Grok My Enthusiasm (29)

By: M.R. Sauter
July 27, 2016

One in a weekly series of enthusiastic posts contributed by HILOBROW friends and regulars.

I started watching pirated episodes of The Great British Bake Off (distributed in the US under the name The Great British Baking Show) last winter as a low effort, low drama balm while I prepared for my comprehensive exams. I was reading on the history and theory of social movements. To paraphrase Terry Pratchett, it was a lot of peasants who didn’t want to be peasants anymore, and since they had pitchforks and the nobles had guns, they stopped being peasants really quickly. It was upsetting. I was upset. My partner was tired of my being upset about history and peasants, so took to plopping me on the couch with a cup of tea, a biscuit, a fuzzy blanket, and The Great British Bake Off at the end of the reading day.

Reader, this show is a fluffy, sugary, springy delight. It is the petit fours of competitive reality television: a charmingly crafted morsel, whose brightly colored, tea party simplicity elides the work that goes into its construction and the crazed social signaling in its presentation.

For me, the baking bits of The Great British Bake Off are secondary (though I know more now about different kinds of pastry dough and the history of pork pies than I ever thought possible or is perhaps strictly necessary). What is truly delightful is the way the show takes so seriously the work of Being British Through Baking and the subtle subversion of it. In terms of camp nationalism, The Great British Bake Off is the National Costume segment of Miss Universe, with full fat butter and caster sugar subbed in for sequins and feathers. When Mary Berry, the grandmotherly, stylish heart and soul of the show, compliments a baker’s “clearly defined layers,” the echoes of British classism reverberate through the competition tent, which is decked out like every fussily pastel tea shop you’ve ever seen and invariably situated on the grounds of this or that grand old estate. The competition occasionally breaks for lessons in British food history, when hosts Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc flirt shamelessly with charming experts on Victorian kitchen equipment or Elizabethan pastry or Quaker biscuits. The segments are bookended by shots of appallingly adorable animals: Hampshire sheep, songbirds, tufted ducks, squirrels (one squirrel in particular, but no spoilers! You’ll know it when you see it).

Unlike American reality TV, which spoonfeeds the audience a precrafted stream of interpersonal drama, the personal lives of the contestants, judges, and hosts are completely irrelevant to the competition, making them ripe for wild, wine-fueled speculation that makes the most out of every offhand comment or stray look. For those looking to get in on the fun of giggling madly at the secret meaning of fondant bears named Paul, Season Four particularly rewards this style of narratively involved viewership. And the baking scandals! Custards have been swiped, ice cream has been inadvertently melted. For chockablock drama, actual and imagined, Season Four wins the blue ribbon, but Season Six, on PBS now (though called “Season Three” on this side of the pond) has its share of nail biting moments.

The show’s contestant are cheerfully diverse in race, age, country and region of origin, and sexual orientation, a fact that has caused no small amount of teeth gnashing on the part of the Daily Mail and other right-wingers. But The Great British Bake Off is all at once cosmopolitan, campy, crafty, and kind in a way that American reality TV has no interest in being. Since its run-away success, the BBC has spun the format off into The Great British Sewing Bee and The Great Pottery Throw Down, along with roughly half a dozen baking-related spin-offs.

Even though I’m done reading histories of failed revolutions, The Great British Bake Off still cannot fail to delight me. Sue Perkins’s dreadful puns, Mary Berry’s flawless jackets and scarves, the cheerful villainy of judge Paul Hollywood, the weather of the English countryside, which has as much personality as any of them, and of course the incredible, never ending train of baked goods. In a television landscape that is, particularly now, dark and combative, the Bake Off tent is a sweet oasis where the biggest problem is whether your trifle is boozy enough for Mary Berry.

(My only spoiler: It could always be boozier.)

***

MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

Grok My Enthusiasm (29)

Categories

Tags