Joy in the Time of Paul Hollywood
A Deep Dive Into Why Exactly The Great British Bake Off is the Greatest Television Program of All Time
The Great British Bake Off is a phenomenon that has sailed past its initial cultural place as a niche fascination to a full-blown hit. It’s hard to say exactly why, but it’s often attributed to the general vibe of camaraderie amongst the contestants.
There’s no prize money, there’s no book deal for the winner, no cooking show, just an engraved glass cake plate and the joy of being the best. This lack of stakes amongst the competitors seems to erase the interpersonal messiness that’s so ubiquitous on competition reality shows.
Nobody talks shit about each other’s bakes (even when they’re disastrous), there are no talking head interviews where contestants say rude things about each other’s skills— just a bunch of people who really like to bake, doing their best and making life-long friends along the way!
I stumbled upon GBBO one weekend in late 2015 when I was looking for a show to decompress with on a Saturday afternoon on Netflix. Possibly because of a fate written by my regal name (Victoria Rose), an early childhood obsession with high-tea, or all the Paddington I read as a kid, I’ve always been a bit of an Anglophile; and reader, this pleasantly straightforward baking competition, replete with regional British accents and classic treats was like a warm & cozy gift to me. I watched the entire season (Series 5, 2014) in one day.
I, who worked in the film & television industry for a decade, and vehemently opposed the pirating of copyrighted media, learned to pirate at the age of 31 so that I could download all the other seasons and watch them too.
For my 32nd birthday, instead of going out to dinner and having a party at a bar as I’d done every single other year of my adult life, I bought a bunch of mini pork-pies, sausage rolls, and scones from my favorite British ex-pat shop, invited my friends over to my house, demanded a Victoria sandwich from my friend Emilie (a fellow GBBO fanatic), and made everyone watch Bake Off (everyone left a fan obvi).
I know that I have a tendency towards the hyperbolic, but I firmly believe if you were to track the popularity of The Great British Bake Off in America, a HUGE amount of its American fandom could eventually be traced back to me.
Because I’m an analytical woman, I’m not the type to let such a phenomenon as GBBO simply exist, I’ve got to know WHY? It’s the absolute antithesis to American reality shows, which frankly, I cannot watch.
Even a show like Top Chef that I once loved seems to spend as much time on making sure to mention all the promotional tie-ins and considerations and/or focusing on interpersonal drama between the contestants as they do filming people cooking or talking about food.
I watched a Netflix BBQ competition show recently where every episode made sure to have a talking-head interview with the be-pearled Southern-Belle-of-BBQ contestant, wherein she said something snide, myopic, or just stupid about one of her fellow contestants or the competition. My personal favorite moment came during the episode when she had to cook Moroccan style BBQ, and she said of her one experience trying Moroccan food: “...it was almost like they mixed sweet, but then it was supposed to be an entree, and then you have to eat it with your hands. I don’t like that.” I can only hope whatever editor decided to include that interview was also thinking about how that sounded like a pretty accurate description of American BBQ too. Irony right??
I cannot for the life of me imagine a contestant on GBBO talking about how gross the cuisine of an unfamiliar culture was to them. In fact I can think of several instances on the show when contestants have apologized to cultures when they didn’t know anything about something they had to do for a technical challenge!
All this is to say, GBBO is nothing like the reality shows we make and watch here, so why is it such a hit? And further, why does it resonate so deeply with me specifically?
Honestly, I think the answer lies in my least favorite thing about the show. Its one dark cloud amongst all of the positive energy: judge Paul Hollywood.
He’s the only cast member who has been with the show since its inception. The other original judge Mary Berry (a UK hybrid of Martha Stewart, Julia Child, and everyone’s grandma) left the show when it moved from the BBC (British PBS) to Channel 4 (British NBC), along with the show’s original hosts, comedy duo Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins.
Paul Hollywood is everything I do not like. He is a straight white man who wears tight button down shirts, a stupid spiky hairdo, and loves race cars. He’s a bully, deeply pedantic, wildly biased from contestant to contestant, and he has the palate of a picky 6 year old.
His favorite treats are iced buns (sweet rolls with icing on top of them) and doughnuts.
A partial list of flavors Paul has been worried about and/or claimed didn’t go together: peanut butter & grape jelly, yuzu (it doesn’t know if it’s a lemon or a lime according to Mr. Hollywood), matcha (I have watched him eat so many green tea cakes & every time he claims he’s never had one before), fennel desserts (I have watched several South-Asian contestants create desserts with fennel in them and every time Paul says he’s never heard of that before), chocolate biscotti with hazelnuts & dried fruits, orange & rosemary (you ever been to France Paul? just kidding, I know you have), orange & oregano (you ever been to Greece Paul? just kidding, I know you have), and most ridiculously: peach & ginger.
On the first episode of the current season, a Jamaican woman was eliminated for creating a ginger cake that was “too spicy” and when she was sent home, the string of expletives I unleashed at Paul Hollywood through my television is too much even for this completely unregulated corner of the internet.
