The Great British Bake Off showrunner knows you didn’t like that last season as much
Many fans of the sweet baking competition have started to sour on the comfort watch in recent years
Aux News Bake
If you weren’t so sweet on the last season of Great British Bake Off—or Great British Baking Show, as it’s called in the U.S.—you’re not alone. Love Productions head and executive producer Richard McKerrow recently opened up about the criticism the baking competition received for its 2022 installment.
“I’d be the first to hold up our hands and say that I feel that the last series was not our strongest,” McKerrow tells The Media Podcast (via Deadline). “We had two series which we had to film during COVID, the team here just went to enormous effort and enormous sacrifice to get that filming done in a bubble. We’re having lots of conversations, I think you have to do that with a series that has been going to season 14.”
Of course, this has been a long time coming for some viewers. After seven seasons, Great British Bake Off parted ways with the BBC after the 2016 competition, instead broadcasting on Channel 4 in the U.K. The change meant losing judge Mary Berry and hosts Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins, who guided much of the show’s tone. Moving forward, only judge Paul Hollywood remained from the old guard.
“When we left the BBC, the outcry was such that it makes you think, ‘Bake Off belongs to the people, it doesn’t belong to Love Productions,’” the chief executive adds. “So you have to take very, very, very good care of it, so when people are criticizing either the challenges have become too complicated or whatever, you know, that’s something we take seriously and we try to do something about it.”
By “or whatever,” McKerrow presumably means the numerous objections to season 13's Mexican-themed episode, which involved hosts Matt Lucas and Noel Fielding donning deeply ill-advised stereotypical costumes to introduce a taco challenge. It followed a 2020 installment that was similarly dubiously dedicated to Japanese cuisine.
McKerrow also teased that Great British Bake Off is gearing up to film its next season starting in April and that a replacement for departing host Lucas will be confirmed in the coming weeks. Only time will tell if the new and improved recipe comes out with a soggy bottom.
19 Comments
For me it wasn’t the cultural insensitivity of the costumes, it was 1) the lack of actual research into Mexican baking/pastry, which goes deeper than tortillas and conchas, and 2) the technical challenge being a cooking challenge. The topping proportions on those tacos were nuts, too.I think shaking up the judges lineup would be good, specifically Paul. He’s not as tough as he used to be but the meme of how tough he is is so played out. It also feels like the casting and judging is too mercenary; the same few types of people get cast every season, and you can easily pick out the pure amateurs who will flame out immediately, the kindly old-timer who will Peter our midway through, the hot people who get a free pass week after week to do just okay, and then the absolute ringer whose competition it is to lose. More and more often you can tell someone should’ve gone home but was kept on because their overall track record or their ability to hold the camera.Simplify the challenges a bit, cast more weirdos, and put in a new judge who will provide the drama/stakes. Otherwise, just let people be nice and bake.
He’s not as tough as he used to beWhat, you don’t think like 6 bakers per episode DESERVE that handshake?
LOL, making them use Diane Kennedy’s fiddly tortilla recipe was hilarious as well. Paul supposedly went to Mexico as well, but even resort tacos bear no resemblance to whatever he was asking for.
These are “tortillas”. Tortillas deliciosas.https://mobile.twitter.com/karl_delo/status/1610368925266485248/mediaViewer?currentTweet=1610368925266485248¤tTweetUser=karl_delo
Is she meant to sound like Siri?
The best part of that challenge was Paul repeatedly confusing the words “taco” and “tortilla.” Really did your research there, buddy.
There are so many delicious Mexican pastries, it’s a fucking crime to have the technical be tacos. Plus, you can’t make tres leches cake without letting it soak up the milk overnight (or at least a good long while). That’s why the cakes were dry, Paul, you ignorant shit! Even without the cheesy jokes and sombreros, the episode would have been a travesty. (And while I’m on a rant: egg rolls are not a pastries!)The early eps would occasionally have an educational section about food. They should something similar now, or at least bring on an expert. Paul spending a holiday in Mexico does not count.
The costumes did look like they were from Party City (or whatever the British equivalent is) which made me roll my eyes, but yeah, I agree those issues were more egregious.
The finalists really were producing very mediocre results. I wonder if this was from poor casting, or if the time constraints are becoming more challenging. Maybe they could’ve extended bake times as the season went on since contestants were presenting slop in the allotted times. Perhaps, Britain just ran out of competent amateur bakers to cast.
I think overall the quality of the bakers has improved; you can tell most of the contestants have heavily planned and tested all their recipes, and thus the winner is usually better at details and time management than the rest of the bakers. It seems like the challenges have been getting tougher and the time constraints tighter.
I think the show is just setting them up to fail on technicals for the drama by cutting the time too much. they had one in like the semis/finals where the judges were saying how screwed the bakers would be if they didn’t use a certain gelatin- only 1 baker used the wrong gelatin but all the bakes failed anyway because they still didn’t have enough time to set. if everybody’s wrong that late in the competition it’s just a bad challenge.
“By “or whatever,” McKerrow presumably means the numerous objections to season 13’s Mexican-themed episode, which involved hosts Matt Lucas and Noel Fielding donning deeply ill-advised stereotypical costumes to introduce a taco challenge.”
Why presume what he means when he SAID what he means.Which part of “people are criticizing either the challenges have become too complicated” did you think meant “people didn’t like the costumes”?
It’s kinda in the show’s DNA to flub a country-specific theme of the week, so the Mexican week was pretty much what you’d expect by this point, but time and time and time again this past season the time constraints ruined the challenges. If Paul is telling every contestant that their dough didn’t proof long enough or gelatin didn’t set long enough, that’s on the producers, not the contestants.
Remember when Giuseppe won German Week by making a panettone.. Remember Japan Week that didn’t have Japanese soufflé pancakes.. Pepperidge Farm remembers.
I haven’t done this season yet, does it at least have a chocolate challenge on the hottest day of the year so that everybody can completely fuck it up and the entire episode can be worthless?
We can only hope.
I’ve never quite understood the apparent moral division some see between eating a culture’s food and wearing a culture’s clothing. Why is one appropriation and the other is hip and sexy?
If I could hazard a guess, I think it’s that each moves through the world and different cultures differently. Food’s a lot easier to share and pass on, and as people learn of recipes those get changed and shared even more. A recipe requires research and proper ingredients/techniques to get right, so there’s a bit more meeting that other culture halfway.Clothing is a little more rigid, especially traditional garb which usually retains some ceremonial purpose or deeper cultural meaning/context. I bet a fashion historian *could* trace the appropriation of certain styles or certain clothing conventions having roots in specific cultures. There’s also the reductiveness of dressing how you think people somewhere dress; people don’t really wear colorful serapes and sombreros in 21st century Mexico, so the fact that they’re reducing the culture to that is pretty narrow-minded and belies a reliance on stereotypes. It’d kinda be like hosting someone from Mexico and cooking them tacos for every meal, every day.Though I will say a few years back in Portland to white ladies opened a “traditional taco” cart and got roasted hardcore for having stolen a specific recipe that could be easily traced back to a village they vacationed in. So food can still be a sensitive topic.
When the bald man showed up, I lost interest.