TELEVISION A world where all your old friends come back again ESSAY
Finding comfort in ‘The Great British Baking Show’
by Rebecca Brill
I
returned to school early from winter break to work on my thesis and found myself alone for two weeks in my four-person house. Campus was mostly empty, and none of my close friends were around. I decided the best way to stave off loneliness was to whip up a batch of lemon cookies. It wouldn’t have normally occurred to me to bake, but I had recently started watching “The Great British Baking Show” (née “Bake Off ”) on Netflix, and the show made it seem like just the right project to take on. With my laptop set up on the kitchen table beside my measuring cups and sack of flour, I watched episode two of season five—devoted to biscuits, appropriately—as I worked. The show gathers 12 amateur bakers from around the U.K. to compete. In each episode, one contestant is eliminated until only three bakers remain for the finale. While Diana rolled pinwheel dough and Nancy prepared what would eventually become the walls of a gingerbread house, I creamed sugar and butter in a metal bowl. I added the dry ingredients to the wet ones, rolled out balls of dough, and placed them one by one on the baking sheet. It almost felt like a communal activity. The batch was still warm when my brother called to inform me that one of my childhood friends had died a few hours earlier in a bus accident on a community service trip. At first, I was convinced that he was playing a sick joke on me. The semester he’d studied abroad in Scotland, I’d lied and told him our parents were getting a divorce, just for the hell of it. I figured this was his revenge. “I don’t believe you,” I told him again and again. “Why would I lie about this?” It was a fair question, but it took me minutes after I hung up the phone to process the unfathomable news. It was late, too late to catch a train home
to New York. Most buildings on campus were closed. There was nowhere to go. So I sat. I sat on the couch and wept and drank and wept and lay down on the floor and sat again. At some point, I pressed the “resume” button on “Bake Off.” I watched three more episodes in succession: bread, desserts, and pies and tarts. This wasn’t escapism—I didn’t and couldn’t forget about my dead friend being dead. Still, it took the edge off: it numbed me just the right amount, the way that binging on food can in the moments just before nausea hits. One comfort of “Bake Off ” is its visual appeal. The competition takes place inside an enormous white tent pitched in the middle of a bucolic garden, some cross between Eden and a Victorian tea party. Inside the tent, each contestant gets a personal workstation, complete with pristine appliances in Easter egg colors. The other comfort of “Bake Off ” is its ritualistic adherence to structure. There are three baking challenges per episode: the signature, the technical, and the showstopper. For the signature challenge, the bakers prepare dishes they have made many times before—family recipes and dinner party staples. It’s a way of easing them into the more demanding work that lies ahead. “Bake Off ” takes no sadistic pleasure in watching its contestants fail. This is a show that roots for its people. The technical challenge is the most satisfying to watch. The bakers, with no prior preparation, are all given the same recipe with minimal instruction. The bakers must use their prowess to prepare the recipe as it was intended. The final products are placed side-by-side. The judges, regal 80-year-old Mary Berry and the slightly slicker Paul Hollywood, taste each dish and provide extended, if nitpicky, commentary (“The layers are a bit uneven” is practically Mary’s catchphrase). They then rank them from worst to best. Each “Bake Off ” episode concludes with a showstopper challenge, in which bakers must present a large dessert that is both visually appealing and delicious. The results are elaborate and often ridiculous. Showstoppers in season five
include a fire-breathing dragon made out cookies, a chessboard made out of layer cakes, and a stack of pies laughably dubbed the “Pieful Tower.” Even more uplifting than the optics of the show is its inclination toward compassion. The eliminations on “Bake Off ” don’t feel like eliminations. They have none of the callousness of Tyra Banks ruthlessly telling a girl she must “pack…her bags… and go home.” In fact, the hosts, Mel and Sue, dread the task so much that they alternate each week. Before the elimination, the host apologizes profusely (“It’s really hard ’cause I have to send someone home today”). Afterward, she showers the baker with so much praise (“You are brilliant, my darling, and you are going to rule the world”) that the decision doesn’t feel final. Hugs abound. Tears are shed. It is not unusual, at the end of an episode of “Bake Off,” to hear the words “I love you.” I took the train into New York the next day so I could attend my friend’s funeral the following morning. When I came home from the service, I didn’t know what to do with myself. It didn’t even seem right to change out of my black dress, because to change would be to declare the mourning over, to try to move on. I wasn’t ready to move on. I sat on my bed and looked at pictures of my friend and me at the bat mitzvah we’d shared. I sent a blubbery, mawkish email to an address the synagogue had provided for notes of condolence intended for the family. I addressed it to my friend. Still in the dress, I opened Netflix and clicked on “Bake Off.” I watched episode after episode over the course of the next two days. I began to appreciate small things: the neat row of pushed-together chairs the bakers sat in for the elimination, the way they hung up their raincoats upon entering the tent like a class of kindergarteners at the beginning of a school day. Most of all, I liked the contestants. Ranging in age from 17 to 70, they seemed not like a cast of characters so much as the residents of a small town. There was Norman, the retired naval officer SWARTHMORE REVIEW
NOVEMBER 2015
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