No Bake Off silliness — just lots of magnificent, delicious bread

Hi dden amid the 20st sacks of flour and bundles of firewood on Victorian Bakers (BBC2) was a statistic that might explain the British obesity crisis.

Working folk 180 years ago wolfed a whopping 6,500 calories a day. That’s around three times the recommended daily i ntake f or adults in the 21st century.

Most of what they ate was meat, potatoes, l umpen bread and lashings of butter, washed down with barrels of beer. And were they fat? not a bit of it.

Most Victorians, especially the children, were thin as twigs. The youngsters had to be, because they never knew when they were going to be sent up a chimney.

They stayed slim because they worked so hard. no lounging around in their bedrooms on the PlayStation, no long snoozes on the sofa and (i say this with a guilty heart) no hours in front of the telly.

The inference is obvious. We are programmed by history to eat much more than we need today, and the way to stay trim is to do 18 hours of physical labour, seven days a week.

The four bakers who signed up for this show looked exhausted by the time they had finished their first two batches. They were not celebs so, thankfully, we were spared tears and endless whingeing about how this was the hardest thing they had ever done etc.

instead, the participants were professionals, including the managing director of a major firm producing supermarket loaves and a chap whose High Street bakery had been in the family for generations.

They entered into the spirit of it in full Victorian costume: the men had even taken the trouble to grown mutton-chop sideburns. But they weren’t the real centre of attention — this show was all about the bread.

Bosses at BBC2, the original home of The Great British Bake Off, have realised that we’ll watch anything with bread in it. Viewers who once couldn’t tell a baguette from a brioche are now experts, able to assess the gluten content of any dough at a glance.

We don’t need saucy double entendres. We don’t even need, though he’ll never believe it, master baker Paul Hollywood.

All we want is the bread. i would never have said this in the pre-Bake Off era, but it was actually interesting to see how traditional ovens were heated from the inside by blazing firewood, with the ashes raked out before the loaves went in.

And there was satisfaction in seeing the bakers knead enormous slabs of dough, in troughs the size of a single bed, with yeast made from skimming the foam off beer.

nothing was wasted. even the leftover bran was fed to a family of contented pigs.

That would never work on Bake Off, of course. imagine the protests from the camera crew if t he r emains of all t hose delicious showstoppers and technical challenges went to the porkers.

The Victorian working man would make short work of the giant burger tested by chef Simon Rimmer on Tricks Of The Restaurant Trade (C4). Piled high with bacon and cheese, it weighed in at 1,500 calories — and that was without the trayful of chips and pint of milkshake.

Simon’s challenge was to eat the lot within 15 minutes. if he managed it, the meal was free. He failed, of course: restaurants don’t survive long by giving away food. Some trick. none of these pur- ported secrets amounted to much more than common sense. Simon revealed that head waiters will always find a good table for pretty young women — what a surprise!

And the house wine on any menu might taste rough, but the next bottle up the price list will be even nastier — that’s hardly a shock.

When a waiter encourages diners to ‘try the olives’ or says he can ‘recommend the steak’, he is deliberately tempting you to spend more money. Well, you didn’t think he was making conversation because he was lonely, did you?

This series makes the mistake of supposing we’ll watch anything to do with food, no matter how banal, and that isn’t strictly true. it is, however, the case with bread.