Great british bake off

Tuesday

Rod Liddle

Welcome home… to a world of beheadings and Bake Off

Apologies for the lengthy interregnum. I was away in the USA for almost three weeks and my mobile phone provider decided I should not be allowed to make or receive any calls while abroad, for which many thanks. Similarly, Hotmail decided I should not be allowed access to my own email account because I could not prove to them that I was myself, having failed to answer the question ‘Who is your favourite fictional character?’ I can’t remember who I chose when first asked. I guessed at ‘Baroness Ashton’ this time around and this was, apparently, the wrong answer. So, anyway, devoid of all the modern appurtenances of life –

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

As a nation of voyeurs, we don’t cook but watch TV cookery programmes instead

When I got married 50 years ago, my wife and I had somehow acquired a little cookery book called Cooking in Ten Minutes. We never quite managed to cook anything in so short a time, mainly, I think, because the book was a bit of a cheat: it seemed to expect you to have a saucepan full of boiling water and a whole lot of washed and prepared vegetables ready before the ten minutes began. We lost the book long ago, but 40 years afterwards I read a volume of essays by Julian Barnes, The Pedant in the Kitchen, in which he devoted an entire chapter to French Cooking in

Thursday

Hugo Rifkind

Six months as a TV critic, and I’ve seen enough corpses to last a lifetime

It was Shetland that tipped me over the edge. Not the place, but the TV series. Although that’s set in the place. So both, really. It’s a crime drama, see, and people keep getting murdered. Roughly speaking, so far, there’s been a corpse every episode. Which by the end of the series will mean eight corpses. Which, given that there are only 20,000 people in Shetland, means that Scotland’s most northerly islands have a murder rate roughly comparable with that of Belize. Or higher, even, because my calculations assume that a series happens in a year, and that we are seeing all the murders there are, rather than just the

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

I want to age like the Three Tenors

In February each year the Oldie magazine gives ‘Oldie of the Year Awards’ to people who show unusual vigour and enterprise in old age. This year’s winner was Mary Berry, the cookery teacher, who at 78 had achieved sudden fame as a presenter and judge on the BBC television show The Great British Bake Off. ‘I just love being an oldie,’ she said. ‘There’s no Botox, no implants and no tucks, and that’s how I think we should all be.’ While this surely reflects the views of Richard Ingrams, the Oldie’s founder and editor, not everyone would agree. To look one’s age as a pastry cook may be no disadvantage,

Thursday

Clarissa Tan

The sight of a rose-and-pistachio cake with lychee flavouring, strewn with petals, makes Clarissa Tan’s heart lift

I’m not crazy about cookery shows. I suspect they indicate how little we are cooking, rather than how much. We’re fascinated with celebrity chefs because we think they’ve mastered something exotic and foreign to us — no surprise their shows are often slotted next to travel programmes. Looking at Jamie Oliver potter about his kitchen, we smugly feel we’ve given some time to cooking, though in reality we’ve done no such thing. On the whole, I think you are better off making yourself some buttered toast than spending an hour watching Anthony Bourdain experiment with spring rolls in Hanoi. The Great British Bake Off (BBC2, Tuesdays) is different. Like Masterchef,