The Great British Bake-Off breaks all the rules of reality shows.
The British baking competition features no raised voices or snippy asides. If the contestants have grand personal narratives of overcoming struggle, we don't hear about them. It seems like everyone is there to make friends.
Yet Bake-Off — known in the US, where Pillsbury owns the term "bake-off," as The Great British Baking Show — has become a national obsession in the United Kingdom. More than 13 million people, one-fifth of the British population, watched the most recent season finale. A spinoff, An Extra Slice, airs extra footage and interviews with the contestants who got eliminated that week. The Great British Baking Show is very self-consciously British, and in the weeks since the finale it's become an unlikely participant in a debate about British identity and immigration — arbitrating, in part, what it means to be British in the first place.
An American version of the show never caught on, but that's all right, because the British original is better anyway. And with one season on Netflix and another that just wrapped up its run on PBS, Americans are beginning to find out what all the fuss is about.
How does The Great British Baking Show work?
Most seasons start with 12 amateur bakers who compete to be crowned the best every week. This is part of what makes the stakes of Bake-Off very, very low. There's no prize money for the winner of the entire season, although most past winners have used it as a springboard to make baking their full-time job.
A typical episode consists of three challenges. The signature challenge gives bakers a specific task — such as a Swiss roll or thin Italian breadsticks — to design a recipe around. The technical challenge requires them to complete a difficult baking task, such as a chocolate soufflé, with only a bare-bones recipe. And the showstopper challenge makes them tackle a professional project: a wedding cake, a tower of eclairs, a tiered set of savory pies.
The Bake-Off contestants find out what the signature and showstopper challenges will be a few weeks before the show begins filming, so they can develop and practice their recipes at home; the technical challenge is always a surprise.
The final products are judged by Mary Berry, a prolific cookbook author, and Paul Hollywood, an artisan baker. Two British comedians, Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins, keep the competition moving along.
This doesn't seem very exciting. Aren't reality shows supposed to have unnecessary, unbelievable drama?
Of course there's drama! During the fourth episode of the UK's sixth season last year, the contestants made baked Alaska on the hottest day of the year. One contestant, Iain Watters, put his baked Alaska in the freezer to solidify some melted ice cream. Fellow contestant Diana Beard briefly took it out of the freezer. The ice cream melted! Watters got frustrated, threw his baked Alaska in the trash, and then had to present the trash bin to the judges! Watters was sent home!
This is, by far, the most dramatic thing that has ever happened on Bake-Off. The British press dubbed it "bingate." The Guardian alone published 11 separate articles about the debacle.
The show's second biggest controversy involved two contestants who accidentally swapped custard while preparing a trifle in season four. "Swapped custard," by the way, sounds a bit like the kind of double entendre — "soggy bottoms," "ladyfingers," "dough balls" — that the Bake-Off hosts love to giggle about.
The relative lack of interpersonal drama doesn't mean there's no tension. The Bake-Off challenges really are difficult, and contestants are expected to execute them very quickly. (I have made a wedding cake. It took me roughly as long to make the cake filling as contestants are expected to spend baking and assembling an entire elaborate dessert.)
The technical challenge is always a surprise, and it inevitably seems to be something that half the contestants claim they've never heard of before. After 15 minutes — in screen time, that is; it's about two hours in real life — of bitten nails and self-doubt, they turn out perfect pastry-wrapped pears or passable chocolate soufflés.
Generally, though, Bake-Off's producers seem to be working from a different playbook than the rest of television, one that doesn't include goading contestants into second-guessing or insulting each other. If a contestant starts having a meltdown, hosts Giedroyc and Perkins will stand next to them and swear or "put our coats over them" so that the footage can't be used, they told the Guardian in 2013.
Even the judges, who are exacting and sometimes harsh on the final product, don't provide running commentary during the baking process on whom they think is going to fail.
The whole thing is suffused with a spirit of generosity. If American TV contestants are expected to go in blustering about winning it all, Great British Bake-Off contenders always say they just hope they don't come in last. And if they do — well, "it’s possibly the last show on earth where in the end, it doesn’t matter who wins, as long as everyone gave it their best shot and had a laugh over a disastrous scrambled-egg chocolate tart or two," Laurie Penny wrote for the New Statesman. "Because ultimately, it’s just cake."
Why is it so popular?
