goncharov trailer discovered in the national film archives my goodness
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$LAYYYTER
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we're not kids anymore.
KIROKAZE

Kaledo Art

roma★
One Nice Bug Per Day
Peter Solarz
YOU ARE THE REASON
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
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Monterey Bay Aquarium

Love Begins

Origami Around
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda

Product Placement
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me

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@seenibunnies
goncharov trailer discovered in the national film archives my goodness
I have been seeing him again...
[Image description: an image of the Pikachu man from the tumblr adverts, and the title shot from "Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King," showing the text "The Return of the whatever the fuck this is" against a backdrop of forests and mountains. /end image description]
actually forget gentrified smores, next time they should do a bake off technical on terrible food people came up with as children but also gentrified
like gentrified crisp and ketchup sandwiches: artisan sourdough bread sliced into triangles with handcooked plain crisps for one. and the other filled richly with tomato chutney passing for ketchup. and one piece of curly parsley placed on top (not meant for eating because it would be too spicy for paul and prue’s mouths).
OK you know what, if we're gonna talk about Bake Off then fuck it, let's do this.
It used to be this wholesome, lovely show! We used to watch it for the bakers! And the learning! And the light banter and occasional bit of coy innuendo! What happened?
Channel 4 happened. When they bought the show they made a number of changes, most of them Not Good™️. Not just in the sense of them resulting in a lot of 😬 and 🫠 moments, but in the sense of how they changed the show's purpose, atmosphere, and brand.
Look, I know most people are just like, "whatever, it's just a baking show," and yeah, sure. But it's one of the UK's most successful TV exports, and where it once shifted the tone of reality competition to being wholesome and supportive of contestants, it's since moved towards creating tension at the contestants' cost. So aside from the fact that most people watching it signed up to watch a nice show, it has also shifted the goalposts of what that even means. And that, lovelies and gentlefolk, is some bullshit.
I decided to break my rant analysis into four main parts: theme weeks, the hosts, the judges, and the bakers. Let's get to it!
Theme Weeks:
If you watch Bake Off, you know the show's always had a specific theme for each week. The staples that come up in most seasons are:
cake
biscuit
bread
pudding/dessert
pastry
patisserie
Less common but consistent are things like caramel and chocolate week.
Then there are the fun episodes! When GBBO was on the BBC, this started out with things tea week, tarts, pies, tray bakes, basically little tangents still focused on emphasizing specific baking skills. In Series 6 (still on the BBC) they had their first nation-focused theme week with French week -- fairly innocuous given that a lot of patisserie is French, France and England share much more culture than either cares to admit [Norman Flag dot gif], and it was a nice change from watching Paul make the bakers do recipes that involved boiling things while talking about how wonderful boiled doughs are (are they, Paul? Are they?).
The show kept mixing it up with innocuous themes like advanced dough and alternative ingredients weeks, European cakes, Victorian week, batter week, and botanical week. And while it was frustrating to watch Paul Hollywood mispronounce things like the Hungarian Dobos Torta and lecture bakers on babka when he clearly knew nothing about it (or about Jewish baking in general, go off Past Me), the show's general attitude was that the judges had their own opinions, which were separate from the immutable facts around the chemistry of baking (more on this later) and shouldn't affect how bakers are judged.
After the show moved to Channel 4, the number of themed weeks increased and more of them focused on specific countries. In 6 seasons on the BBC, there were only two country-focused theme weeks, and in 5 seasons on Channel 4 there have been five. And while they've also had themes like vegan baking, roaring 20s, the 1980s, spice week, etc. the show has really started to go hard on exoticizing other cultures in outright disrespectful and racist ways. There's been Italian and Danish week, German, Japanese (it wasn't, it was East Asian week), and now Mexican week (which doesn't touch on interspersed Jewish bakes that didn't get a theme week, like versions of bagels and babka set as technical challenges that were borderline hate crimes and mansplained by a guy who has no idea how to make either and once wrote in a cookbook that challah was traditionally eaten during Passover). Each time the hosts played up the theme with racist bits and jokes that can be used as evidence in court if your case is "why should shows with scripted content have a professional writing staff."
Which touches on other issues the show has now...
The Hosts:
When GBBO was on the BBC, the show was hosted by ✨Mel Giedroyc✨ and ✨Sue Perkins✨. They encouraged the bakers! They'd hold stuff for them sometimes! They were interested in them! If a baker had a breakdown, they would start singing copyrighted material to render the footage unusable! When the show moved to Channel 4, they left, though I'm not unconvinced that Channel 4 offered them impossible to accept contracts to force them out so they could rebrand the show. They replaced them with Sandy Toksvig and Noel Fielding. Sandy was a lovely host in the vein of Mel and Sue, and she and Noel had a relatively sweet rapport, but she left a few seasons ago and was replaced by Matt Lucas.
