Great British Baking Show Broke the Technical Challenge
Spoilers follow for the 16th season of The Great British Baking Show, the finale of which premiered on Netflix on Friday, November 7.
After this deeply lackluster season of The Great British Baking Show, I have words for Paul Hollywood, Prue Leith, and the production team: The technical has gone stale. Time to throw it in the bin and start over from scratch.
All due congratulations to Jasmine Mitchell, who won by making efficient, if not exactly memorable, bakes that stuck to classic flavors that never ventured too far beyond Paul and Prue’s preferences. But her win came at the end of a season that was most notable for a recurring pretense: that the technical matters as much as the signature and the showstopper. This entire season made clear that is simply not the case, a statement as ludicrous as, say, “Paul’s level of bronze is naturally obtained.” As the series has continued, the technical has become progressively harder and the contestants’ success with it that much rarer, making for a challenge that’s become increasingly difficult to factor into the equation of who should win and lose each week. The technical now only matters when Paul and Prue decide it matters, and even for a competition series defined by the judges’ subjectivity, the uneven handling of the technical has become a frustrating indication of how far GBBS has strayed from the format that made it a sensation. The contestants have now grown up in the GBBS era, and their awareness of what the judges want, and how important it is to practice signatures and showstoppers before they arrive in the tent, has eroded the comparative importance of the technical. The homework now matters more than the test, and that imbalance fundamentally changes the nature of the competition.
Theoretically, each of GBBS’s three weekly challenges is equally weighted, designed to demonstrate different skills and abilities that add up to the measure of the baker. The signature is like the baker’s calling card, an offering that conveys their preferred flavor profiles and style, while the showstopper is more ambitious, testing what the contestants can deliver when they’re pushed to their limits. A signature can receive a Hollywood handshake; a showstopper can save a baker on the edge of elimination. In between the two of those, humbler but still essential, is the technical. With no advance notice on what they’ll be tasked with making, how will the bakers perform when challenged on their knowledge and their instincts?
Once upon a time, when GBBS used to have a broader age range of competitors, the technical allowed for more of a sense of who the bakers were, their histories and experiences. Think of how contestants like season five’s Nancy Birtwhistle or season seven’s Jane Beedle would crush technicals because they’d made these bakes for their families before and could reveal a bit of their inner lives by sharing those memories. But as the series has gone on, the contestants have skewed younger and more inexperienced, while the challenges across the board have gotten more esoteric. (Or simply ill conceived, like that infamously bad taco challenge.) The result is that the technicals in particular have suffered in terms of actual competitive spirit; they’re now a kind of group torture. Instructions are increasingly sparse and often nonexistent, and the amount of baking time provided has gotten tighter. Paul and Prue’s expectations are still high, but the overall quality of the technicals is inconsistent, even shoddy, because the bakers now making it onto the show frequently don’t quite have the expertise to deliver what the technicals demand, or the time allowed is absurdly low.
The technical used to be a way for contestants to demonstrate hitherto undeclared abilities. Now, they’re the series’ most reliable way to humiliate the bakers via sequences that poke fun at their failures, like the montage of them struggling to make piping bags with parchment paper during Back to School Week or those lingering shots of poorly frosted fondant fancies during Cake Week. (Back in season seven, fondant fancies were a semifinal showstopper; now, they’re the season premiere’s technical challenge, which shows you just how much the series has upped its expectations.) Technicals used to be fun because we got to see contestants realizing they knew more than they thought they did; now, the reveal is typically that they actually know less. The result is that there’s no longer a real pattern to how people will do in technicals, and the arc of each season has consequently become more topsy-turvy. Think of how often the judges, during their first check-in with Noel and Alison, say that contestants who did well with signatures then did poorly with technicals, or vice versa. Technicals were always meant to be difficult, but the results are now so disparate that the technical is no longer a genuinely revealing glimpse into what the bakers can do.
To the show’s credit, it did switch up the technicals this season, so clearly the producers realized something wasn’t working. These attempts, though, still felt weighted against the contestants. Cake Week’s “choose your own adventure” of ingredients, with extra options available to the bakers that weren’t actually meant to be in the fondant fancies, was a manipulative setup that nearly everyone failed by adding almond flour to their batter. Chocolate Week’s white-chocolate tart was impossible to judge objectively since the bakers were able to choose whatever components they wanted, so none of the tarts were actually one-to-one comparisons. GBBS is obviously trying to make the technical more exciting with these changes, but what the series actually needs to do is to make it feel essential to the competition again. For years now, technicals haven’t seemed like they have the influence of either the signature or the showstopper, which allows Paul and Prue to factor the technical into their decision-making however the hell they feel at any given time. If Paul and Prue want to use the technical as justification to send someone home or give them Star Baker, it’s suddenly the most important barometer of the bakers’ potential or limitations; otherwise, it’s a nonfactor.
It’s been too long since the technical was shown as being considered with the same gravity as the other challenges, which made it that much weirder this season when suddenly, Paul and Prue decided that a baker’s performance on the technical was enough to cancel out other successes. Pui Man Li delivered an amazing coconut sweet-bread showstopper in Bread Week, but went home thanks to her last-place showing in the doughnut technical. During Chocolate Week, Nadia Mercuri’s thick, undercooked white-chocolate-tart base was used as the tipping point for her expulsion, although her tiramisu showstopper was praised for flavor. Toby Littlewood got the boot for his goopy framboisier in the semifinal, although his macaron showstopper was described as one of the best-looking and best-tasting.
But as the season continued and even the upper echelon of contestants did poorly on technicals like gala pies, raspberry soufflés, and steamed puddings, Prue and Paul couldn’t maintain that approach. Finalist Aaron Mountford-Myles was also last in two technicals, in Pastry Week and Desserts Week, and second-to-last for Pâtisserie Week; his showstoppers those episodes were similarly lackluster, yet Paul and Prue decided he should stick around. (Aaron should have apologized to the world’s sloths for that macaron display.) And in an outcome that felt predetermined, Jasmine won the final despite coming in third in the technical, a madeleine-tower challenge. To be fair, Aaron, Jasmine, and Tom Arden all struggled with the technical, with none of them achieving the madeleine’s distinct hump or the correct placement of the ribbon topper Paul and Prue (hilariously) claimed to take into consideration during judging. But their uniform poor showing is a telling sign of how arduous the technical has become, and essentially how irrelevant.
If even the series’ front-runners can’t wrap their minds around what the technical is asking of them, then what’s the challenge really accomplishing? And if some people are eliminated for poor showings in technicals but others slide through, where’s the sense that the technical actually matters, since it can be pushed aside whenever the judges want? The skills it’s supposed to illuminate — like what a dough or batter is supposed to feel or look like, or an idea of how long certain elements should bake for — are arguably the most revealing about the bakers, since they don’t get a chance to practice technicals like they do signatures or showstoppers. By ignoring or prioritizing the technical results however they desire, Paul and Prue are saying they don’t want the best instinctive bakers; they want the people who can execute ideas they’ve already been able to prepare and practice for. No matter how much they keep trying to dress this challenge up, all the fancy ribbons in the world can’t disguise the fact that the technical has become an unsightly mess.
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