Nadiya Hussain’s recipes have become staples in households across the country and acquired for the TV presenter and cookery writer the status of national treasure. However, her reaction to the BBC’s decision not to commission a new series from her leaves a bitter taste and prompts the thought that her secret ingredient all along might have been celebrity entitlement.
Over the weekend, the Great British Bake Off winner posted a video update on Instagram for her 950,000 followers. After explaining her social media absence (events in Gaza were making it ‘hard to post about food in a positive way’) and letting us know about changes in her professional dealings (‘I’m way more mindful of who I work with, brands I work with, especially if they are brands that support the genocide’), Hussain revealed that the BBC had ‘decided that they didn’t want to commission a show’. This marked ‘a huge turning point because it’s something I’ve done for the past ten years’ but she was ‘really excited’ about the future and would be ‘trying to be my truest, most honest self’.
She explained:
‘I was already on this steady trajectory of change and I was kind of thinking about where I wanted my career to go, and when BBC decided that they didn’t want to commission the show anymore, it really did kind of solidify everything for me, and it made me kind of dig my heels in and think “Okay, I know where I want to be.”’
Pare back the first-world-problems confessional prose and the jarring metaphors – can you dig your heels in while on a trajectory of change? – and what you’ll find is grievance. Hussain wants us to know not only that the BBC hasn’t invited her to make another programme, a decision that would naturally be disappointing for her, but that she is a victim.
Of what, you ask?
She continues:
‘Actually, you know, it’s really difficult as a Muslim woman, I work in an industry that doesn’t always support people like me or recognise my talent or full potential. There’s a lot of gaslighting, making me feel like what’s actually happening isn’t happening.’
That ‘as a Muslim woman’ comes out of nowhere and squats unpleasantly at the centre of this drama. Hussain does not elaborate, so it is difficult to tell if something has happened behind closed doors to make her feel that her religious affiliation is implicated here. It would be unusual if that were the case given how heavily the BBC has invested in her as a face of the corporation’s lifestyle programming. Might it be that, rather than the media industry changing, it is Hussain herself and her outlook that have changed? In 2017, she shared her concern that she might have been Bake Off’s ‘token Muslim’, when she considered her Muslim identity ‘incidental’, but by 2020 she was telling the Observer a different story.
In that interview, she described herself as ‘a brown Muslim woman, working in a very male-dominated, Caucasian industry’, admitting that, had she been asked about these matters five years previously ‘I wouldn’t have entertained it. I would have said, Look, can we just talk about the cooking and the baking?’ However, she pointed to the Black Lives Matter movement as a turning point, saying that the conversations it provoked ‘would have made me uncomfortable’ in the past because part of me wants to be a part of the white middle-aged Caucasian industry’. Hussain had since decided that: ‘The truth is, I’m never going to blend in. They will always tower over me, they will always be whiter than me, and they will be more English than I am, and they’re men. I will never, ever blend in.’
That the industry she reproaches has gone out of its way to promote her
Her ‘as a Muslim woman’ makes more sense in this context. If she has been mistreated or discriminated against because of her Islamic faith or her skin colour, that is reprehensible and those responsible should feel profound shame at treating anyone in that manner, let alone a great British success story like Hussain. Certainly, she has come in for contemptible racial and religious abuse in the past, but it is hard to imagine such attitudes being commonplace in the highly progressive and evermore diverse worlds of London TV production and publishing.
Then again, her reference to the BLM movement in that Observer interview possibly hints at something else. The summer of madness that followed the murder of George Floyd taught us many things, and one of the most informative was the success of identity politics in recruiting hitherto apolitical people to its army of righteous victimhood. Viewing every event, personal and political, local and global, through the lens of race and other immutable characteristics became socially acceptable, if not virtuous, if not compulsory.
Maybe that’s all that’s at work here, identity politics narcissism, and if so, it’s nothing we haven’t heard from plenty of other celebrities. But it still doesn’t account for Hussain’s assertion that her industry ‘doesn’t always support people like me or recognise my talent or full potential’. Without wishing to be rude, if she feels her talent and potential haven’t been properly recognised after a decade of fame and fortune in which she became almost inescapable on TV, newspapers, magazines and bookstores, what would it take to satisfy her? Baking a cake for the Royal Family? Done it. Appearing on Desert Island Discs? Been there. An MBE? Got one.
Has Hussain considered that, far from being hard done by, she is a very privileged woman who has had opportunities heaped upon her for the last ten years? That the industry she reproaches has gone out of its way to promote her, in one venture after another? That just because, after all this, she still expects more, doesn’t mean she’s entitled to it?
Apart from The Great British Bake Off, The Chronicles of Nadiya, Nadiya’s British Food Adventure, Nadiya’s Family Favourites, Nadiya’s Party Feasts, Nadiya’s Asian Odyssey, Nadiya’s Time to Eat, Nadiya Bakes, Nadiya’s American Adventure, Nadiya’s Everyday Baking, Nadiya’s Simple Spices, Nadiya’s Cook Once, Eat Twice, 18 appearances on The One Show, 15 appearances on Loose Women, a column in The Times, ten cookbooks, six children’s books, three picture books, and an autobiography, what has the media industry ever done for Nadiya Hussain?
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