Bake-Off blamed viewers for producers’ problems

This week, into the Great British Baking Show tent we go to discuss its Audience Choice week. How does it fit in to the pattern of reality TV shows—from American Idol to Survivor 50—blaming viewers for what are ultimately producers’ decisions?

Transcript

On your mark, get set, bake!
I mean, blame the audience for some bad bake-off challenges.
It’s Made from Humans: How Reality Becomes TV.
[music]
I’m your host, Andy Dehnart, the creator of Reality Blurred, and a writer who believes in the power of true stories.
We’re in the Great British Baking Show tent today to look at the audience choice episode, which followed other shows in allowing viewers to choose the path that players and contestants take.
Is that just an excuse for some bad producing?
[end music]
Welcome!
Let’s start today with some Behind the Blog, where I discuss how the blogging and podcasting magic happens.
Today at Reality Blurred’s worldwide headquarters has been an unexpected start to my morning. I’m recording this a little later than I anticipated because our cute little cat—who is so demure and quiet, probably the most demure and quietest of the three—caught a squirrel this morning because a squirrel slid right off our roof, basically into her mouth.
She chased after it. I thought she was just chasing it, and I stood up and looked, and she actually had it pinned down on the ground.
And I was like, “Oh fuck, what do I do now?”
Thankfully, she let go. The squirrel ran up the tree and yelled at her, and she ran away and spent some time checking her out.
As you know, if you have cats, they are extremely good at letting you care for them and, you know, do things like clip their nails or give them medicine. So that was not fun for either of us, but she didn’t seem to have any puncture wounds or scrapes or cuts or anything, which is amazing.
Thankfully, she’s vaccinated for rabies and otherwise will probably be fine if there was something like that, other than an infection.
So keep an eye on her, and I guess keep an eye on me too, because it just was a kind of wild and unexpected start to my day.
And like I said, thus I’m recording a little bit late.
Also, just as some background here for the podcast that you’re currently listening to: I’ve been experimenting and playing around with the schedule and sort of bouncing around based on shows during the week.
For example, an episode after Project Runway over the summer, or after Survivor’s premiere earlier in September, or last week was right after the season finale of Below Deck.
I realize that for me, when I listen to podcasts, I really appreciate the consistency. I love that every Wednesday and every Friday there’s a new episode of Extra Hot Great, the podcast about TV that I love listening to.
I love that every Monday I’m going to have a new episode of Awesome Etiquette from the Emily Post Institute waiting for me in my app.
So I love that kind of consistency, and even when shows are kind of on and off for seasons, I appreciate that too.
I realize I’m not providing that consistency, but I’m also just trying new things. So if you have feedback, I would be glad to hear it.
I’m constantly wondering where a new episode is, and it doesn’t show up until some random time. But I think I’m trying to aim for Tuesdays generally.
That feels like a good day for my schedule and also for the podcast landscape in general. Like, there are fewer TV podcasts, I think, that come out on Tuesdays.
So hopefully it kind of fills the gap in your week, if you have one, for TV podcasts. If that’s where I am fitting into your life, then great.
But wherever I’m fitting in, thank you so much, and thanks for sticking with me.
And let’s go on to the actual content, where we are going to go into the department analyzing the analysis.
I almost said “analyzing the analysis,” but I guess same difference.
We’re analyzing the analysis, where I look more closely at a show and/or my critiques of it.
And today is really about language—the language that shows use that I think sometimes allows producers and/or networks to pretend that they have no role in what we’re seeing.
It’s already kind of amazing how much of production falls into the background of most shows. The editing should be seamless and just feel really organic and natural to us, even when it’s having fun.
The producing—in terms of like setting up everything from casting to the environment—should feel pretty organic. And of course, we’re not seeing camera operators and mics, and mics being put onto people.
We’re not seeing things like on Survivor, where every single player gets checked by medical before and after every challenge and before tribal council, which came into play last week on Survivor 51 when we had Rob quit the show.
He was insisting that he was injured but had not told anyone during any of those checks. And then the doctor came to the beach and checked him out and couldn’t find anything.
And Rob left anyway, which I have thoughts about. I’ll link that in the show notes.
But it’s just one of those things that you don’t know they’re always getting seen by medical personnel, and that happens in private too.
So if Rob had something he was concerned about but didn’t want to affect the game or his fellow players’ perception of the game, he could have safely mentioned that to the doctors.
