The best and worst thing about The Great British Bake Off is that it never changes. Year after year, series after series, presenting duo after presenting duo, it returns with its bunting, pastels and puns and makes you wonder how on earth it is September again. This is great if, as is understandable in 2026, you would like to feel like you have been lobotomised for an hour every Tuesday evening, and not so great if, as is understandable in 2026, you are thrumming with existential dread.
This year, though, looks different from most. This is because after the departure of longtime judge Prue Leith, who revealed shortly after hanging up the proverbial oven gloves that she had never watched an episode, Channel 4 have brought in the big guns. The arrival of Nigella Lawson to the Bake Off tent is clearly the wisest of many historic attempts to Make Bake Off Actually Great Again, both in the sense of large viewing figures and the sense of quality: this self-proclaimed domestic goddess, oozing charisma and sex appeal, who practically invented the concept of food-based innuendo, is the show’s dream hire.
Fans will be delighted that Nigella has succeeded in making Bake Off the same but better. The bakers and presenters are practically wetting themselves with excitement to have her there while she exudes quiet confidence. “I want it really sumptuous,” she tells the bakers of the first challenge, and Noel Fielding, in overly self-aware Bake-Off style, responds: “I think I might be pregnant.” This happens within the first two minutes of the show, but it will be the first of many occasions this series in which Nigella’s natural glamour makes everyone feel starstruck.
And, yes, the first of many innuendos. If, like me, hearing a single mention of a soggy bottom is enough to make you want to smash your television using a hardback omnibus of Jean-Paul Sartre (it’s that existential dread, again), Nigella will ease this. Though she of course doesn’t shy away from anything that is, like drag king Gabe’s showstopper, a little blue, the difference is her tone.
Hairdresser Tom smirks when Nigella tells him his chocolate stout cake – her opening challenge – is “giving me a lot of pleasure”, but she absolutely means it. When Paul comments, judging the walnut and coffee cake technical challenge, that “that nut size is huge” and Noel and Allison fall about laughing, Nigella just rolls her eyes. Baking, and its associate sensuality, is a serious business.
Thank god for Nigella Lawson, who has managed to disguise an overbaked sponge with some sort of magical chocolate ganache(Photo: Patch Dolan)If Nigella is adding a touch more sophistication to Bake Off, it’s welcome in a programme that often feels a little bit like a televised primary school home economics class. Asking a load of full grown adults to make a “self-portrait cake”, in which they model their own heads out of chocolate or draw pictures of themselves with icing, feels positively undignified, and you would have thought they could have come up with a more grown-up name than “star baker” by now (still, law student Mo, who won the title this first week, deserved to glow with pride – that blueberry compote).
In contrast to the self-consciously silly challenges, the standard is already impossibly high: paediatric doctor Yannis’s self-portrait is executed using icing pointillism (!), while Mo’s showstopper looks professional, and the ability of all the bakers to knock up the walnut and coffee cake just from a picture, with no recipe – a particularly difficult idea of Nigella’s – is impressive.
Mishaps abound too, of course: accessibility coordinator Molly tragically drops her bundt cake and has to start again, while HGV service centre administrator Danni ends the showstopper with their (real) head in their hands as the top layer of their two-tiered self-portrait cake slides languidly off the base and bounces off the edge of the worktop.
So yes, same old Bake Off. Same Alison and Noel, same slightly flat first episode before we’ve got to know any of the contestants, same Paul Hollywood positively squirming with glee as he anticipates the arrival of his 17th Bake Off pay cheque. But thank god for Nigella Lawson, who has managed to disguise an overbaked sponge with some sort of magical chocolate ganache, and made it just about edible again.
‘The Great British Bake Off’ airs on Tuesdays at 8pm on Channel 4
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