too much cookery course — not enough unscripted fun

[emmamark]

I don’t have the stomach for back-to-back cookery programmes, so I skipped Mary Berry’s Simple Comforts (sorry, ma’am) and went straight to Nadiya Bakes, which followed immediately afterwards. It was… fine. Nadiya Hussain was smiley, as she always is, and she baked some nice cakes, as she always does. But I struggled to see the point of this half-hour baking lesson. Is anyone going to make a blueberry scone pizza? And if not, then why are we all watching it? The answer to that second question is complicated. We watch food programmes, not because we want to learn to cook, but because we enjoy glimpsing a lifestyle we aspire to. Think of Nigella’s dinner parties, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s veg garden or Jamie Oliver’s massive fridge. These are the things we are interested in. Not the bloody recipes. That’s what the books are for. This was the problem with Nadiya Bakes. Too much cookery course; not enough Keeping Up With the Hussains. We all know that Nadiya is a good company, so it would have been nice to hang out with her a bit more. Let’s see where she buys her flour from and what she chats to the grocer about.