Beneath a blazing sun, before an immense Berkshire country house, stands a plump white tent strung with crisp bunting. Within, a handful of bakers are furiously beating sugar, flour and eggs, surrounded by fridges in pastel hues. Outside, an elderly terrier lollops beneath an ancient beech tree. The land of The Great British Bake Off is as comforting and familiar, as green and pleasant, as they come.
And then the idyll breaks. Noel Fielding wafts across the luminous lawn, a gangly tangle of gold boots, drainpipes and black locks. Sandi Toksvig, Fielding’s co-presenter, emerges from her dressing-room trailer, its entrance dotted with small gnome figures. And there’s Prue Leith, billowing over to a camera, hair on end. At which point, someone might as well have daubed pictures of Mel Giedroyc, Sue Perkins and Mary Berry onto the marquee’s side, so large is the elephant in the tent.
Even if you were living under a muffin tin last autumn, the din from the Bake Off hysteria will have reached you. So attached are we to this slice of Arcadia that the announcement that the show was moving from its 8pm slot on BBC1 to Channel 4 quickly became the nation’s most burning issue. Sorry, Brexit who?
After seven series, Bake Off had become the BBC’s prized diamond, pulling in record-breaking viewing figures of up to 15m. But the BBC insisted on classifying the show as “factual” rather than “entertainment”, which meant they couldn’t pay the production company — and therefore its presenters — what its colossal TV hit deserved. When Channel 4 offered a reported £75m for three series (considerably more than the £15m the BBC is believed to have offered), Love Productions jumped ship.
Only the talent didn’t follow. Bake Off’s beloved presenters, Mel and Sue, quickly announced they wouldn’t be “going with the dough”. Berry also told Love Productions where to shove it, citing loyalty to the BBC. It was only her blue-eyed co-judge, Hollywood, who chose to stay put. In the eyes of his outraged detractors, he might as well have taken a blowtorch to Berry’s victoria sponge.
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BAKE OFF BY NUMBERS
Ten months later, the icing has settled. Paul and Mary has become Paul and Leith, which has a better ring to it, and Mel and Sue have been replaced by another waggish and cacklesome duo, Fielding and Toksvig. To make up for ad breaks, the show will be 75 minutes long; it’s not yet decided what time it will be transmitted, but children’s bedtimes must be a consideration. Other than this, Love Productions insists, nothing has changed. The format, the tent, the weather, the good-naturedness, the “On your marks, get set, bake” opener, the eggs, the chocolate, the essences, are all exactly as they were.
The question is, does this new foursome have the chemistry for the most successful modern TV series to carry on rising like an expertly whipped soufflé?
I visit the set in late June, on the hottest day of the year, and filming is in its early stages. I sit down with Paul Hollywood, Leith, Fielding and Toksvig in a hefty, high-ceilinged room of Welford Park, the stately home whose grounds have hosted the Bake Off set for the previous four series. A fan whirrs noisily beside a table heaving with chocolate bars. Outside, a former Gurkha patrols a footpath and two security guards with binoculars are trying to escape the sun. How are you all getting along, I ask casually, as Leith puts away her laptop.
“The relationship started off passionate, and now it’s gone cold,” Fielding chortles from deep within a fusty sofa.
“Yes, there was a lot of lust at the beginning,” Toksvig nods, deadpan.
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And for the next 30 seconds, the pair can’t stop tittering, so I turn to Hollywood, who is disconcertingly shuffling a pack of cards. What has he been doing to get to know his new friends?
The usual, he says, dinner and beers down the pub after filming. And they’ve been reading each other’s books, he says.
“I’m reading a novel by Sandi about the Boer War that is simply marvellous,” says Leith, opening her eyes emphatically when she reaches “marvellous”.
“And I’ve just got a book of Noel’s, actually,” says Hollywood. Only he can’t remember its title.
“It’s a book of my art,” Fielding says softly.
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“Brilliant,” Hollywood quips.
“It’s OK for you Paul, it’s pictures,” Leith chips in, which prompts more guffaws.
In all the previous Bake Off series, the permatanned Hollywood was the star who came in for the most delicious mockings. Evidently nothing’s changed — though Hollywood is quick to point out that he gives Fielding as good as he gets. What do they wind each other up about?
