britishness-greatbritishbak-blog

[britishness-greatbritishbak-blog]

The finale of Season 8 of The Great British Bake Off aired last night, and while the three final contestant came to the conclusion of perfecting their versions of teacakes and treacle tarts, the show’s production team was closing in on its own recipe: for Britishness.  Start with a jolly theme tune and a Lady of the Manor judge (this season old-school chef Mary Berry moved aside for food critic Prue Leith, though we can barely tell the difference). Add the atmosphere of a village fete; throw in some Union Jack bunting; wrap it up in a marquee, and let it rain or shine (it’s the Great British weather, after all).

Since it started in 2010, Bake Off has captured the hearts of British viewers. Fourteen million people tuned in to watch Candice Brown win in 2016. A little under seven million people watched the first episode of the current season, a drop blamed on the programme’s move from the BBC to Channel 4, but a number that nevertheless represents one quarter of the British TV-watching public.

Bake Off presents itself as the dreamscape of British iconography, complete with pastel pink electric food-mixers and hanging teacups. Competitiveness is watered down, and the most damning comment delivered by one of the judges is likely to be that a tart has a ‘soggy bottom’, a phrase unfailingly met with titters all round. It’s unchallenging, feel-good TV at its most polished.

But as you’re invited to openly sentimentalise about a cake-eating, tea-drinking past, you begin to wonder if the deliberate version of Bake Off’s Britain accurately reflects reality. Jo Ellison, writer for the Financial Times, attributed the success of the show to “nostalgia [as] the new avant-gardism”, and while for her this happily explains the show’s popularity, it also indicates the tendency of a generation to look back on a past that does not really belong to it. Bake Off’s exaggerated vision of twee country life is a manifestation of the latest vogue, a fantasy for television screens and cookbooks that is not made up of memories.

In this way, the constructed romantic village life recalls a text message written by a newspaper editor to David Cameron in 2011, then leader of the Conservative party: “Let’s discuss over country supper soon”. With its encapsulation of the elite’s access to a rural idyll, the phrase casually evoked privilege and the British press exploded. There’s the sense that with all its country kitchen apparatus and abundance of cheerful gingham, GBBO contributes to the way in which an urban media reduces the realities of rural living to a quaint experiment in bread baking.  

And though its vision of Britain may be rose-tinted, Bake Off’s cheery if contrived naivety is what makes its escapism so very appealing. In a country ridden with the anxieties of identity and Brexit Britain, it’s no surprise that this simplified Britishness acts as a comforting palliative. Along with Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film “Dunkirk”, and Netflix series “The Crown”, the show plays its part in a broader national mythmaking movement, where well-constructed nostalgia validates narrow visions of what Britishness should look like. It’s the same imaginary world summoned by John Major in 1993 when he – ironically – argued that Britain should remain in Europe: “Fifty years from now Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and - as George Orwell said – ‘old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist’”.

For a nation that waits anxiously for post-Brexit Britain to unfold, it seems that Bake Off’s teacakes are all that’s left as comfort food.