Hungry for more Bake Off banter
TED Danson is a good enough
reason to watch anything. I refer you to Cheers, The Good Place, Curb Your Enthusiasm...
At 73, he still has a magnetic Hollywood star quality, and he’s the main draw of Mr Mayor, which started on Sky Comedy on Friday – a political satire with potential.
He plays retired LA businessman Neil Bremer, who
ran for Mayor as a bit of a lark, and won. Now he strides through the corridors of City Hall with bright ideas, while his frantic team scramble to do damage control as he clashes against woke culture.
It’s an excellent premise, and Holly Hunter has fun playing a local activist. But this needs time if it’s
going to win votes.
THE alarming sight of Paul Hollywood in a pink vest, fringed jacket and cowboy boots with a mega-quiff wasn’t enough to put
me off the return of Bake Off.
Along with Prue Leith on keyboards, Matt Lucas on drums and Noel Fielding on guitar, the bonkers ‘performance’ (I use the term loosely) involved lyrics such as, “Don’t bake my tart, my flaky, pastry tart”.
Which only goes to show that C4’s The Great British Bake Off, now on series 12, can pretty much do whatever it bloody well likes and we’ll eat it all up faster than a plate of Jaffa Cakes.
The ultimate comfort food telly, the British bunting-clad tent is a place of joy and sugar where the worst thing that can happen is a cake collapsing. And it did.
The new batch of 12 bakers were the perfect mix. From vegan Freya who admitted that not using eggs is “a bit of a faff”, to Giuseppe – who compared the tent to the Sistine Chapel – and George, who enjoys feeding people “because that’s what great people do”.
It did not go unnoticed that retired midwife Maggie is Prue’s doppelganger. If she’s not wearing matching technicolour accessories by episode three, I’ll be sorely disappointed.
As Cake Week kicked off, Prue and Paul wanted 12 mini rolls with the perfect swirl. Eccentricity reigned as Matt sang The Flintstones in German for an unmoved Jurgen, while Noel reassured Tom he wouldn’t be the first to go (he was). Tom and Amanda made Black Forest rolls, before realising that Jurgen, who is from the Actual Black Forest, was doing the same. They didn’t have a hope. The technical challenge brought some brilliant baffled faces as everyone had to ask early favourite Maggie what a malt loaf was.
Finally, serving up inevitable catastrophe as series bait, the showstoppers had to defy gravity. It was odds-on that at least one cake would collapse, but we got lucky – it was two. Chigs’s chocolate fudge mug smashed to the floor and Amanda’s surf cake slumped sideways as if it had simply given up on life.
There were other close shaves – my nerves were shot as Rochica jumped up and
down next to her precarious hanging apple cake. And incredible creations like Giuseppe’s beanstalk and Crystelle’s bunch of flowers made for excellent telly.
That’s the beauty of this joyful, jam-filled show – from every sloppy mess right through to the handshakeworthy winners, it’s exactly the tonic the nation needs.