TV Review: Bake Right Off

A Negative Review:

I hate all TV, but I still bloody watch it sometimes, don’t I?  If only to have something to hate.  It helps, it’s like going to football matches; helps to get all my pointless aggression out.  Maybe if all them neonazi fellas were into football, they wouldn’t have to…no, wait.  Never mind.

Anyway, I will now spend several hundred words telling you how much I hate everyone.  And then, if there’s time, I’ll bring it back and prove the above point by having got it out of my system. 

Noel Fielding looks like a man solemnly contemplating his life at the tail end of a monstrous comedown.
“Stacey lives in Hertfordshire with her husband James….her apple and walnut cake contains Granny Smith apples”, intones the Mighty Boosh co-writer/star, wondering how the fuck he got here.
His bland, scripted words belie his awkward body language, which screams: “Does anyone remember when I was cool?  I used to dress outlandishly and get laid a lot and be all edgy and that, like a comedy Pete Doherty?  That was me, wasn’t it?  WASN’T IT?!  In another life….”

For Fielding’s comedy foil, they’ve gone for Tom Cruise’s older brother, Sandy Toksvig.  She is more at home here, having spent most of her career on annoying mainstream TV programmes.

There’s some impressive cakes, but what is happening here is bigger than baking.  This is So British, people will say with a grin.  Britishey, Britty-Brit British.  They’ll say British, they’ll mean middle class and English, the same as everyone else does.  Little Britain British, rather than Britain First British.  So, derivative and mildly irritating, rather than stupid and malicious.
They’ve got two Scousers on it, though, in an attempt to appeal to a new demographic of people who probably don’t read The Daily Mail.  And they’ve replaced the older posh lady with an older posh lady who isn’t even a baker. 

“Bakers!  Unfortunately, time is not an illusion!”

There’s a challenge where they all have to make a cake that doesn’t look like a cake.  They’re calling it an Illusion Challenge.  Will anyone try to pass off an Emperor’s New Clothes-style non-cake “illusion” as a cake?  Will someone make a dismembered hand cake?  A cake disguised as the Turin Shroud? 

Find out – after the break!

Yes.  There’s adverts now, surely the most revolting of the new developments.

No.  No one did any of those things, but there were some pretty impressive cakey creations, to be fair.  So, you know, it’s still got people on it that are really good at baking. 

Fielding announces the first loser in the same gritted-teeth monotone he’s employed to get through this job.  It probably pays very well.  It might lead him further down a path he never expected to be on.  I don’t care, I don’t know him, do I?  I just talk shit about him on the internet for a laugh.  So, which one of is really the aresehole? 
(It’s him, isn’t it?)

It’s still got Hollywood on it, as well – the only personnel hangover from when it was on the BBC, and our taxes paid for it, so everyone could join in, love it or loathe it – or be bothered by it because everyone at work talked about it all the fucking time.  You know, it was proper communal. 
Now, though, it’s funded by advertising, so is paid for out of our collective sense of inadequacy and the misanthropy of the kind of cocaine-addled “creatives” who make perfume adverts (surely the lowest, most disgusting form of communication ever hatched from a demonic egg of doom; an affront to our very souls.  A linguistic, sonic, visual crime against humanity for which there can surely be no atonement).  And the waning power of TV as a uniting force.  That’s why Channel 4 have paid loads of money to do it: it works.  It works on me, in the way that advertising does; I talk about how much I hate it while watching it – and then I’m in, aren’t I?  What hurts most is not that some very cynical, exploitative things are happening – it’s how readily they work, even on those of us predisposed toward resisting them.  They know what they’re doing, this lot.  It makes me hate them even more. 
Almost as much as I hate myself.

The second week is the same, only more so.

It’s pretty horrible, all this, isn’t it?  As if you couldn’t tell, I was in a bad mood when I watched it/wrote this.  I expected this to be cathartic – or at least, somehow useful to get it out of my mind and into the world.  Out of my mind and into yours, perhaps.  It doesn’t seem to have worked.  It’s presumably just irked others who have read it….

So, to cheer myself up, I’m going to watch an arty documentary about atrocities and the traumatic legacy of mass political violence, fifty years ago, in a part of the world to which I will probably never go.

In conclusion: It’s in the same big tent.  It’s still a (relatively quiet) soap opera.
And I’m as awful as I sound.

A positive review:

It’s the same as before, which is nice.  But it’s got different presenters and adverts.  It’s only a bloody baking competition, though, isn’t it?  Really not worth getting all worked up about, now, is it?  Good.  Calm down then, and stop being so unkind about people, there’s a good lad.  You’re going to a festival this weekend, aren’t you?  With your friends?  To play some music?  Well, that’ll be nice, won’t it?

Maybe you’ll be in a better mood then.  I’ll just be here, watching Bake Off. 
I like that new presenter, he’s fun, isn’t he? 
What did I see him on before…?