Inside the World of "The Great British Bake Off" | Hacker News Reader

Inside the World of "The Great British Bake Off"

newyorker.com

61 pointsmitchbob18 comments

"My only real defense was Sue, one of the jesterlike presenters, who shielded me and did a remarkable, jazzlike expletive improv until everyone gave up trying to film. (Sometimes, she told me, she tried a different tack: libelling pharmaceutical companies to make embarrassing footage unusable.)"

I'm actually surprised the producers allow for this kind of defending of the bakers. Sue lasted 6 years, so it must not have upset the producers that much. However, as TFA stated, the fact that there's not a lot of over exaggerated drama more typical of a Kardashean/HouseWives reality show is why Bake Off succeeds. I can totally see a reality producer sending multiple camera ops, boom operator, sound recordist over to capture a sticky situation only exacerbating things. They can't help themselves. It's part of their DNA. Having that footage deemed unusable because of the dialog deliberately used by the host could not be taken kindly. I have the same mentality though whenever someone shoves a camera in my face when in public by giving them the bird while waving my hand directly in front of my face. If they blur the bird, they blur my face.

"there's not a lot of over exaggerated drama more typical of a Kardashean/HouseWives reality show is why Bake Off succeeds."

The only reason we watch it is because instead of the shock trash drama of most reality television, the Bake Off vibe is kind.

even the judging - when critical - is still done in a more realistic way. Anyone who acted like Gordon Ramsey IRL would get fired or beat down pdq.

People can make utter trash on Bake Off, get honest critiques, and yet the vibe is _still_ good. It's really great.

Now a bit off-topic: Bake Off has completely put me off baking myself. Nearly everything always goes wrong. And as this article kind of says: these people aren't _really_ amateurs. So I'm watching and thinking "if these above-average bakers are having this much trouble, I'm not even going to try"

My partner bakes. I don't, and the primary reason is that I am a very good cook, but I don't really measure. Baking is all science-y and requires measuring.

(If I were to be completely honest, probably right up there with measuring is that flour is just so damn messy!)

Here's the thing about measuring and precision. Baking requires less of it than people make out, and stovetop cooking benefits more from it than people make out. So neither popular conception is really right. With baking, I can tell you that I estimate stuff all the time and my bakes turn out just fine. For example, I learned how to estimate shortening as a kid because cleaning that out of a measuring cup is a real pain. There are some very technical recipes where you have to meticulously follow the directions, but that isn't most baking one will encounter.

Yeah, this saying always confused me too. I'm not a very good baker in that I need a recipe and can't just reel off the proportions for a crumble or whatever. But nothing about "normal" baking has ever really seemed especially sensitive. Whole milk/semi skimmed, medium eggs or large, DIYed self raising flour, brown sugar mixed with caster because there's no light muscovado, milk and a bit of extra butter instead of buttermilk. Cheaper chocolate with less cocoa and cut the sugar back a bit. Usually I bake with under half the sugar in the recipe anyway. Ovens vary wildly too. Mostly all turns out just fine.

> Ovens vary wildly too.

I had an oven where the set temp did not match the heat of the oven. After several instances of things not coming out the way the were supposed to, I bought a thermometer to compare the two. I learned to set the cooking temp +25°.

Yes, ovens vary wildly!

People on bake off are making very hard things. It's very misrepresentative of what baking is like as a result. Even when they make something that's not hard to make (like a cake), they are forced to make it in a hard way (making very elaborate cakes that take a ton of engineering to assemble, having strict time limits, etc). Unless you are trying to do competition baking (or perhaps run a bakery), you'll have a much easier time than that. Literally the first thing I learned how to cook was chocolate chip cookies, so I wouldn't say you should be intimidated by the very hard things that the experts are doing.

It doesn’t help that they’re under a time crunch in a tent where humidity and temperature can be vastly different from contestants home kitchens and even from day to day.

It's funny that Ramsay has become this stand-in for someone who blows up professionally. If you watch older shows of his, even the British Kitchen Nightmares, he comes off as generally nice to people who try and who care about things. The only people you see him blow up at are people who are incompetent and who don't care. And a lot of the time when he's yelling he's egging people on to succeed and not trying to tear them down. It's in the US Kitchen Nightmares where I really see him explode because the restaurants they're putting him in aren't even well meaning anymore.

Watching Ramsay on MasterChef really changed my opinion of the man (for the better). He is so supportive of and kind to the contestants on that show, I figured that he must've been playing into a bit on his other shows.

Yep, that's why I watch it. The baking part is cool, I'm a home baker myself and all, but not the main draw. It's not like I'm gonna be making three tier cakes with macaron waterfalls any time. I watch the show because the people are genuinely nice to each other and help each other out when it gets tough.

We like MasterChef Australia for the same reason.

"jazzlike expletive improv"

Many years ago I was part of a panel on Newsnight - I was actually quite impressed at the Malcolm Tucker level of profanity that came from the presenters once the cameras were off.

> They can't help themselves. It's part of their DNA.

They can help themselves. They can be trained, they may have been trained in the past to focus on that drama but they can be re-taught, can learn and grow and create something that's different.

It's just that sometimes they need a reminder from the hosts that GBBO isn't that kind of show. Hopefully it's a shared cultural vision and a friendly refresher, rather than a hostile producer vs. host relationship where one drags cameras in and the other pushes them back with expletive improv...

It's the same thing that causes traffic from the rubber neckers trying to look at a wreck on the other side of the highway. It's the same that attracts people to NASCAR crashes, hockey fights and other various low forms of human nature. Again, part of the DNA.

Some people are more suited for these roles, and others naturally push away from them. Training can be used, but the basic instinct to be pro/con this type of person is already set. Just look at the size of the audiences for thta type of content, and you'll see it is filling a niche for someone.

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