Of course, someone might want to hide something because they don’t want to be pulled from the game, and there’s all kinds of variations there.
But we’re not here to talk about doctors. We’re here to talk about language.
And this came to me from the Great British Baking Show, or as it’s known where it comes from—the UK—as the Great British Bake Off. They had the first ever audience week last week.
And “audience week” just meant that the audience chose all of the challenges for the episode.
I will say, to start off with, this kind of language where we talk about viewers has always bothered me, just because it feels like exaggeration and marketing.
And my best—you know, the first example I really remember—was American Idol, which is like at the end of every episode or before the eliminations, Ryan Seacrest would be like, “America voted.”
And it’s like, no. Some people who are watching American Idol voted.
So sure, maybe you had to limit it to people in the continental United States based on time zones, or I can’t remember if Hawaii and Alaska were included in those votes as well.
Whatever the case might be, it was just always this idea that all of America has voted right now, and that’s of course not true.
It’s just a kind of rhetorical flourish that suggests this person is your American Idol, America.
It probably bothers me a little bit too that it was just like referring to America all the time, and it just becomes this weird sort of nonsensical patriotism that’s sort of embedded in it somehow.
But there’s a thought that maybe is worth exploring in the future.
Another example of this: Big Brother, which has “America’s vote” and “America’s player.”
And of course, again, do most people in the United States know that Big Brother is airing? Probably not.
Do the people who are watching it know and vote? Absolutely.
And so it’s more like the fans voting here.
That’s interestingly enough, kind of what happened with Survivor Season 50, where they announced back in 2025—so a year before the actual show came on air, but months before it filmed—that the theme for the season, including its title, would be Survivor 50 in the Hands of the Fans, which became a little less awkward as time went by, maybe just because I got used to it, but still a little bizarre.
And the idea here was that it’s like, let’s say thank you to all the people who’ve watched so consistently over the years and let them make decisions about the way the game will proceed.
Now, in theory, I really like this, and I appreciate the general idea of saying, “Okay, do you want to do this or that?”
But it turned out that the questions that were asked of viewers—fans, people who voted for Survivor 50’s twists, and that was all during the spring of 2025—didn’t have a lot of choices.
So some of the things that were on the table were like the tribe’s colors and the immunity necklace’s appearance, which okay, but like that doesn’t affect the game at all.
Whether or not the players should have rice or have to earn it—same with the camp supplies.
And then there were some questions about twists and the show itself. Like, should there be a reunion where the winner is revealed live, or should it happen immediately in Fiji?
So some things that definitely affected the game and affected the way the season played out.
But what was frustrating about this was the way things were worded was not clear and obvious. Like, it just seemed slanted or biased in some way.
It’s like I—let me give you an example.
This is the way that they introduced the final vote for season 50’s “In the Hands of the Fans.” Quote: “Idols are a big part of today’s game and responsible for some of the most dramatic moves in Survivor history. But for Survivor 50, you—all caps—get to decide: idols or no idols.”
And when I wrote about this, I wrote to translate, “Survivor would have sucked without idols, so don’t be an idiot and vote for this season to suck, you absolute wank puffin.”
A wank puffin, by the way, is slang in Britain for a contemptible person.
So anyway, the actual vote then—which you chose like this or that—had “no idols” and “yes idols” each labeled.
So it said: “No idols. I don’t like idols. I want to take Survivor back to its roots: a very simple game where a reliable alliance was the most single most important thing and could take you all the way to the end.”
I’m trying to read that like a frustrated baby, which is maybe how I sound when I’m recapping sometimes.
But that’s how it reads to me.
Or the other option: “Yes, idols. Are you serious, Jeff Probst? I love idols. They reward players who hustle and they create uncertainty that can change the game at any moment.”
So at best, these were leading questions. At worst, they were just kind of incoherent because I don’t love the proliferation of advantages that take over the game, but I like having hidden immunity idols in play—kind of like we actually got for Survivor 51, just an actual idol hidden at camp. Incredible.
But like, I don’t think it has anything to do with what this language is. Like, “a very simple game where a reliable alliance was the single most important thing”—I don’t think that those two things are tied together.
And so why am I voting for that?
In full disclosure, I was not one of the fans who voted, because I couldn’t be bothered to create an account and go through all of the process to do that.
So all of the “hands of the fans” things were other people’s decisions. I guess maybe I also did it so I could blame them and not myself.
