After 'bingate', The Great British Bake Off keeps calm and carries on
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Version 0 of 1. Pity the historians of the future. They’re the ones who will have to put the hysteria surrounding last week’s episode of The Great British Bake Off into some kind of context. And that’ll be much harder than it sounds, because the main trajectory of the news this summer has basically been: horror, horror, misery, horror, misery, man putting a pudding in a bin, misery. “Why did everyone lose their minds about a man putting a pudding in a bin?” they’ll wonder. “Why, with everything else going on in the world, did that make the Sun’s front page? Why did the Guardian devote 11 separate news stories to it? It was just a man putting a pudding in a bin”. Finally, exasperated at their ridiculous ancestors and exhausted from trying to figure out what the hell a “bincident” is, they’ll give up, cut their losses and simply torch the archives. It’ll be the Library of Alexandria all over again. Thanks a lot, The Great British Bake Off. To be fair, the commotion could have dragged on for much longer, had it not been for the Bake Off’s impressively even-handed approach to the situation last night. Other reality shows would have milked every drop of drama from the exits of Iain and Diana. The Apprentice would have rammed a camera into the faces of the other contestants and forced them to compare themselves to sharks as aggressively as possible. A Gordon Ramsay show would have set the clip of Iain binning his baked alaska to an unnecessarily bombastic soundtrack, and then intercut it with shots where Ramsay pulls a face like he’s simultaneously eating a lemon and being booted in the knackers. But The Great British Bake Off? The Great British Bake Off doesn’t do drama. It alludes to bums quite a lot. And, yes, it assumes that we want to know much more about the history of quiches than we actually do. But when faced with any form of controversy whatsoever, it slaps on an overcompensatory grin and – ignoring the long-term psychological effects of suppressing negative emotion – pretends that nothing has actually happened. That’s just how British it is. Last week’s fracas was only referenced twice, in a pair of self-consciously awkward asides. First, the loss of Diana was covered via lots of footage where the remaining contestants all praised their fallen comrade, telling us how much they’ll miss her and what a team player she was and wordlessly implying that we’re all horrible monsters for calling her names last week. The loss of Iain, meanwhile, was batted aside with eight simple words: “Please don’t put your tarts in the bin.” Yes, it was all filmed ages ago, but this felt like the Bake Off schoolmarmishly ticking us off for making such a lot of fuss about nothing, and it was absolutely the right choice to make. With a week’s worth of hindsight, bingate wasn’t really a controversy at all. It wasn’t even a blip. It was a squeak, barely audible as the mighty Bake Off machine glided onwards. After all, it assumed, why would anybody possibly get all out of joint over something as silly as a tantrum, when we have rows and rows of pastry-covered pears to drool over? The series has long been associated with the phrase, thanks to its mutual demographic of middle-class faux-nostalgists, but last night it was made explicit – the motto of The Great British Bake Off is Keep Calm and Carry On. |