Yes, it’s cosy, safe, and mostly middle class, but one of the joys of Bake Off is the competitive spirit – everyone just wants to win. And the Channel 4 team are just getting into their stride
Can there be anything more delightful than a giant penis rendered in pink royal icing? Hours later, I’m still laughing to myself about it. “What are you holding?” Kim-Joy asks fellow baker Dan. “A baby,” says the stay-at-home dad, referring to the showstopper tableau of almond sugar cookie that supposedly depicts him carefully cradling his first child. It doesn’t look like a baby. “It looks like …” says Paul Hollywood, with a smirk, when Dan brings the baked portrait up to be judged. Go on, say penis. “A massive prawn.”
The Great British Bake Off (Channel 4, 8pm) is back, and it is still a joy. Now in its ninth series, and the second in its new Channel 4 home, it shows no sign of getting stale. Aside from a few nods to evolving trends – there will be a vegan week, the makers announced – it is unchanged. Because why change a recipe as good as this? New judge Prue Leith, her confidence grown – despite a good joke at the start of the show about her gaffe last year when she tweeted the name of the winner ahead of the final – has proved to be a great successor to Mary Berry. She is tarter, to Berry’s icing-sugar sweetness. The presenters, Sandi Toksvig (enough of an anarchic edge to stop her going full head girl) and Noel Fielding (kind-natured, with a new Elvis/Shakin’ Stevens haircut) are endearing and more assured this year. Hollywood, the only survivor from the original, seems to have weathered the lingering feel over the last series that he was being grabby by staying with the show. Sun and birdsong drench the famous tent (“Like, the actual tent,” says Briony, from Bristol, and one of my favourites): the producers continue to resist updating the pastel fantasy farmhouse kitchen decor, and one or both of the judges will turn their nose up at any inclusion of rosewater. It is all comfortingly familiar.
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