Blood, tears and salt in the wound
The Great British Bake Off
BBC2, Tuesday
Is Mary Berry the Better Together campaign’s secret weapon? As she and Paul Hollywood pitched their tent for the fourth series of Bake Off, the BBC announcer ranked its return alongside the Olympics, Andy Murray’s Wimbledon win and Mo Farah’s double-double as a reason to be proud to be British. Why not throw in the relief of Mafeking while you’re there?
The intro may have had Alex Salmond choking on his Dundee cake, but the arrival of a fresh batch of bakers was cause for celebration.
An idea that sounds more like the programme of events for a 19th-Century travelling circus (we’re going to put 13 people in a tent in a field and get them to bake cakes and bread for a bloke who has the ability to turn people to jelly with his stare and a sweet old lady whose tongue turns to acid at the taste of a dry sponge) becomes riveting viewing because you start to get to know the competitors over the weeks and have a vested interest in who wins.
And if that doesn’t get you rolling up to its door, there’s always the irresistible allure of watching the clowns who shouldn’t be in the competition fail miserably in the early rounds.
To satisfy that appetite, week one had Toby, a man who was to cake making what Katie Price is to celebrities who ask for stricter privacy laws.
Toby (pictured right) described his demeanour at the start as “not at all calm” so presenting him with a worktop full of sharp utensils should have raised a Health & Safety concern.
By the state of his fingers at the programme’s end his elimination from the competition could accurately be described as “death by a thousand cuts”.
In the technical challenge he put salt in the mixture instead of sugar but still served it up to the judges. Paul has taken a lot of heat over an alleged affair that caused the break-up of his marriage but he was a true gent after tucking into Toby’s travesty, grabbing the fork out of Mary’s hand and telling her not to eat it.
“I’m going to become an anti-cake eating monk,” a broken and bleeding Toby told us.
Or perhaps a campaigner for the Yes vote?