She’s poetry, is Nadiya Hussain. Poetry. Specifically, that bit about “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ / – that is all ye know on earth, / and all ye need to know.” Keats hadn’t met the 2015 Bake Off winner turned television cook and documentary presenter when he came up with this excellent insight. But if he had I’m pretty sure he would have chucked the Grecian urn he was pondering at the time and built his verse round her copious charm and luminous loveliness instead.
TL;DR version – I’m a fan. My adoration of the baker knows no bounds. I cannot even think what they might be, because – have you seen her? Have you watched her do her bake-y thing? Have you seen her radiate joy like a lantern, reach across time, space and screens to confide, cajole and charm by turns? Everyone who succeeds in gaining and maintaining a public profile of this nature has this ability in some measure, but she is the only one to have it in pure, unadulterated form. She’s a gift to television and possibly the nation. When it comes to keeping hope alive in these absurdly horrific times, she is my alpha and omega, and I exaggerate only slightly.
All her exquisite Nadiyaness is on display in her latest series, Nadiya Bakes (BBC Two). Even if you are not as consumed by love as I am, you must at least join in the more modest celebration of the fact that the cast and crew have all resisted the temptation to try to fix what isn’t broken. It remains – even after half a dozen such series when the lure of attempting to mess with perfection must be becoming nigh overwhelming – just Nadiya, the kitchen counter, the camera and the magic they make among themselves. (The documentary crews too, incidentally, have held their collective nerve and still manage to keep out of the way and let their star’s charm fell whichever interviewee and/or continent on which its focus falls.)
And Nadiya herself remains untouched by her increasing fame or fortune. She is just there, as happy, smiling, authentically, effortlessly herself as she ever was. Of the programme’s actual content there is not much to say except YES to making cupcakes with a shortbread biscuit base and a literal strawberry centre; YES to blueberry, lavender and lemon scone pizza; YES to toad in the hole with seekh kebabs instead of sausages; and YES to that mango and coconut Victoria sponge at the end.
The main thing is YES to Nadiya. YES to her enthusiasms (“They just get married,” she explains of her choice of scone flavourings, “and have these … babies and it’s wonderful”), which might look a shade emetic written down but are gusts of sheer delight on screen. YES to her ability to hone in on all the weaknesses that unite us and fortify us against them (“Yolks in there,” she says as she begins the separation of multiple eggs, any mixing of which will bring disaster. “Whites in there. Keep telling yourself that”). And YES, above all, to the ineffable restoration of the spirit half an hour in her presence provides.
The glory of Nadiya, basically, is that she could talk you into getting into a burning car BUT – you know she never would. I am glad, of course, to know that the secret to light pancake or Yorkshire pudding batter is to use cold milk and then a very hot oven so that everything expands as fast and well as possible, but I am even gladder to know that as long as she lives, humanity is not quite doomed.
If you prefer your programmes and presenters with a more austere charm, Mary Berry’s Simple Comforts (BBC Two, ★★★) is on just before. Combining something of the Ghosts of Delia Smith Past and Future, the former Bake Off judge takes us to Paris in the opening episode of her new six-part series. There she talks us carefully through the tradition of the long lunch (“with wine!”), the existence of bistros and boulangeries, the importance of the baguette in Gallic culture and sandwiches, the making of a croque monsieur and a perfect bechamel sauce, interspersed with so many references to “real comfort food” that I begin to suspect she has been taken hostage by Big Carbohydrate.
We have, I suspect, seen literally all of it before – mostly in the kind of videos your French teacher used to bung on towards the end of term when nobody could be bothered any more – but that too was a simple comfort all of its own.
