The Great British Bake Off Finale: Why Do We Care So Much, Exactly?

The Great British Bake Off Finale: Why Do We Care So Much, Exactly?

The Great British Bake Off may well be the only televised baking contest in which you can find yourself in the final three, having displayed a monstrous display of pastry-based ineptitude, in the preceding weeks. For the uninitiated, The Great British Bake-Off is a bakery competition, presented by the Great British comediennes and sub-Loose Women TV presenters, Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins and judged by the Great British experts Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood. The nation is well and truly hooked on this show, which demonstrates, week in, week out, how incredibly difficult it is for mere mortals to perform an act of patisserie that does not ultimately end in humiliation.

To be fair, there have been some pretty exquisite creations involved in the show so far – remember how we all gasped at John Waite’s gingerbread coliseum? How we marvelled at Brendan Lynch’s delicate platter of petits fours that had us weeping and salivating in equal measure? And of course, who can forget James Morton’s lavish array of Christmas jumpers, in which he cooked up some lovely puddings? Well, that’s all well and good but these same people were also responsible for serving up undercooked tarte tatin, getting their rum baba dough stuck to a proving cloth and serving up a soggy Wellington just weeks earlier.

These three men have already become national heroes for simply doing what approximately two-thirds of the nation can do anyway: be a bit hit and miss at making cakes and stuff. The race for the final appears not to be a case of three men striving for perfection, but three men trying to be the one man that makes less of a mess of things than the other two. So! Whose cake will fall apart less than the other two? The final is tomorrow night (October 14, 2012) – you’ll have to wait until then for the finale in this Great British display of mediocrity.