Noel Fielding is mostly known for his quirky brand of comedy, a sort of British Zooey Deschanel who's goth from the neck up, an upperclass British gay divorcee from the neck down, and basically an early 60s Beatle re: trousers. Matt Lucas has almost definitely never watched a single episode of GBBO and his most redeeming quality is his thinly veiled contempt for Paul Hollywood.
The two treat the baking tent as their personal playground. Far from the supportive attitude of Mel and Sue, they tend to get in the bakers' way during the most stressful moments, especially when they try to do hilarious "comedy" bits (I can't not put that in quotes) like Noel's talking wooden spoon thing, or Matt talking over Noel to do time calls. During theme weeks like Japanese and Mexican week, they do culture-specific bits that are both racist ("just Juan joke" and "is Mexico a real place?") and unsurprising, given that both Matt and Noel did blackface on their respective sketch shows and absolutely could and should have known better because it was already the current fucking century.
All this to say, there's now a separation between the bakers and the hosts, as if they're on different shows. The hosts are doing their own thing and the bakers are doing GBBO. The show has gotten meaner to the bakers, and the hosts aren't there to support them anymore, they're just there to be comic relief. Because when you refocus your show on stressing the bakers the fuck out, you need a forced laugh I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
The Judges:
First of all, a sincere congratulations to Paul Hollywood who managed to squeeze I jUsT cAmE bAcK fRoM mExIcO aNd YeT sTiLL pRoNoUnCe PiCo De GaLLo As 'PiKa De KaLLa' and I aM aN eXpErT oN s'MoReS wHiCh aRe MaDe WiTh DiGeStiVe BiScUiTs AcCoRdiNg tO mE, aN eXpErT oN s'MoReS, just two in a giant pile of astoundingly wrong hot takes, into a short enough time span that they all aired within Liz Truss's term as Prime Minister. A true man of accomplishments.
In the interest of fairness, I need to preface this with a disclaimer that, due to the fact that I've been watching Bake Off for most of its run, I'm biased. Specifically, I can't stand Paul Hollywood's smarmy, classist, egomaniac ass because he's proven time and again he's more interested in looking smart than actually knowing what he's talking about. Since the show moved to Channel 4, they've changed the occasional handshake Paul would give bakers to the HoLlYwOoD hAnDsHaKe™️. It's gone from being an emphasis of someone's skill to a goal, a reward, and one that emphasizes the judges' place above the bakers.
The judges used to function as teachers, imparting their skills and insights to the bakers. When the show was on the BBC, the voiceover leading to a judging would focus on the bakers' work being finished, saying how it will now be evaluated based on their skill and how well they met the brief. The voiceovers now, on Channel 4, focus on the judging (literally saying something along the lines of, "the bakers will now be judged by Prue and Paul"). There is a clear distinction Channel 4's producers have made, to mark that the show is now about whether or not the judges approve, not whether the brief was understood and executed well. On the BBC, it was irrelevant whether the judges liked a particular flavor, as long as the bake was well-made. Now, the bakers are expected to know the judges tastes and cater to them, which is frankly bullshit. A judge doesn't have to like a flavor to know whether or not it was executed well, ie. is it carrying a bake and was it meant to etc.
The judges have been turned into a brand. Cynically, Channel 4 knows that by building them up and focusing the show more on them, they can exploit their image more for profit. In the process, they've become much more biased and their own biases have come out as well. Most recently in the flaming dumpster fire that was Mexican Week, Paul Hollywood tried to intimidate a baker by telling them he had just gotten back from Mexico (which must have been a fruitful learning trip if he couldn't even learn how to pronounce pico de gallo correctly). Where do I even start with this? Here's an amateur baker from England (the show specifically casts middle and lower middle class bakers for the most part??) who likely can't afford trips to Mexico, who lives in a country with incredibly limited access to Mexican cuisine, who is expected not only to understand the cooking and baking traditions of a completely different culture but to do so well enough to play with it and do something creative with it. On top of which, one of the judges is now using his privilege of traveling halfway around the world as some kind of leverage, as if this were a bar that any amateur British baker could clear.
