In other matters

...I hope it is not an indication of age that I prefer The Great British Bake-Off to The Borgias. The former has got to be the most British of TV programmes; a baking contest presided over by Mary Berry. If you've been watching you will know she's the queen of baking and very renowned and respected, as the contestants were endlessly reminded;

'And it must be so daunting to have Mary judging you,'
Right answer:'Oh yes, no, I wouldn't want to let Mary down...'
Wrong answer: 'Who the fudge is Mary?'

It involves a little bit of food history, the man who baked Churchill's 80th birthday cake, including a decoration on the side referring to Winnie's expertise in bricklaying; the origin of the cup cake stemming from, er, cups, the background of the battenburg, that sort of thing. I watch with the awe of a child who could never boil eggs, never mind bake a proper cake. The whole thing is almost anal in its precision (the cup cake mixture must not spill out over the cake case apparently. What happens if it does? Does it automatically qualify as a muffin or something?) But the judging is so gentle...'One of you has not impressed the judges enough to go onto the next round...'

My favourite bit, of which I am desperate to find a proper transcript*, was an exchange between a wildly enthusiastic presenter and a young man with earrings, the latter attempting to make a Thomas the Tank Engine Cake. Said cake was decorated with green icing, to represent the verdure of the valleys, on which the baker was going to create train tracks plus a tunnel out of which Thomas would emerge.

'A tunnel!' squeaked the presenter, 'A real tunnel?'
'No,' said the young man, eyeballing her with a look of wonder, 'A cake tunnel.'
'A cake tunnel!' She echoed happily, 'Not a real tunnel, of course, a cake tunnel.' She tried not to seem crestfallen. Cake tunnel yes. Cake is what the show is about. Berry is judging, Brunel must wait.

As it turned out, the young man may as well have been digging a real tunnel for all the good it did; his efforts were deemed poorest. It's never fun to come last but it must be particularly galling when 'last' means behind even the guy who threw a layer of his cake on the floor. But there was something so heartening about the way everyone leapt in to help rescue the wreckage, and the judges gallantly tasted the scraped remnants, only to announce that it was delicious.

And the Borgias? Oh, someone got stiffed and the pope got a new mistress. Woteva.

*recorded here as precisely as I remember