And the same thing happened on the premiere of Survivor 51, where Jeff Probst gave these like totally disingenuous kind of live polls. Like, “How many of you would have gotten rid of idols if you had the chance?”
And like, what do you even—you’re asking people who are on your show to vote against the things you already have planned?
Like, it was just—that was just him looking for some confirmation of his opinion, which is kind of what these things sound like to me.
So I, um—like, again, that’s Survivor Season 50, and it was ultimately a pretty good season, and the fans ended up voting for every single thing that we’ve had over the last five years, probably because of recency bias, and you see these things over and over again, and you think, “I don’t want the game without them.”
So yes, we’ll keep it in.
So Bake Off—to go back over to the land of the wank puffin for a moment—announced earlier this year before its series filmed that they were going to solicit ideas for challenges for Audience Choice Week.
So I went and looked, because I didn’t remember seeing this at the time or didn’t remember what they were actually asking.
And I was curious if they were actually giving questions and answers, or like multiple choice questions, or options, or how it was all worded, especially since in the episode that we saw last week, which is on Netflix here in the US—so on Friday for us—the way like Nigella Lawson talked about the first challenge, which was about creating a cheesecake.
She was like, “Cheesecake was overwhelmingly the audience’s choice.”
Cleaned-Up Transcript (Continued)
And so it’s like, “Oh, like, well, do they give a choice? Cheesecake, chocolate cake, or, you know, I don’t know, dry and tasteless cake?”
Like, what was—how did they, how do we get here?
And I went and found this page that I will link to in the show notes. You can check it out too.
And it was interesting because it was very open-ended. There’s a bunch of conditions listed here—bullet points—that are basically the rules.
And I appreciate the transparency and honesty here. Let me read from a few of them.
The first one, the very first bullet point, says: “The challenge ideas will be chosen by the Great British Bake Off team and judges. There is no guarantee that any challenge idea will be selected, be identified, or that the audience theme will be part of the program. The selection of any challenge idea and/or whether you are identified in the program is at our absolute discretion.”
Next bullet point: “The challenge ideas will be further developed by the Bake Off team and judges.”
And Love that’s Love Productions, who produces the show, reserves the right to determine all challenge parameters and rules. So that’s great.
And that is actually clearly what happened, because there was not, you know, like people sent in ideas and then they turned those ideas into challenges.
But the way that the show played it off was: “This is the audience’s choice. This is what the audience has done to you. This is, as a baker, this is what the audience has done to me.”
Shannon has a funny line that I quoted in my recap where she’s like, you know, “Sorry, audience, but not really a fan of this,” and I couldn’t agree with her more on that.
And that was because the three challenges were probably some of the weakest that the show has had in a while.
The first one, the signature bake, brought in friends and family members and loved ones of the bakers to help them out making the cheesecake. But it really didn’t give them anything to do for the challenge itself.
It’s not like they gave them a challenge that would take eight hours and then gave them four, but a second person.
And I guess I don’t know much about cheesecake. I know that it takes a while to cool, et cetera, so maybe this was that.
But it didn’t seem like we had much that we wouldn’t have gotten from the loved ones in the tent, except for some really cool decorations.
Gary’s sister made this incredible swan—beautiful—but like, probably nothing that really affected his standing in the competition ultimately.
No, I loved having them there. It was really fun to see them.
It was fun to watch Gabe refer to the partner that he brought and his other partner as part of a boy band. They don’t use the term “thrupple,” which is really funny.
It was nice to see like dynamics between parents and kids and just like the kind of siblings, et cetera. There was a lot of really fun moments that came from it.
So I didn’t mind. It just didn’t really seem to make any sense.
What really didn’t make any sense, though, was the technical challenge, where instead of giving the bakers the usual kind of challenge—a limited amount of information, a limited amount of ingredients to make the same thing, and then the judges judge blind and see all of the options in front of them to see how well people were able to follow instructions slash know their craft enough to be able to produce this thing—instead of that, they gave each baker a rather cute, I will admit, little cabinet with a gingham cloth-covered windows, so little curtains.
And inside were just a bunch of ingredients for baking, and they could make whatever they wanted.
That is literally not a technical challenge. It’s just another challenge.
The only difference on Bake Off is that the first and last challenges—the signature and the showstopper—the bakers are all given information about what all those challenges are before the competition starts.
They tell the production team what they’re going to make, and then they have time to practice it at home and refine it and get the right ingredients in the tent.
