wistfulness of it all.

Of course, a huge part of the show’s great charm is its gentle pace; that stately weekly waltz through the signature bake, followed by the technical challenge and then into the sugar spun drama of the showstopper round where contestants show off their most ambitious creations.

Well, the constraints of advertising mean that we can wave goodbye to that pleasing structure forever. A cliffhanger will surely be required every ten or fifteen minutes to lead into the ad break, followed by a jolting recap of events when we are back in the tent again. Commercial television dumbs down and flattens the atmosphere, it just can’t help itself.

The move must also signal a blizzard of adverts for icing sugar and kitchen gadgets and overpriced cake mixes, not to mention distracting product placement like you won’t believe. It will likely make the complaints about the prominence of the Smeg fridges in 2012’s series three – the BBC had to apologise after the Smeg logo was shown 37 times in one episode – look like an accidental flash when the cameras panned. The pleasing virtue of mystery flours in unmarked jars will doubtless be gone forever.

In the brash world of ratings chasing commercial television, even the bakers themselves must change. No one will be allowed to be sweet, low key, just a bit batty or troubled by pastry.

In time honoured tradition, they must be turned into screen-grab exaggerations of themselves, pimped-up contestants with sob stories and dying relatives who were briefly revived by their special recipe gingerbread and iced buns. It means the loss of innocence. It means turning The Great British Bake Off into the Eggs Factor, a fate from which it will never recover.

And what about the hosts? There is no guarantee that judges Mary Berry – who is already looking decidedly sniffy – and Paul Hollywood will follow the show to C4. Perhaps they hate change even more than their fans.

Mary has been doing the same thing since the 1960s, only now with better teeth and a nicer line in flowery blazers. Paul tried to change by launching himself in America, then ruined it all by having an affair with a sexy co-presenter that nearly ended his career – and his marriage.

Last night presenters Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc confirmed they will step down as the show’s hosts when it moves to C4, telling fans: ‘We’re not going with the dough’. Certainly, they are right to fret about what the future holds.

For commercial television is where successful BBC shows and popular BBC personalities go to die.

That transition almost never works, for there is always some inexplicable diminution of talent, some reason they fail to sparkle in the brash new frame.

Last year, BBC Business Affairs editor Robert Peston left the BBC for a glittering new job as political editor and talk show host for ITV. Despite being inflated with hot air like any good souffle, Peston has sunk almost without trace, taking his under-whipped eggs with him.

IT is a pattern that has been repeated throughout broadcasting history, when successful shows are poached – and then fried by waning ratings. Remember Trinny and Susannah?

Their fashion show What Not To Wear was a big hit for the BBC, but after five years they defected to ITV in 2006 for a £1.2million initial contract.

Yet the pair never repeated their earlier success and were last seen doing online shows and makeover tours in Poland.

Even Morecambe and Wise stumbled when they left their 20million-plus audiences at the BBC for Thames Television in 1978, while it seems unlikely that Jeremy Clarkson and co will emulate their huge BBC Top Gear success on their new show for online broadcaster Amazon.

Yes, the money is tempting, but does oblivion beckon?

As everyone else seems to have made fortunes out of GBBO – including many of the contestants themselves – one can understand why Love Productions wanted to cash in on their golden goose.

After all, with the record-breaking success of the last series, rising figures this year and the slightly extravagant lionisation of winner Nadiya – she now has her own show on BBC, The Chronicles Of Nadiya – perhaps we are reaching peak cake?

The day when the show explodes in its own overheated oven, like an unpricked potato, cannot be far off. Yet I can’t help but feel that Love has made a terrible mistake.

After all, it was the BBC who took a huge chance on the Bake Off, who left it to rise and prove itself after everyone had turned it down and the first series in 2010 was met with disinterest and derision.

Not every broadcaster would have done that and then persisted.

It is easy to forget now those punishing early reviews. The Telegraph called it ‘a budget X Factor for diabetics’ and ‘moronically patronising’, The Guardian decided that ‘once you’ve seen one person cream butter and sugar together, haven’t you seen them all?’, while the Sun dubbed it ‘ The Great British Eff Off’.

Charming. Yet the GBBO confounded all the sceptics and rose to become the best loved family show of the last decade and beyond. Now that is all over. It will never, ever be the same again and it is useless trying to pretend that it will.

I’d like to say let’s circle the wagon wheels and fight it out, but it is too late – much too late – for that.