The Great British Bake Off, once reincarnated in its new home at Channel 4, would “stay exactly the same”, Paul Hollywood said last year, and a quick glance at the first publicity shot for the new series would suggest he has a point.
There is a table topped with homely linen and laden with baked goods. A warm yet authoritative older woman smiles in a faintly alarming jacket, while a chap displaying a white beard and an inch too much chest twinkles at the camera. Between them are a blonde and a brunette looking both earnest and ironic, as if to say: yes, this is all just a little bit silly, but aren’t cakes lovely?
And yet this is not, of course, Bake Off as 14 million people came to know and love it on BBC1. After the programme’s producer, Love Productions, announced in September that it was whisking Britain’s most popular TV programme off to Channel 4, it promptly lost three of its four presenters, leaving only roguish Liverpudlian bread man Hollywood.
So, stepping into the shoes of cookery institution Mary Berry, Channel 4 has substituted cookery institution Prue Leith. For comedians Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins, we have comedians Sandi Toksvig and Noel Fielding, who in his smirk to camera appears to be attempting to convey some of the cheerfully smutty innuendo beloved of his predecessors.
The Bake Off marquee seems to have been jettisoned in favour of an oddly constructed brick wall in a forest glade, and no one could accuse that limp string of bunting, yards of which festooned previous Bake Off sets, of being terribly jaunty.
And yet, alongside the jam scones, chocolate brownies and Calendar Girls-style cherry cupcakes offered up by the new presenting team, sharp-eyed viewers will find a well-loved sight: a chocolate cake covered in ganache and topped with raspberries, familiar from the opening titles of previous series.
A well-tested recipe, in other words, but the proof of this pudding will come when the new series is broadcast, at a still-undisclosed date this year.