So they’ve had experience with practicing those. So this was “bake anything you want, but don’t practice.”
And the judges had different things to choose from, so like eleven different options on the table.
And that, to me, is not the spirit of the technical, and also just kind of ruins that fun visual of “here’s the same thing”—you know, eleven, twelve, whatever many people are left in the tent—times and see who did the best job visually.
And it gives us the chance as the audience to really judge, because it’s like, “Oh, that one’s definitely overbaked” or “that one’s burned” or “that one’s decoration is beautiful compared to that one.”
So we get to see, in addition to obviously the tasting the judges do.
And then finally, the audience was blamed for selecting a challenge for the showstopper where the bakers had to create a wearable bake.
Now, almost all of them made a hat that was a cake, and that was it, and it sat on top of a mannequin because there was a hole cut out of the bottom of the cake.
No one actually wore their things because they couldn’t really.
And I just think that this was a misfire from start to finish.
And I don’t know if this came from an individual in the audience who someone said, “Hey, why don’t they make clothes out of baked goods?” I guess.
I don’t know what the intent was.
Only two people—or sorry, there was one person who made—Clara, who made a purse that she could actually carry around, a handbag. And she apparently, when she was testing this, took her dog for a walk and carried it with her to test it, and it worked, which was fun.
But the baking part wasn’t actually the handle, so it was just the cake below, on a kind of apparatus.
And then two people made wings that someone would wear on their back, but very different approaches to that.
Everyone else did the hat cake thing.
And it just, you know, didn’t—I don’t know. Some of them were really, really, really beautiful and incredible cakes and hats.
And Connie’s especially—this wedding hat that she made, this sort of purple marbling—was just absolutely gorgeous, this wide brim, and apparently tasted really well, or tasted great as well.
So you know, it didn’t—it wasn’t like a disaster, which sometimes the signatures have been in the past, or sorry, the showstoppers have been, because they’re just so complicated and so demanding.
But I just don’t think that this was a challenge worth doing if you’re not going to really have wearable things.
And I don’t even know what that means. You can’t wear baked goods anyway.
So.
Again, the show admits on its website that this was all the work of production in terms of refining the challenges and putting them together.
But the show itself was like, “This is the audience. The audience wanted this. They wanted to see you make wearable things. They wanted to see you bake with what they have in their cabinets.”
And it’s like, that is not the truth, and that is not the reality of what people had to go through.
And this is where the rhetoric, for me, I think, bothers me: that we, as viewers, are given a story that, again, like I said at the beginning, hides the role that producers play.
And I don’t necessarily think that production should be—I’m not trying to villainize them.
Like, I think the people who make reality TV shows are incredibly talented craftspeople who are underpaid in the United States.
They are not represented by unions, which they absolutely should be. In most cases, they’re not represented by unions, and they should be.
They have very little job security, and yet they do incredible work—from giving us super amazing camera angles on Survivor to supporting the bakers behind the scenes of Bake Off in ways that we never see.
So I’m not trying to just say like it’s the producer’s fault here, but I don’t think that we also need to say this was the choice of the audience.
Just skip that.
And I think kind of the same thing with Survivor: if you’re going to put out on the table all these options and they’re so poorly worded and so unclear as to what will actually happen, like, why bother?
Just give us a show. Give us your choices as producers, creators, creative people.
I tune in to see that. I want to know what you’ve created.
And sometimes, sure, it doesn’t work out. I try to say that I appreciate when people try things and shows try things, and it doesn’t work, even when I complain about them.
Because I know that that’s true in my own work. Like, I try things in my writing or in even in a recap, and it’s like, “Maybe this joke works, maybe this approach works, maybe it doesn’t at all,” and that’s okay.
But I don’t think that we need to continue the charade of saying like this is all the audience’s fault and we had nothing to do with it at all.
Okay, on to recommendations, where I share things that are bringing joy and entertainment into my life.
First up this week is another podcast, and it’s related to Bake Off. It’s called Sticky Bun Boys.
Sticky Bun Boys is hosted by David and Michael from Bake Off, and both of them are gay, queer people.
And they are really leaning into the fun, gayness, queerness, the pun of it all as they recap Bake Off and talk about the show.
But what I love most about it, besides all of the hilarious jokes and their personalities, is their insight into the tent and how things work.
