The Great British Bake-Off is one of my favorite things for reasons I don’t even really understand. Even without Mel, Sue and Mary Berry there’s something about the show’s format and the lowest-stakes competition on television (there’s no prize for winning Bake-Off, even the contestants on Nailed It! walk away with more) that makes it compelling drama. And being so low-stakes means the controversies and villains are incredibly minor and kind as well.
Take Laura Adlington, who was clearly the villain of the most recent season of Bake-Off. She seems like an absolutely lovely person and pretty much everyone on the show always gets along, but fans absolutely hated her anyway and I honestly cannot blame them too much.
We don’t get to taste the food the contestants make on The Great British Bake-Off, we can only see it. Week after week, for what seemed like five or six weeks out of ten, we watched Laura bungle her way through the competition, turning in messy piles of food that did look up to the standard of the other contestants at all, and week after week she barely avoided being eliminated, knocking out fan favorites like Mark and Lottie because of much Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith liked the taste of her bakes, the one thing the home audience can’t judge. This frustrated viewers, including me, to no end. It was not as frustrating as The Independent mentioning the season’s winner in a story about Noel Fielding taking paternity leave when the holiday specials filmed before the finale aired on Netflix in the US, but it was still kind of frustrating. Even hosts Noel Fielding and Matt Lucas seemed to imply to Paul and Prue they didn’t think Laura should go through to the final during the penultimate episode.
Laura had to deal with a lot of Twitter trolling and anxiety as the show aired because of this.
Gearing up for every Tuesday night – it was exciting and it was fun, and I don’t want to sound negative about Bake Off, because I really did love it, but dealing with being in the public eye, and Twitter, in particular, was challenging, to say the least.
The issue is, even on Bake-Off, the producers create storylines and villains that don’t really exist. Lottie and Mark were never having any sort of romantic relationship, despite the show heavily implying they were that even Uncle Roger mentioned it.
Likewise, Laura wasn’t a villain, everyone on that show gets along to a fault and Paul and Prue really thought she did better than the bakers they sent home week after week, even though she was always on the cusp of being sent home, so she deserved to be in the final.
But is interesting to see how caught up people can get in a show where amateurs compete for literally just an engraved cake plate to the point where Laura Adlington was treated like she was Kanye West for being a bit sloppy.