Bake Off’s fawning over Russell Brand really takes the biscuit!
Russell Brand’s greatest talent is his ego. He is testimony to the power of selfdelusion over reality. On the face of it, he’s an abject mediocrity: a third-rate TV host and unfunny stand- up who, convinced of his own brilliance, blagged a lead role in a Hollywood movie, Get Him To The Greek (it was dire, and then some).
Marriage to pop star Katy Perry followed ( short- lived and acrimonious), as did a best-selling autobiography ( unreadably pretentious) and a moronic foray into politics (urging young people to boycott the 2015 election — I bet ed Miliband curses Brand’s name every day).
Yet he still preens as though he were a demi-god sent from Olympus. He might look like Charles Manson, with his long curls and greying beard, and sound like david Beckham reading a dictionary, but he certainly fooled Paul Hollywood and Prue leith on The Great Celebrity Bake Off (C4).
The first of five one- day challenges, with stars competing to raise money for stand up To Cancer, pitted Brand against a real a-list actor, John lithgow, as well as a genuinely funny comic, Jon richardson, and a woman who scooped a clutch of gold medals at the Paralympics, wheelchair racer ‘Hurricane’ Hannah Cockcroft.
she is a bona fide superhuman, unbeatable over any distance from 100 to 800 metres — combining usain Bolt’s speed with roger Bannister’s stamina. But the Bake Off gang barely stopped to say hello as they rushed to fawn over Brand.
For the showstopper round, the bakers made biscuits to commemorate their greatest performances. lithgow portrayed himself as Churchill in The Crown. Cockcroft made an Olympic racetrack.
Brand said the birth of his daughter was his own greatest achievement and arranged scraps of gingerbread to depict the scene. His biscuity self-portrait resembled the dalai lama, while his wife was reduced to crude gynaecology.
Crawling on their knees, Prue and Paul declared him ‘star baker’. Only co-host noel Fielding seemed not to be duped. But it was hard to take him seriously, because he’d dyed his hair blond, sideburns and all — so badly he looked like a seventies schoolgirl who’d gone for the david Cassidy look in her bedroom.
speaking of schoolgirl embarrassments, hurrah for the return of the delightfully funny Derry Girls (C4), a sitcom about growing up Catholic in northern Ireland during the Troubles.
The four teenage friends, with tag-along english cousin James, were sent on an outdoor adventure weekend with a group of Protestant children, to ‘forge friendships across the divide’.
Their parents were suspicious. erin (saoirse-Monica Jackson), who daydreams about going on The Wogan show to boast of how she single-handedly ended decades of violence, lost her temper: ‘We’re not doing this to get off with Protestant boys, Mammy, we’re doing it for peace!’
naturally, before the weekend degenerated into a fist-fight, erin and her friends were desperate to ‘ get off ’ with the terrified boys.
This is a comedy about how memory exaggerates childhood, so that all the nuns are monsters, while the mothers do nothing but trade paranoid gossip. erin’s little sister is not so much odd as feral. Maybe adolescence in ulster wasn’t quite like this — but that’s how it seems now.
snatches of songs from The undertones and The Cranberries heighten the sense that we’re looking through a kaleidoscope at the past.
‘she’s coming, the small angry penguin-woman!’ yells one boy as a nun approaches.
If you ever laughed at dave allen, try derry Girls.
BRAIN-TEASERS OF THE NIGHT: After one contestant reached the final question on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? (ITV), another effortlessly scooped £64,000. There seems no doubt about it — those questions are definitely easier this time round.