For example, I learned from them about how the time calls that the judges—or sorry, that the hosts do—are just for, they’re fake, basically. They don’t actually occur at that time in the tent for the most part.
So I’ll link to that in the show notes as well.
But give Sticky Bun Boys a listen if you love Bake Off. It’s a great way to hear a recap with some insights and some great sticky gay jokes at the same time.
Next up is Sweet Deceit on Food Network.
Last week we got a new season of Is It Cake on Netflix, themed to Halloween. It’s a brief little special season.
But we also got Food Network’s take on this format called Sweet Deceit, which, coincidentally or not, includes a lot of the people who we’ve seen on Is It Cake over the years, in addition to being on other Food Network shows.
The twist of Sweet Deceit, however, is that instead of the people who are trying to create cakes that look realistic—like actual objects in real life—those hyper-realistic bakes being the contestants, they are the ones working behind the scenes. Contestants are just everyday people, like you or me, who go in and try to figure out: “Is that book a cake? Or is that lamp a cake? Or is that box a cake?”
And that’s the fun of the show.
Now, I spent a considerable amount of time in my review saying that I’m annoyed by Is It Cake and to some degree this show, because we as viewers get a closer view of the objects than the actual people in the room do.
So it’s easier for us, and therefore not as fun.
For example, in Sweet Deceit, there’s one collection of objects that they’re standing kind of in a little entryway looking at.
And I was like, “Oh my gosh, okay, so it’s definitely not that lamp. It’s definitely not that old school phone.”
And just kind of like, “So is it this or this?” And I was just like playing along.
But then we got a—or we get a close-up as viewers—and you can clearly see that the cord of the phone is essentially like it looks like frosting that’s been extruded out of a frosting tube.
It was a little more complicated than that. And also, if you look closely, you can see that the dial is not as round as it would be otherwise.
I didn’t notice that. My husband did.
So I might have not noticed in the actual room, but I figured out that it was the phone based on the cable.
But the cable was kind of like tucked behind another object, and it wasn’t clear to me if the people could see it or not.
And so that just makes it less of a fun game.
That said, I’m recommending it, and I think the show grew on me, especially as I showed it to Nick and kind of fast-forwarded to all the reveals.
Because the way the contestants on the show learn if they’re right or not, and if they’ve earned money, is by going over to the objects and biting down on the one that they chose and they thought was cake or, in the parlance of this show, sweet. So they can, you know, stick with “not is it cake,” but “is it sweet?”
So that’s really ridiculous and funny. And you know, sometimes—like, I joked about them breaking their teeth—no one really does.
Clearly, they’ve been instructed to bite very slowly. But if you bite down on a keyring, is that chocolate or is it metal?
And it’s fun to see that moment of realization and sometimes surprise for us as viewers.
It’s hosted by Josh Peck and features a team of three people going through various rooms.
And the person who isn’t responsible for all these bakes that are in front of them—these hyper-realistic cakes—is also there. There’s kind of some fun shit-talking back and forth, but it moves quickly.
It’s a little half-hour show. They have another one coming in the holiday season, so I’m looking forward to that.
I think I like it better than—um, actually, no, I know I like it better than Is It Cake, because Is It Cake to me is just drawn out a little too much.
As much as I appreciate the craft that the bakers on that show are doing, it’s just, again, like we’re halfway across the room from these things.
So of course, the celebrities can’t tell what is cake and what isn’t.
But you know, I can at least appreciate that they’ve made cool things despite that.
So Sweet Deceit is on Food Network Monday nights, and episodes are on HBO Max if you have missed them.
Okay, on to Life Advice from TV, coming to us today from a brief exchange on Bake Off’s Audience Week between Tom and new judge Nigella Lawson.
Tom is a contestant.
But before we get to that, I just want to thank you so much for joining me in the podcast tent today.
If you like the show, subscribe in your podcast app and tell a friend, or tell an enemy. I’m not picky about these things.
Our theme song is Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod, and this episode is by me, Andy Dehnart, and is copyright 2026 by Reality Blurred LLC, which is also me.
You can find me at realityblurred.com and andydehnart.com.
And now you can hear Tom and Nigella’s advice.
[begin clip]
Alison Hammond: “Are there any bananas in this recipe?”
Paul Hollywood: “Let me guess, banana bread.”
Tom: “Not bread, cake. So I’m taking inspiration from Dolly Parton.”
Nigella Lawson: “As we all should.”
Tom: “Exactly.”