The Great British Bake Off (Channel 4)

Rating:

As I age, keeping up with the accelerating demands of technology can be nearly impossible — but I never thought I’d end up underqualified to eat a biscuit.

As the showstopper round began on The Great British Bake Off, Paul Hollywood warned, ‘Engineering, architectural and artistic skills are all integral to this challenge.’ Fellow judge Prue Leith added that she wanted ‘brave and witty’ creations. And if you don’t have a degree in dunking, don’t bother.

The standards required of contestants this year are simply silly. When the series returned last week, the first task had cakemakers decorating a Swiss roll with complex designs including a honeycomb with bees, Ukrainian ‘passion petals’, and a depiction of Queen’s University Belfast. I repeat, on a Swiss roll.

This time, the opening round was even more bewildering. The bakers made oblong loaves with a picture pattern running through them like the words in a stick of rock. Then they sliced the loaves into chunky biscuits.

Three people created the face of a pet. One did his baby’s portrait. ‘Keep it simple,’ urged Paul, which was a ridiculous stipulation. These people were making platefuls of biscuits that were more like Polaroids. Whatever else this show is now, simplicity has nothing to do with it.

And that’s a great shame, because one of the joys of Bake Off used to be how straight-forward it was.

If the recipes are over-engineered, so is some of the dialogue. One bit of banter between Alison Hammond and baker Leighton, about her appearance on Celebrity Bake Off five years ago, was obviously scripted.

The baker who serves up an ordinary tearoom treat is likely to be punished with Paul’s choicest sneers. He reduced one man, Aaron, almost to tears with harsh disparagement of how his showstopper looked: ‘I was happy with the baking, but everything else . . . awful!’

Poor Aaron must have been fooled by the title into thinking this was still a baking show — a fatal error.

Other criticisms were equally brutal. ‘This is a classic example of style over substance,’ Paul told another baker, Toby, whose showstopper fell short.

Toby looked mortified. Minutes earlier, he’d won the technical challenge for the second week running, by knocking out a trayful of chocolate-coated iced caramel hobnobs.

Some of his rivals made a right mess of that, and paid for it. ‘You need a machete to cut it, it’s so thick,’ Paul told one. ‘Were you trying to pipe the icing through a hose?’ he taunted another.

His grumpiness has never been far from the surface but this year his trademark ‘Hollywood handshake’ appears to have been replaced by a ‘Hollywood slap in the face’.

‘I can’t identify what it is,’ he barked at Pui Man, from Hong Kong. ‘It’s a biscuit,’ she whispered sadly. Does it really have to be any more than that?