Who doesn’t like coffee and walnut?” asks Carole, a 59-year-old Dorset woman with waves of fuchsia hair and a hankering for “classic” bakes. It’s a perfectly sensible question. A rhetorical question really, yet the charismatic Carole also has an excellent answer. “Unless you don’t like coffee,” she says, “or are allergic to nuts.”
It was at this moment precisely – 30 minutes into the newest series of Channel 4’s The Great British Bake Off – that I decided to pledge loyalty to Team Carole. She can land a joke. She can make tidy little fondant bumble bees and lip-smacking lemon curd. So it is very sad to me that she’s bound to lose this competition, a competition that at first glance seems like it was designed to be won by a middle-aged woman who loves gardening so dearly that she’s called “Compost Carole”.
Who to support on a reality TV show is a matter of instinct, but across a baker’s dozen of Bake Off series, I’ve developed something of a type. I prefer cheerful contestants to panicked ones. I like contestants that add a little gut instinct to their choux rather than faithfully adhering to a recipe. I like someone who bakes like they’ve made a certain tarte over and again, across years of their lives, rather than having 20 hurried goes in the last week. Basically, I like the older contestants – on Bake Off, however, kitchen experience is a liability.
First, some back-of-the-doily stats. In the history of Bake Off, only one baker over the age of 50 has ever hoisted the glass cakestand victoriously into the air since the show began in 2010. That was season five’s Nancy Birtwhistle, a 60-year-old grandmother. Last year’s winner, Giuseppe Dell’Anno, became the second-oldest at 45 – hardly in line for his free bus pass. Like most of the contestants themselves, a significant proportion of winners have been in their thirties, though there have also been three in their twenties. If the judgement of Paul Hollywood is anything to go by, pudding is a young person’s game.
And yet, I perceive a tension at the heart of Bake Off. Its showstopper round frequently asks contestants to draw from deep wells of nostalgia and, in its technical challenges, to rely on a lifetime spent in an apron. So far in season 13, contestants have been asked to bake a cake in the shape of a home that was meaningful to them and also to make garibaldi biscuits, a 1970s staple so foreign to the young contestants that I felt ancient for simply knowing what they were. Paul, I should note, is 56.
Carole, though, has the potential to defy Bake Off’s ageist pitfalls. She claims to be partial to sturdy, old-fashioned bakes, but flavours her sponge with chicory – a more surprising addition in 2022 than Janusz’s soy sauce. (At 34, this skilled Polish PA from East Sussex is arguably at the peak of his baking prowess.) She’s shocked to be on the show, yet speaks in the vernacular of reality TV like she was raised on it. “Things like this don’t happen to me,” the supermarket cashier tells the camera in her warm West Country lilt. It’s Bake Off’s earnest answer to “I’m not here to make friends”.
Which isn’t to say Carole’s “happy just to be here”. This lady really wants to win. When her showstopper biscuit in the impossible shape of a masquerade mask collapses in episode two, she’s nearly in tears – crestfallen over fallen crust. But it’s what Carole does next that’s got me convinced she can break the curse of the quinquagenarians – a decade that’s never produced a Bake Off champ.
Carole bucks up. She doesn’t quibble with Paul over lard ratios or chalk up her biscuit breakdown to the fickle tent gods. “I really do need to pick me socks up now,” Carole says after squeaking through elimination. “I’ve had a second chance so I need to take it with both hands.”
She might have come very close to the bottom, but she loses like a real winner. In the words of Prue upon tasting Carole’s “To Bee or Not To Bee” lemon-curd cakes: “What’s not to like?”
The Great British Bake Off is on Channel 4 every Tuesday at 8pm