Bake-Off's spirit of generosity is refreshing. Watching people do something they're mostly good at is fun. And the contestants are people you generally want to root for; they seem real in a way that most TV contenders don't. They sometimes have gray hair or bifocals or a body mass index over 19. Every season has a handful of men with super-masculine jobs — prison guard, builder, construction engineer — and, refreshingly, the fact that these men also bake is treated as perfectly normal. Even high-powered doctors and lawyers stress out about their éclairs, which can be oddly reassuring.
But there's also something deeper at work. Watching Bake-Off is the same kind of cathartic, ultimately comforting experience as reading a cozy mystery novel with a cup of hot chocolate. There might be some anxiety-inducing parts, but you know that in the end, it's all mostly going to work out.
Even if a contestant puts salt instead of sugar in your angel food cake — yes, this has happened — the judges can be harsh, but they're never cruel. Bake-Off appeals to the best parts of our nature: the parts that love dessert and hate vicarious embarrassment.
How British is The Great British Bake-Off?
It's not just Brits who love Bake-Off. The Bake-Off recipe has been successfully exported to 20 other countries. Sadly, it flopped in the US, perhaps because Pillsbury owns the term "bake-off" and so it was given the uninspiring name The American Baking Competition.
But there does seem to be something quintessentially British about the original. The show evokes what social scientist Michael Billig has called "banal nationalism" — the little, seemingly apolitical things that make up national identity. Banal nationalism in the US is "The Star-Spangled Banner" at a baseball game on a summer afternoon, or the presidential habit of tacking "God Bless America" onto the end of a major speech, or that Coke commercial where everybody sang "America the Beautiful" in different languages.
Bake-Off is saturated in traditional ideas of Britishness. The competition takes place in a giant event tent pitched on the grounds of a grand British house. The original inspiration for the show was the baking competition at village fetes, the British version of the county fair. The interior of the tent is festooned with tiny Union Jack pennants. There are lots of Liberty of London–esque floral prints.
As the Guardian's Charlotte Higgins wrote in a recent insightful essay about the symbolism and success of Bake-Off:
Bake Off is pure English pastoral… It is Miss Marple. It is the National Trust. It is the first tableau in Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics: a village cricket match played out in a green and pleasant land. It is the England that then prime minister John Major vowed would never vanish in a famous 1993 speech: "Long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and – as George Orwell said – ‘old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist’.
These signals mean that Bake-Off ends up as an arbiter not only of baking, but also of Britishness, at a time when Britain is increasingly anxious about immigration and national identity.
Wait, I thought this was a fun show about baking?
(This section is going to reveal the identity of the winner of the most recent season, which has not aired in the US, and maybe never will. If that really bothers you, you can just pretend the whole thing ended with the section above, but you'll never be able to talk about the Great Chocolate Mosque Controversy of 2015.)
Bake-Off's notion of Britishness is inclusive. Contestants with South Asian heritage usually create some recipes that include Indian, Pakistani, or Bangaldeshi flavors in a metaphor for cultural mingling that seems almost too on-the-nose: the curry-spiced savory pie as melting pot.
This year, the winner, Nadiya Hussain, was a British Muslim of Bengali heritage who wears a hijab. And the season that led to Hussain's triumph played out opposite vehement British opposition to allowing migrants and refugees, many of them Muslim, into the country.
The triumph of a British woman in a hijab brought out predictable online criticism that the show was being too "politically correct" — a Great British Hot-Take-Off, if you will. The peak was the ridiculous assertion that a white woman eliminated near the end would have stayed on if she'd built a "chocolate mosque" rather than a chocolate carousel. (Bakers' showstopper projects aren't judged on subject matter, though it's amusing to imagine what the judges would have said about a loaf of bread created in tribute to the World Cup–predicting Paul the Psychic Octopus during a fourth-season challenge if that were the case.)
The truth was that Hussain was both incredibly talented — she made a chocolate peacock and a sari-wrapped traditional British wedding cake, a symbol if there ever was one — and delightfully entertaining to watch. Her victory was emotional:
I’m never gonna put boundaries on myself ever again. I’m never gonna say I can’t do it. I’m never gonna say ‘maybe’. I’m never gonna say, ‘I don’t think I can.’ I can and I will.
The best indication of the importance Bake-Off has attained in Britain is that Hussain's victory was treated as a genuine milestone, and a victory for her declaration that she was British too: "Just because I’m not a stereotypical British person, it doesn’t mean I am not into bunting, cake, and tea. I’m as British as anyone else."