I’m a little worried about Noel Fielding . During his first few years on Channel 4’s The Great British Bake Off , he enjoyed a virtual monopoly on smut and pushing at the boundaries of obscene but broadcastable innuendo. But that all changed when breakfast telly favourite Alison Hammond turned up as a co-host last year , replacing the relatively understated Matt Lucas .
Now, poor old Noel has some stiff, if you’ll pardon the expression, competition. The boy’s been relegated to wandering around the Bake Off tent, engaging in weak banter while Hammond steals the show. At one point in the first episode of the 2024 series, she gives the goth such a smacker of a kiss, for no good reason, that she inflicts a mild flesh wound.
Hammond’s real shocker, you might even say showstopper, comes courtesy of a pet hen owned by one of the contestants, Georgie , a children’s nurse who lives on a farm in Carmarthenshire. You see, for unexplained reasons, Georgie has named her “favourite chicken” Fanny. Now, as talented a cook as Georgie is, I can’t help wondering if the discovery of Fanny made her a certainty to enter the GBBO tent.
All too predictably come the references to a “demented and deformed Fanny”, a Fanny “with a slightly odd shape” and various other pudenda addenda. It climaxes when Georgie recreates Fanny in sponge loaf cake form, complete with lemon curd filling, and 300 individual fondant feathers. As Paul Hollywood and Noel are concentrating on sampling .
