Great British Fake Off

Nothing about the new season of GBBO looks right, from its not being on the British Broadcasting Channel (the show jumped to Channel 4) to the distinct lack of Mary Berry to the extremely messed up trailer:

I don’t give a fuck if comedian Noel Fielding played Old Gregg on “The Mighty Boosh” and made me laugh very much; he’s claiming he won’t eat the goddamn cakes. Berry’s replacement, Prue Leith, recently admitted she thought twice about joining the show because of all her work campaigning for healthy foods. In that same interview, Fielding’s co-host Sandi Toksvig claims she’s never watched the show, in what is possibly an extremely unclear joke?????

We’ve got Theseus’s Bake Off on our hands and let me tell you, Mr. Public Relations Analyst who was the one opinion source for this Guardian story about how It’s Going To Be Totally Fine And Everyone’s Gonna Love It: Disrupting The Great British Bake Off, it’s not gonna be good and people aren’t gonna love it. We tried this before in the States—the series is untranslatable. Even though the new hosts and judges are Brits, the producers have managed to take all the joy and spirit out of the thing—the magic ingredient, you might say. The whole beast has become self-aware there is no guile left.

“New lineup will be a hit on Channel 4 precisely because it’s different from what audiences know, analysts say,” reads the subhead of the Guardian piece, which uses the word “disruptive” not once but twice (thank you, PR expert). The only hope is that the contestants bring some fresh life to the show, but perhaps it’s time to admit a certain kind of defeat, or at least twilight. Everything, especially pastries, goes stale.