Prue, meanwhile, has openly asserted her biases against cultural flavors and textures, prioritizing her own personal preferences over them, as if they were in any way relevant to the skills and knowledge necessary to execute the tasks she sets to the bakers. She has also been consistently elitist, criticizing bakers for choices they made that were clearly informed by their experiences within income brackets that are too low and foreign for Prue to comprehend. She once had a go at a baker on a Christmas special because his Christmas dinner themed bake didn't have a turkey, even though it was clear from the stories he shared of his own Christmases that his family likely couldn't afford one. "It's not really Christmas dinner without a turkey," Prue said into the camera angrily while sitting on a chair made of live orphans and telling the ghost of Christmas Future to come back when he had another museum gift shop necklace for her to round out her collection.
The show is no longer about which baker has the best skills. It's become about which mortal can appease the gods of Mount Olympus, ie. the judges.
The Bakers:
Remember when the show was about them? Channel 4 doesn't! Because this is a reality competition show, the bakers are chosen both based on their skills, as well as cast-ability. They're cast as characters, distinct from each other, from different areas, age groups, ethnicities. All of them are amateurs. All of them are middle or lower middle class. They've ranged from college students to supermarket cashiers to prison wardens to scientists.
Something I noticed when the show moved to Channel 4 is that the baker who goes home in the first week is always wildly behind the rest in skills. I have no proof of this other than my eyeballs and deductive reasoning skills, but I think that Channel 4 deliberately casts a ringer each season who they think will be an easy send-off in the first week, just to get the audience's feet wet.
Anyway, like I said, this show used to be about the bakers - about them building skills and learning, and having walked into the tent with a self-taught foundation and understanding of the processes and chemical reactions involved in baking. When the show was on the BBC, the end of each round had some (often brief) moments of tension - will they finish in time? Will they get their bakes on the plate before time is up? Did they forget to add sugar to their batter and only remember at the last minute? In the end, they usually managed to finish and we'd all breathe a sigh of relief and think, yeah! You go, Bakers Who I'm Rooting For!
Now, on Channel 4, the end of round drama has been stretched to be so much longer that they've composed extra music for it. The bakers often seem out of their depth, whether because the instructions for the technical challenge are too vague (bake a lemon meringue pie??? As if anyone in the UK under the age of 60 has had one in the last decade???), or because they were expected to bake something that required a more than a basic foundation they weren't told of. Often it seems like they just aren't given enough time, a tactic used by reality competition shows to manipulate contestants into giving the cameras more dramatic content. On top of all this, the hosts get in their way, instead of helping them plate their bakes. As has been pointed out before, when everyone fails the challenge, the real failure lies with whoever set it.
In conclusion:
The show no longer exists to teach the bakers - and the audience - skills or knowledge. It now manipulates contestants for dramatic effect and prioritizes showing conflict over wholesome content. Channel 4 sees the bakers as social media content they can churn out season after season, and don't care about them because in a few months there'll be a new batch to exploit. Meanwhile, the judges are also out of their depth, co-opting recipes from other cultures and butchering them horrendously, while the camera gives them nothing but status as they hold bakers to the expectation that they learn how to make things very much the wrong way. If you saw any of the tweets about Mexican or Japanese week, or read my post on how Paul Hollywood isn't allowed to go near babka ever again, you'll understand.
So what would fix all this? Scrap the current judges and the hosts altogether. Bring back Mel and Sue, and replace the judges with expert bakers who have a love of their craft and want to share it with others. The draw of GBBO used to be its warmth and comfort - if Channel 4 isn't going to start its own version of Master Chef For Bakers, then it needs to stop trying to find a balance of how it can insert that vibe into GBBO. It can't. That's not a thing. Stop trying.
I have weird hang-ups about competition shows so, even though it was the nice one where the hosts tried to preserve contestants’ dignity, I refused to get into GBBO. But I heard occasional “fun” excerpts, like when James Acaster was a contestant.
It’s funny, even if I’m getting second-hand embarrassment. Comedian can’t bake for shit, but he can make us laugh, right?
Then I heard him talk about it.
Jesus Christ, no looking after the contestants here. Sure enough, this was after the switch to Channel 4.
I feel bad for fans of what used to be the one nice baking show.
This analysis highlights so clearly and precisely so many things are wrong with Bake Off these days. It used to be one of my favourite things to watch. Even those bits of “history of baking” where Mel or Sue went to talk to professionals about the week’s theme/one of the challenges. Country-themed weeks could have been fun, if they accompanied it with something like this and brought in an expert guest judge. It had one good series on Channel 4 before it lost its way. This year I didn’t bother watching.
