Digested week: I had Nigella down as tradwife burlesque but her Bake Off debut won me over | Emma Brockes

It was a big week at the UN, Buckingham Palace and the White House, but for all sentient people of Britain, the top story this week was that Bake Off is back and we need to talk about Nigella. (“Isn’t that the thing you use on cold sores?” said my gen Alpha child, as yet uninitiated into the lifestyle icons of our age. “That’s Bonjela,” I said.) I went into the opener of the show’s 17th season crankily resenting the departure of Prue Leith, who I love, and who offers, apart from anything else, a corrective to all the women on TV at the moment lecturing us about how to age from behind Maga-style glow-ups. (Youth on HBO anyone? No thanks!)

And in the first half of the show, Nigella did indeed seem to struggle. She was quiet, watchful and seemingly unsure of herself in the face of the wide array of personality types on the show, who were also struggling to adapt to new surroundings. This isn’t working at all, I thought, and then halfway through the show she clicked, or possibly I did.

I should say that going back I was never a big Nigella person. I bought her first cookery book a million years ago and loved the excess of all that butter and cheese. But over the years, as her brand grew and refined, I just assumed she was part of the large cohort of women who aren’t really for me – broadly speaking, who commit themselves to a kind of tradwife burlesque that, even at ironic remove, seethes with the conventionality of the thing it’s critiquing.

Anyway so much for that. As Bake Off unfolded, I crumbled like a flapjack in biscuit week (don’t email; per UK tax law, a flapjack is, indeed, a biscuit). It is so rare to watch someone of Nigella’s star power comport themselves on telly in such pensive style, so that even when she’s trying to be saucy, it seems to me, her natural state is one of anxious enthusiasm and a depth of feeling that comes out in odd places. “May I just say, I love salt,” she said, with the mad emphasis of someone correcting a widely held but incorrect assumption about themselves and instantly, of course, I loved her.

Tuesday

While the rest of the House of Windsor wrestled with the fallout from Tuesday’s publication of Charles Spencer’s book, Prince Harry – surely closer to his uncle in thought and style than anyone else in the family – gave us some benign royal news in the form of an update on his children’s eating habits.

Since moving from the US to the UK last month, the prince said his two children were enjoying Marmite for the first time – and I’m going to have to run the quotes in full here, for their jolliness and mild strangeness. “Is that a British thing?” said Harry to Hello! magazine at the WellChild awards this week, referring to Marmite. “Because it’s always been in my life, and now the kids are eating Marmite on crumpets, which is big for me.” I mean, what’s that about? Of course he knows it’s British; perhaps he feels in brand competition with the iconic British spread. Anyway, on he went: “They used to diss me for having Marmite in the house, and now they’re in the UK it’s like that’s kind of like water under the bridge, so it’s good.”

That’s nice; I mean it. I was happy when one of my two accepted that Marmite was the only way, although I’ve never had much success with any of the other British staples and nor has Harry, who said his attempt to put his kids on to beans on toast “hadn’t gone down very well”. I’d watch a full series on this, in which Harry puts toad in the hole, yorkshire pudding and the full English (“is that a British thing?”) in front of his kids – but no one tell Brooklyn Beckham or he’ll be round with his cookbook.

Wednesday

Disappointing news from the Dolly Parton estate, where that very nice-seeming nephew of hers who broke the news of her death in a video statement last month has turned out, judging by court papers filed by the Parton estate in Tennessee this week, to be – how to put this? – fairly unusual.

Bryan Seaver, who Parton employed for more than two decades as her head of security, is alleged to have sent Danny Nozell, Parton’s manager who runs the late singer’s estate, a series of communications, including the lines, “I’m a killer” and, “I’m literally an international arms dealer and mercenary. All I do is warfare. Everyone needs to be worried about what I might do.” Meanwhile, in trying to explain himself to TMZ this week, Seaver apparently made things worse with the explanation: “I am a career soldier and military contractor and do conduct arms deals for foreign governments. I am a security professional and I am a killer. However, nothing in this lawsuit were threats and most of the comments I stand by.” So that’s OK.

To be fair to Seaver, “all I do is warfare” is a great line I will be trying to work into my own conversations from now on. One wonders what this scene was like while Parton was alive. Famously, the singer employed large numbers of her family at Dollywood and elsewhere, and one has to assume kept any awkward characters in check. Now the queen is dead, can the centre hold?

Thursday

News of the one-in-a-thousand-year El Niño coming down the pike is so grim, let’s cling to the odd bit of cheer from the climate frontline. This week in West Bengal, news of a baby elephant calf, separated from its mother and drowning in flood water, was rescued by two heroic fishers who spotted its trunk, waving out of the water like a periscope, and after following it for 3 miles into shallow water, managed to fish it out of the murk.

The calf, which was a few days old, had lost its mum and the rest of the herd at the Teesta River and, improbably, after wrestling it on to the boat, the fishers managed to find the herd and reunite it with its mum, who got in such a frenzy at the sight of her missing baby that onlookers fleetingly worried she’d kill it. Instead, she wrapped her trunk around its body, splashed its head with water and flapped her ears with abandon, making witnesses on the bank hold themselves in at the beauty of it all.

Friday

Week two of trying to change mobile phone providers comes to a close without success and what have I learned? That the phrase “I know it’s not your fault” followed by a giant rage spiral doesn’t achieve the desired outcome. That the phrases “why are you like this?” and “what is wrong with your company?” equally have little to no effect. And that inserting “literally” into the sentence “we’re talking about a £10-a-month contract, literally what’s wrong with you?” doesn’t provide the needle-moving emphasis I’d hoped. Time for a lie down and a rethink.

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