Now that Bake Off is in its 16th series, on its third TV channel, and has baked and punned everything under the bun as you might say, I fully expected that its latest run would confirm that this televisual confection had, finally, gone stale. Indeed, I’ve said as much a few times over the past few years, tiring of the rigid format, as unchanging in its liturgy as the Roman Catholic Mass or the state opening of parliament, and not much more exciting.
How wrong! The show has risen to the occasion like a rampant soufflé when I, certainly, least expected it, and on the evidence of this first episode, I can see why it’s happened. The unchanged set of presenters and judges – Alison Hammond, Noel Fielding, Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith – are all very well, but they are, if not the icing on the cake, not the tastiest bits. The essential ingredient of any show such as this is its contestants, and this time the producers have excelled themselves. This diverse group would make Nigel Farage choke on his fruitcake. Leighton, a queer Welshman, likes to play with traditional Welsh/British and American flavours. Pui Man, born in Hong Kong, is a perfectionist when it comes to the design of her bakes. And Jessika, a drag king whose act is apparently quite “explicit”, also loves to push boundaries with her cookery creations.