“Mainly how different our skin tones are: I’m alive, and he’s not.”
“I sleep in a coffin, he sleeps in a bed,” nods Fielding, who on closer inspection is decidedly the whitest man I’ve seen. He eventually stops cackling to reflect a little harder. “We do all get on, which is odd, as you couldn’t have put more unlikely people together.”
“Yes, it’s a dysfunctional family, but it works,” says Hollywood.
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Measured on laughs per second, that is clearly the case. They’re a hoot to interview, finishing off each other’s thoughts, launching into amusing and detailed anecdotes of evenings in the pub, throwing in sharp gags with the ease of people who have spent many long hours together.
Famously, though, Hollywood was very close to his previous Bake Off family. Berry would even offer to do his ironing after they’d had dinner together. Mel and Sue, too, had a soft spot for the cocky master baker. He says he still speaks to them all and bats away the question by claiming he’d “miss them even if they were on Bake Off”, since he didn’t see them at other times of the year outside of filming.
It’s nine months since Hollywood was bashed, in an especially nasty fashion, for staying with Bake Off and he still seems baffled by the response. In his eyes, all he did was remain loyal to the programme that had plucked him from obscurity after his bakery business had dissolved with debts, and thereby launched his stonking career. “Bake Off is where I belong. They gave me an opportunity in 2009 and I grabbed at it with both hands. I love Bake Off, it’s where my home is,” he explains, fixing me with an intense stare.
Hollywood is believed to have been paid, on average, less than £70,000 for each of the seven series he did for the BBC. Even if his pay did rise in recent series, it still didn’t put him anywhere near the BBC’s big earners such as Chris Evans, who last month was revealed to earn more than £2.2m. But the moolah, Hollywood claims, was not a factor. “You don’t get money for telly, you get money selling books. Money wasn’t the issue. I just want my job, I love it.” He is not openly bitter, but I’m pretty certain his mission is to make what he terms “the next chapter” of Bake Off even more honkingly successful than the first.
Of all the new appointments, Fielding’s was the least obvious. He made his name as part of the comedy act the Mighty Boosh, whose weird, psychedelic, surreal series, which ran late night on BBC2 in the mid-Noughties, was everything that mainstream Bake Off is not. His solo stand-up is equally absurdist and esoteric. He has previously admitted to snorting all kinds of things. He likes to wear drag. He can’t bake. But proving just how far the Bake Off tentacles reach, he has, he says, been obsessed with the show since series one, and would often watch it and think to himself that Mel, a friend, had the best job. “It’s the ultimate float TV. You chill out, have a cup of tea, try some buns … It’s not stressful.”
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Critics have suggested that Fielding would be asked to rein it in. Actually, he says he is being encouraged to be himself. “Though I haven’t come in and tried to do what I do on my own shows. Bake Off has a very specific tone and I respect that. You have to come in and not knock the boat.”
And, for all his sweary wildness, he comes across as the most warm-hearted of the pack. He chatters, often at length, about how brilliant the bakers are, how impressed he is by their creations, and openly declares that he can’t help develop favourites.
Waiflike, he doesn’t strike me as a man partial to cake. And he hasn’t, it turns out, been eating many buns. “Sugar is a powerful thing, I get more work when I’m thinner. So I can’t put on weight. No one likes a tubby goth, is what I’m saying,” he laughs, looking towards Hollywood, who shrugs.
Toksvig, the Danish-British presenter of QI, is a more natural Bake Off fit. For a start, she can bake — the Danes know a thing or two about pastry — and she has the safe humour required of a family-show presenter.
“Sandi had never seen Bake Off,” Fielding says impishly.
“Shush,” she retorts.
“You lied to me, you said you’d seen every one,” says Hollywood with mock outrage. Toksvig remains silent.
What was your favourite episode, I ask.
“The one where they make cake? I don’t watch a lot of television, I’m more of a reader,” she laughs, throwing her hands up. In any case, she didn’t think it was a good idea to watch back through the series because “you wouldn’t want to be trying to emulate someone else’s brilliance”. Indeed, watching Matt Le Blanc and Chris Evans being shoved into cardboard Top Gear cutouts of Richard Hammond and Jeremy Clarkson does not make for compelling television.
