Great British Bake Off: This is television as metaphor for Britain’s anguished psyche

The pandemic truly must be over, because The Great British Bakeoff (Channel 4, Tuesday) has relocated to its pre-Covid marquee in bucolic Berkshire. Here, the show’s judges, Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith, are joined by its presenters, the comedians Matt Lucas and Noel Fielding, for another serving of baking and banter that comes with the lightest sprinkling of weekly elimination tension.

Really, it’s television as metaphor for the British psyche. Outside the tent, life is strange and ever-changing. Elizabeth is gone, Brexit is back, and the merry-go-round of British politics swings from farce to futility. But, inside, all is as it was: the sponges are squishy, the lemon drizzle drizzly, the marzipan reliably sweet and moreish. If only the real world were as straightforward.

The Star Wars-based opening skit features Luke Piewalker, Princess Layer Cake, Prue-bacca and Darth Baker. Can punning cause you to double over in physical, mental and existential agony? Bake Off has just answered in the affirmative

The received wisdom about Bake Off is that its move from the BBC to Channel 4, five years ago, was essentially seamless. But that’s not quite the case, as Lucas and Fielding have dialled up the wacky factor considerably. Certainly, veteran viewers may have found themselves pining for Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins, whom they replaced, during a terrible Star Wars-based opening skit featuring Luke Piewalker, Princess Layer Cake, Prue-bacca and Darth Baker. Can punning cause you to double over in physical, mental and existential agony? Bake Off has just answered in the affirmative.

There’s an Irish contestant this year, Rebecca “Rebs” Lightbody, from “Co Antrim”. Obviously, on Irish telly we’d know the townland from which she hailed, where she went to school and what her parents did. Alas, this is Channel 4, and such crucial details are omitted.

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A master’s student and former barista, Lightbody is the youngest contestant this year. And she does well in the show-stopper round, in which she makes a cake based on a rural Antrim house (with a spritzing of coconut rum to represent the Northern Ireland rain).

“It does remind me of a very rural cottage,” says Hollywood, who then comments approvingly on its piña-colada flavour. She falls short of Baker of the Week yet is never in danger of elimination.

That’s really that. The series is so beloved and so formulaic that it can run on autopilot. Which is sort of what it does in this first episode. Lucas and Fielding hover, terrible gags at the ready. Hollywood and Leith pivot between cheery and gimlet-eyed, as nature intended.

The contestants are thrilled simply to be there, inside the tent, where all things make sense and where the slings and arrows of everyday life are at a safe remove

And the contestants are thrilled simply to be there, inside the tent, where all things make sense and where the slings and arrows of everyday life are at a safe remove. Perhaps that’s why it makes for such addictive viewing. The comforting fiction that Bake Off invites us to buy into is that there is nothing in life that can’t be solved with cake and a Star Wars pun. That isn’t true. But, now more than ever, how deliciously that fantasy goes down.