I think one thing that wasn’t mentioned in the OP but that’s been important for the success of the show, was Mary Berry. Mel and Sue even claimed they only would have followed to C4 if Mary had. Mary had already written 45 cookery books before Bake Off. She was the Big Name Judge on Bake Off, not Paul. The criticism she gave was different. She made an effort to be constructive. If something was not entirely to her personal taste, she wouldn’t make a big deal of it. If something looked a bit messy, she’d call it rustic and leave it at that. (Paul Hollywood had a screaming fit on a recent semi-final because someone didn’t glaze the fruits on their tarts ffs). She’d often disagree with Paul’s harsher takes and didn’t let Paul talk over her. She was kinder (albeit sometimes stern). Even if Paul was dismissive of her wealth of knowledge, I don’t think anyone else in that tent was. And unlike Paul, Mary freely admitted when there were holes in her knowledge (unfortunately Paul would then come in with his bad info).
I also don’t think we can blame everything on Channel 4. I wonder if what we have now might be the show Love Productions wanted to make all along. Mel and Sue have stated in interviews that they didn’t like how in the first BBC series the production staff kept needling the bakers for drama, asking stuff like “and what would your dead grandmother think of how you performed today” to get them to cry on camera. And Mel and Sue weren’t having it, they threatened to walk unless they stopped doing this. (and ofc also did the unbroadcastable language and hiding contestants from cameras thing as already mentioned). Now Bake Off is so big, this threat doesn’t work. They can just replace a host who complains.
Another source for decline was when C4 Bake Off started using more and more young contestants than before. I remember a couple of headlines like “youngest group of bakers ever”. And I’m sure this is because they are easier to torment for drama. One final they were constantly needling this young baker on how her parents might not be there for the results, because their plane was delayed or sth. She was in tears for most of the episode. The other two finalists were also were reduced to tears a few times. The atmosphere in the tent was so bad.
This programme was carried by Mary, Mel and Sue and Paul was the token bastard which every competition show uses for a bit of conflict i guess. I think in that particular configuration, Paul worked, because he couldn’t go full bastard. Now the show is lead by two bastard judges, 2 hosts who take the focus away from the baking, and a group of increasingly younger, more stressed bakers.
BBC’s GBBO gave us Nadiya Hussain, a Muslim Bangladeshi woman with low self-confidence who became this amazing, witty baker during her series. When she won, I was in tears too. Now she’s a national treasure with her own prime-time shows. On today’s Bake Off, she would have been crushed before the halfway point of the series.
I drew these December 2021 and just completely forgot to post them
“She’s taken his voice…”
“You know exactly what I’m going to say. How are you doing that? Roast beef! Bananas! The Medusa Cascade. Bang! Rose Tyler Martha Jones Donna Noble TARDIS! Shamble bobble dibble dooble. Oh Doctor, you’re so handsome. Yes I am! Thank you. A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O…”
vessel for a hero
This stupid exchange between friends has become a cultural icon.
This text thread brought us into a new age
favorite comedies that ended too soon ≡ Better Off Ted
“God, you people are paranoid. No wonder the company has to secretly manipulate you.”
Shows that continue to age well and continue to be fucking hilarious
Speed (1994) incorrectly credits Jan De Bont as director. Speed did not have any director, because if Speed had any direction, it would’ve been called Velocity
obama included fleabag as one of his favorite shows of 2019 which means he watched the scene in the first episode where fleabag masturbates to a video of him talking. use this information or don’t
oh
i am tired and i will never be free
Chiou and Bergey (2018)
(Zoom waaaay in on their figure 1)
Relating to that last anon about oranges, if there was a way to get only one ovary (I don’t remember the proper word) fertilized, what would happen? Nothing? A single orange slice? An orange with no slices? Love your blog btw
yes!! this but this is called ‘incomplete pollination’ and i cant find any pics of it in oranges but it is a thing that happens, especially in places with fewer bees and pollinators (like the pollen just…doesnt quite get there). this honey bee website has a few examples:
pears (right one is missing a couple):
cucumbers:
tomatoes (notice that the right side is producing the correct hormone to make it ripen, but the left isnt, because….its empty….theres nothing there….):
this is apparently what it looks like in watermelons, where the lack of tissue development causes it to split on the inside:
strawberries:
raspberries (healthy fruit at far left, middle and right are incompletely pollinated):
the plants just….dont really know what to do and Do That instead, and wonkiness ensures. its all fun and games until u realize this is what the fruits of a ton of plants will consistently look like if the bees die out
The Great Tumblr Purge (2018, recolorized)
“Let us mourn her with a traditional ballad.”