In many respects, Channel 4 is banking on the show’s tried-and-tested format being its key ingredient, rather than its personalities. The fact that it thrives in 25 countries suggests they are onto something. “Format is king,” Hollywood says. No one, however, expects Channel 4 to come close to the BBC’s record-breaking viewing figures: where 15m tuned in to see Candice Brown win last year. Channel 4’s most popular show, Gogglebox, gets 5m at most.
How this slightly cheesy, joyfully warm, village fete of a TV series became the country’s most successful show is still being mulled over. For Leith, Bake Off’s attraction is straightforward. “People love competition and everyone loves cake,” she explains, in her rather clipped tone. “Even if you don’t allow yourself to eat much cake, you still like drooling over it … and it’s not out to humiliate anyone.”
The former Great British Menu judge has perhaps the hardest role, stepping into national treasure Berry’s vivid judging pumps. Known for brazenly speaking her mind, she is sharp, witty and most definitely not a soft touch. Her catchphrase is “it’s not worth the calories” — though, despite being a healthy-food campaigner, she doesn’t see an issue with obese Britain being fed more cake. “I really thought twice about accepting Bake Off. I’ve spent my life campaigning about children learning to cook and healthy meals in schools, but I reasoned that, actually, baking is the best way to get people into general cooking. And that’s what we need the nation to do: to get interested in the kitchen.”
I suggest that this might not be the most feminist view, that making cakes narrows women’s horizons rather than broadens them. She doesn’t buy it. In fact, it makes her “quite cross”. “That whole attitude,” she shakes her head. “You know, there was a high mistress at [the leading private school] St Paul’s for girls, and I said to her once that the girls should learn to cook. And she said, ‘Over my dead body. My girls are going to be brain surgeons and astrophysicists. I tell them never to do anything domestic.’ And I thought, what kind of life are they going to have? If they grow up with that idea, then they are going to be cut off from some of the great pleasures of life.”
If the show’s popularity is anything to go by, Leith is spot-on: watching bakers whip up gingerbread houses, milk buns and scones gives its viewers untold pleasures. And every year, the standards reach new heights. This year is no different. Blown away by previously unheard-of flavour pairings and clever concoctions, Hollywood has given out more handshakes than ever before.
It must, however, be tough for a show that has grown so big that a binned baked alaska can become an item on Newsnight, and whose contestants can go on to win book deals, TV shows and newspaper columns, to maintain its gentle appeal. Surely it attracts more cut-throat sorts? “No, it attracts good bakers. You can’t say, ‘I’m in it for the money.’ You’ve got to be a brilliant baker first,” Hollywood says fiercely.
“Bake Off stands out for its lack of gimmickry, emotional backstories and the sex factor. It’s the antithesis to Love Island
And an in-it-to-win-it attitude isn’t likely to get a baker very far. Bake Off’s currency is generosity of spirit and collaborative encouragement. It stands out for its lack of gimmickry, emotional backstories and sex factor, the antithesis to Love Island. Its best contestants will fall over a boiling saucepan of sugar to help each other out.
“It’s astonishing. They really are devoted to each other,” Leith says.
And then the electricity goes — stately homes, eh? — and we emerge from the porch to see the home’s owner tootling off under a sunhat to bottle-feed some lambs. The cameras stop rolling and flour-strewn bakers run out of the sweaty tent and tumble onto the grass, hugging each other and patting the terrier. For all the furore of last autumn, the happy magic still seems to be here in spades.
The Great British Bake Off is coming soon to Channel 4
Bake off glossary
Star baker
A coveted title handed out to one contestant at the end of each episode
Soggy bottom
Refers to the underside of disastrous pies and tarts. No laughing matter
“On your marks, get set, bake!”
In the vein of Mel and Sue, Fielding and Toksvig will yell this out at the start of each bake
“It’s not worth the calories”
You’ll be hearing it from Leith when she deeply unimpressed
Even bake
Hollywood and, formerly, Berry’s code for a near-perfect creation
Technical challenge
Bakers receive a very pared-down recipe, often missing key information. Probably the toughest task
Show-stopper
The final challenge of the week. Requires making an artful, extravagant and massively impressive creation. A tall order