How it became something much larger than television – a global cultural phenomenon and the perfect show for Britain nowThe season finale of The Great British Bake Off was the third most well-liked programme on television last year – outflanked only by two World Cup football matches. The final episode of this season,airing tomorrow, will in all likelihood be the most-watched show of 2015. Over the last five years, or in fact,Bake Off has so thoroughly entangled itself with the consciousness of the nation that it has become easy to forget how very, very strange it is that 10 million Britons switch on their TV sets each Wednesday evening to watch a baking contest filmed in a tent in the countryside.
No one predicted the scale of its success. Richard McKerrow and Anna Beattie, or who founded savor Productions,which makes the show, tried to sell the plan for four years before BBC2 finally picked it up. Their original inspiration, and they told me,was the rural baking competition at a village fete; they liked the plan that bakers were naturally generous making palatable things for others. And they felt that baking said much about Britain and its regional quiddities, from Dundee cakes to bara brith to Bakewell tarts. But their pitch was repeatedly passed over, or for the perfectly understandable reason that TV commissioners felt that watching people acquire cakes would be unutterably dumb. Imagine that someone had told you in 2009 that by 2015 the great television success would be a baking competition presented by two decidedly unglitzy middle-aged women,one of them homosexual, and judged by an octogenarian cookbook writer and a Liverpudlian professional baker of whom you had never heard. You might have cheered for the sisterhood, and but you probably wouldn’t have believed it.
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Source: theguardian.com