One evening in the autumn of 2012, I got a somewhat urgent phone call from my mom. I was living in a quasi-legal student sublet at the time—the landlord had hooked the electricity up to the street lights outside—and she wanted to recommend a baking show that might distract me from the rats under the floor. Think “MasterChef” but with the pacing of an afternoon spent punting on the Thames. The bakers were normal people: a shop worker, a vicar’s wife, a searingly competitive sixty-three-year-old Buddhist whose coup de grâce was a flock of choux-pastry cygnets. “There’s a Scottish boy on it,” my mom added, offering some enticement. “He wears knitted jumpers.”
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In the U.K., if you so much as bring a beat-up homemade carrot cake into the office, you can count on somebody telling you to apply for “The Great British Bake Off.” I was twenty and already had a signature apricot-tart recipe, so I was bound to get the call eventually. My mom would, I’m sure, argue that she meant only for me to watch “Bake Off.” But you can’t watch people doing the thing you love, only worse, and just sit by. Or, at least, I couldn’t.
Within a few weeks, I had not only seen every episode but obsessively studied the format. I took notes when the bakers were challenged to make “hand-raised” meat pies: a topsy-turvy process in which you make the pastry with hot water instead of cold, and press the dough not into a pie dish but around the outside of a wooden mold. I acquainted myself with the judges’ predilections: the delicate Mary Berry favored the classics, whereas Paul Hollywood—a thoroughly suntanned man with the alpha saunter of a prison guard—seemed to have a weakness for piña-colada-flavored bakes. I wasn’t interested in the backstory montages showing the bakers’ home towns, or in the wholesome conversational patter—that was filler. I wanted the uncensored baking, those sweet shots of gelatine leaking from badly molded pastry.
I should probably clear up one thing, which is that my enthusiasm for baking, at that point, exceeded my expertise. My sense of superiority was mostly speculative: I could probably bake this stuff if I bothered to learn. So I learned. When I should have been reading David Hume, I pored over the writings of Paul Hollywood, that other great empiricist, for his thoughts on dough hydration and oven temperature. I made phyllo pastry from scratch in my room, stretching the dough to the thinness of a page of the King James Bible.
What I mean to say—and what any contestant on the show will admit, if they’re honest—is that you don’t make it to the world of competitive televised baking by accident. I sent in an application in early 2013, attaching photos of Viennese whirls, black-currant tarts, and a drum-size brioche à tête. “My repertoire isn’t huge,” I noted judiciously in the comments. “But what it lacks in breadth, I think is counterbalanced in part by its depth.” Midway through the casting process, I sent an e-mail to one of the producers: “It’s all I’ve been thinking about. Waking up at four in the morning to nurse a brioche dough back to life.” The producers are used to this—they get people who want the thing so badly that they apply seven, eight, nine times.
During the next couple of months, I inched closer to the show. I cleared interviews with home economists who quizzed me on the finer points of baking technique—how to tell when a meringue was done cooking, or how to get a thin, shattering crust on a loaf of bread. Next were screen tests, a first date with the camera. Toward the end, in-person baking trials. These days, it’s not until the thousands of applicants have been whittled to a final hundred that anyone even tastes the bakes. “The best amateur bakers in the country” is the line, although I get the sense that even the producers don’t fully buy this. Throughout the process, we were encouraged to practice, to fill in the gaps in our knowledge, to get up to speed with things outside the amateur repertoire of biscuits and cakes. If any of us were truly skilled at baking, it was often because we had sought out “Bake Off,” not the other way around.
It is hard to think of another show that screens so carefully not just for personality type and talent but also for that more slippery variable, purity of intention. Producers find themselves in the position of trying to cast one of the best-known shows on television—one that routinely makes people famous—with people who care about neither television nor fame. They have to sniff out clout-chasers, and pick through government databases for things like criminal convictions and undeclared baking businesses. Even unrealized dreams can be suspect. When I asked Sophia Reid, the head of casting, about Dylan Bachelet, the Pixar-cute twenty-year-old retail assistant from Season 15, she said that she had been nervous about him at first. “I knew Dylan wanted to be a chef,” she told me. “How’s that gonna land?”
The show attempts to present Britain in microcosm, which is why casters have scouted on the street and plugged into Facebook groups—Black dads in London, Irish badminton players, that kind of thing. The holy grail is what Reid calls “the unlikely baker.” To Kieran Smith, the show’s executive producer, that’s someone like Rahul Mandal, the Winnie-the-Pooh-esque nuclear scientist from Season 9. “The moment you get a Rahul . . . ,” Smith mused, bowing his head. “There is someone who is unintentionally funny. There is someone who probably never wanted to be on television in their life.”
At the very end of the audition process, I was sent to Lynn Greenwood, an impish, curly-haired psychotherapist who has also served as a dowsing rod for shows like “The Apprentice.” All bakers-to-be must prove to her that they’re fit for the rigors of reality TV. “I can sniff out someone who’s disturbed within a few minutes,” Greenwood told me when I visited her recently, in the same leafy London neighborhood where we had met twelve years earlier. What she remembers of my assessment, she told me approvingly, was that I was very quiet and not outwardly ambitious, and that I loved baking. I didn’t tell her that, from what I recalled, I cried for half the session, constitutionally incapable of playing it cool. That’s possibly why, a couple of months later, I was on the show.
In the course of the past fifteen years, and seemingly by accident, “The Great British Bake Off” has become one of the most popular shows on TV. In its best years, “Bake Off” has drawn more British viewers than “Downton Abbey,” “Sherlock,” “Doctor Who,” or, indeed, Prince Phillip’s funeral. Paul Hollywood has arguably established himself as the only credible pop-culture inheritor to the title of Ol’ Blue Eyes. The show has even given us new language: it is now possible for laypeople to talk sagaciously about a bake having a “soggy bottom.”
It would have been easy enough for “Bake Off” to ensnare the food crowd, but it has become a phenomenon even among people who have never touched a stand mixer. In the streaming era, “Bake Off” is the standard-setter for ambiently watchable TV; a generation of half-watchers turns to it for its gently sedative properties. Meanwhile, bakers watch it for the craft, thinking that maybe next year they’ll apply. In recent years, as spinoff shows have proliferated, it’s become clear that you can riff on certain incidental details—the “British,” say, or the “Bake Off.”International franchises have included “The Great American Baking Show,” an Uruguayan Bake Off, and the lesser-known “All of Holland Bakes.” We have seen “The Great British Sewing Bee,” “The Great Pottery Throw Down,” and “The Big Blowout” (“Bake Off” for hair stylists).
But the original still dominates. Most Brits don’t do outright patriotism, so when we deploy phrases like “Great British” it is with a certain sardonic flair. The bakers are the kinds of people who will be more upset if they accidentally steal someone else’s custard than if theirs is the custard being nabbed (as happened in the now notorious Custardgate incident). Occasionally, though, the steelier survival instincts kick in, and a pressed baker might be compelled to construct a gingerbread model of the Moulin Rouge on top of a croquembouche. Mix in the pleasurably low-stakes drama of baking, in which nothing rides on success except a baker’s pride, and you’ve struck comfort-TV gold. Even Kylie Jenner is a fan—she posted a video of her watching “Bake Off” on her jet, calling it “my favorite show.” Consider the cultural tectonics involved in bringing the extended Kardashian empire into contact with Nelly Ghaffar, from Season 15, a flirtatious palliative-care assistant from Slovakia by way of Dorset. But this is what makes “Bake Off” so beloved: it is one of the most successful unscripted shows of the century and still feels like an underdog.