Very often on GBBO, South-Asian contestants will get pigeonholed as “spice mavens” and the judges will make awkward [racist] jokes about their frequent use of spices like cardamom, cumin, coriander seeds, chilis, and ginger in their baking, as if white Brits don’t put butter, vanilla, and Golden Syrup in nearly every single item they make…
Don’t even get me started on the wretched “Hollywood Handshake,” the completely patriarchal “honor” that Paul doles out to contestants if he thinks their bakes deserve it. The symbolism behind a white man positioning the act of shaking his hand as 1) something that must be earned and 2) something one should aspire to is just so gross to me.
Culturally, the handshake is such a symbol of equality, it’s a way of saying to someone “I see you on my level, I trust your good intentions, and I acknowledge that through grasping your hand.” Making it something that someone has to earn, especially when the person saying “you must earn the right to shake my hand” is a white man like Paul Hollywood is both tone-deaf and embarrassing.
Aside from the mostly harmless bullying that Hollywood seems to enjoy on the show— intentionally making contestants nervous while they’re in the middle of baking, asking pointed questions about ingredients, amounts, and cooking methods when it’s too late to do anything about it, jamming his sausage fingers into a slice of bread and calling it “raw” when it is in fact only mildly under-baked, destroying cookie sculptures with a chef’s knife... it seems like Paul might substantively, actually be kind of a dick?
I don’t really care about his personal life— I guess he was married and then had one or more rather public affairs (yawn)? But I definitely do care that he dressed up like a Nazi for NYE costume party. Yes he apologized but like, if you’re the kind of white dude who thinks a Nazi costume is ever a good joke, that tells me some things about you.
So how could someone who ticks all of my “no thank you” boxes be integral to what makes GBBO so good? It is that in spite of Paul Hollywood, there is still so much joy, connection, and prosperity to be found.
I feel like Series 4 (2013) contestant Ruby Tandoh summed it up beautifully in this tweet:
“every day i think about how bake off has been a trojan horse for SO many people of colour and assorted queers to sneak into the food world. smuggled over the threshold cloaked in bunting, right under the nose of her majesty's scone patrol. what an energy. we stan”
Every season, along with all the nice white women that one would stereotypically expect to find on a competition reality show for Britain’s best home baker, there’s everyone else who loves to bake in the UK. Cultures for whom food is a way of life— Black folks of Caribbean & African heritage, and South & East Asian peoples. And then of course there are the gays. The fellas are definitely better represented that we are to be sure but the fact remains, you can’t have a competition baking show without the gays!
And all of a sudden, all of these people who are not typically the faces we expect to see when we think “baking cheflebrity” have become faces we know and love.
In spite of the cringeworthy nickname of “Spice Queen” given to her by Paul & Mary on Series 5 (2014), Chetna Makan has released three cookbooks since appearing on the show and as far as I can tell, is totally crushing it.
Even though Paul rarely had anything nice to say about any of her gorgeous creations during Series 6 (2015), contestant Flora Shedden has since opened the gorgeous Aran Bakery in Scotland (no I haven’t been, I just look at it on Instagram and apply for jobs there constantly) and released two cookbooks.
My favorite GBBO success story is Series 6 (2015) contestant (and winner!) Nadiya Hussain. Nadiya got off to a rough start on her season of Bake Off and watching her battle back to win it all is as good as any underdog match I’ve ever seen. The thing that I love so much about Nadiya’s journey is that it seemed to be an entirely personal trial. It wasn’t about pleasing the judges, or getting her flavors dialed in, she just had to find the confidence, and once she did, she was unstoppable!
Nadiya has published a staggering 10 books, and appeared on 8 television programs since her season of Bake Off, all the while maintaining a truly refreshing level of honesty about the racism, anxiety, and struggles she’s faced along the way. Honestly, even if you’re not a GBBO fan, you should be a Nadiya fan, we could all learn a lot from her.
Aside from career successes, the net-gain for former contestants seems to be the connections they make with the other contestants and the larger GBBO galaxy. The unlikely friendship between Series 7 (2016) contestants Val Stones, 69 & Selasi Gbormittah, 34 is a real heartwarmer. I could watch wee-gays Michael Chakraverty & Henry Bird from Series 10 (2019) do just about anything together and get some joy out of it.
It’s almost like a metaphor.
There will always be forces that we cannot escape in our world. There will always be clueless white men who take up too much space, think too much of their narrowly-informed opinions, and are unaware of just how much influence they wield. Often, those same white men will control aspects of our fate. But if we can still find our own wins within that power structure, and if we can find kinship and connection with others also looking for their joy in that same space, then we just might be good.
I don’t pretend that I *actually* know anything about Paul Hollywood. I worked in the film & TV industry long enough to know that what you see on screen usually has little to nothing to do with reality, but on GBBO, Hollywood plays the heel perfectly. His “guy you love to hate” allows us to appreciate the accomplishments of the bakers, the beauty of their bakes, and the esprit de corps between the contestants and the hosts, all that much more.
And in this often overwhelmingly unkind world we live in, clearly, that’s something we all need.
