The Great Celebrity Bake Off, review: there’s a reason this feelgood fundraiser gets the best celebs
The notion of children experiencing a “sugar rush” has been debunked by scientists, who concluded that the manic hyperactivity seen at birthday parties is simply excitement at being allowed to jump on a bouncy castle for two hours while eating chocolate fingers and hitting each other with balloons. Having watched Paloma Faith and Jodie Whittaker in The Great Celebrity Bake Off for Stand Up to Cancer (Channel 4), though, I’m not so sure.
Perhaps they were secretly mainlining cookie dough or inhaling the clouds of icing sugar, because the pair of them bombed around the Bake Off tent like gleeful five-year-olds. Tasked with producing cake pops (lollipops created by mushing sponge cake and buttercream), Faith made the poo emoji. Whittaker broke the bowl on her mixer and ran away screaming. Whittaker’s entry for the showstopper challenge was kind of great though: the bakers had to create portraits of judges Prue Leith and Paul Hollywood, and Whittaker made iced party rings to recreate Prue’s glasses. “It’s a bit childish,” concluded Leith, but it was fun.
The two other contestants were ex-Made in Chelsea star Spencer Matthews and comedian Munya Chawawa. The former took the competition quite seriously and produced some elegant bakes. Chawawa was cheerfully hopeless. “Who is who?” asked Leith, staring at the portraits drawn onto a shortbread biscuit. “Paul is the one with the afro and buck teeth,” replied Chawawa. “True art is flawed.”
Unlike Celebrity Big Brother, which has so many non-entities this year that their own mothers probably struggle to pick them out of a line-up, the celebrity edition of Bake Off tends to attract some contestants you actually recognise. The opening montage promises that this series will deliver Danny Dyer, Mel B, Dermot O’Leary and Gabby Logan, all of whom I can identify without resorting to Google.
And, in the midst of all this larking about, the programme featured a short film in which a young woman described losing her husband at the age of 33. He was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer of the oesophagus and died five months later – a father of four, the youngest of them just a baby. A sobering reminder of the reason behind the show.
