What is it About the Great British Baking Show?

I am tragically already awake for the day, due to the fact that the puppy has to be to the vet by 8:30 to have his life transformed. I don’t think I need to say more, lest I rouse the gender rights of dogs crowd to wrath. I look forward to this transformation very much. It hasn’t come a moment too soon.

And then I will toddle over to Aldi and then to the doctor myself, in the most responsible way possible, for one of those awkward and uncomfortable times that nevertheless have proven life saving to many. Then I will hobble home and take three children to the dentist. In all, a ghastly morning and afternoon.

But! We have two episodes left of the Great British Baking Show on Netflix, before we have to begin flailing about on YouTube looking for more, and so the evening will more than make up for the traumas of the morning.

What is so wonderful about the Great British Baking Show? I’ve been trying to put my finger on it.

For one thing, most strangely, it is the first tv we have found that every single one of us sits in front of with eyes riveted, mouth watering, atmosphere completely whine free. Again, I haven’t quite nailed down why this is so. Everyone unaccountably wants to see every episode, even the boys, even the baby. No one moans and complains about it being on. No one wanders away to do something else. The little girls sit straight, and then, when the tension becomes too much, they shout and jump up and down. Marigold refers to Paul and Mary as if they live in our house and will be along shortly to poke at our own food.

After weeks of watching it, on Saturday Matt and I gave way to the sudden intense desire to bake. He made cookies, as he is want to do, and bread for the first time. I had less success with a sticky toffee pudding and a banana cake, because we had bananas. I should have just called it a bread, which it basically was, although baked in a bunt pan.

Sunday luncheon, instead of talking about what we all learned in Sunday school, we talked about the Great British Baking Show.

So what is it? What makes this one single program better than all the others wrapped up together? Is it the pastel counters and the glorious tent with the rain pattering down? Is it the ill cut trousers of the two young ladies who occasionally actually ruin the efforts of the contestants? Is it the language of sponge, biscuit, and ruff puff? Much has been said by my children about how glorious and well timed the music is. How it sweeps up but not too much, so that you feel the agony of suspense, but not too much. I particularly like that everyone has enough time to bake and that, in general, only one kind of thing is being made. There isn’t a great frantic rushing about. Instead, often the whole tent is full of people kneeling before their ovens, lips moving in what looks like prayer.

I haven’t watched American food tv in a very long while and I gave up because it wasn’t any longer about the food. It was about gimmicks and hard lighting and shouting and public humiliation. Or it was watching men drive around the country eating in restaurants. The days of sitting transfixed watching a skilled hand soothingly mince and sweat an onion are long gone. It’s like all of food tv is hosted by Donald Trump. The tired soul wanders away to find a book.

There is a great cultural fatigue about food and everything. It’s not any more that we can just cook nice things and eat them. They have to be morally acceptable either by not being too sugar, or by being locally sourced. And we can’t watch people cook on tv because the tv only shouts and flaps. But really, food, at least, if nothing else, should be a calming, civilizing enterprise–not shattered by political sensibility, not bastardized by tv food competition personalities. It should be the kitchen, the knife, the kettle, the sweat wiped away from the brow in the heat of a tense moment, and, at the end, something fat and life giving sitting there to comfort the soul and restore the body.

I had better arise and have a cup of tea, because what is the world coming to.