A soggy bottom or a perfect bake?
Will Channel 4’s Great British Bake Off – with advertising revenue boosted by sponsorship – become a commercial and ratings success? Raymond Snoddy rates its chances
Once upon a time there was a silly season in August when nothing much happened and news editors had to rely on alleged sightings of the Loch Ness monster.
With Trump tweeting, Brexit settling ever deeper in the water and terror threats potentially around almost every corner, we are lucky to get a silly few days off from the realities of the contemporary world.
The silly few days have just dawned and we can slip effortlessly into the innocent world of off–screen bake-off battles and cookery confrontations [speak for yourself, WPP’s shares just dropped 12% – Ed].
As often happens, the pre-screening rows and fisticuffs are usually more entertaining, and deadly for executives, than the programmes themselves.
Ten years ago there was the promotional press conference video which wrongly portrayed the Queen storming out of a photo-shoot with Annie Leibovitz that cost Peter Fincham his BBC job.
Prue Leith, the new Mary Berry, may sound a bit like the Queen – although there the resemblance ends – but she has already entertained us royally before Channel 4’s Great British Bake Off kicks off on Tuesday.
Maybe she knew that she had to say something totally outrageous at the programme launch press conference to generate headlines to help fill the silly few days.
That is really the only rational explanation. Prue is far too mature and sensible not to realise that Channel 4 is funded by advertising, as indeed is her doubtless generous fee.
Why otherwise would she encourage viewers, if they missed the ad-free BBC programmes, to record and fast forward through the spots that are said to be costing advertisers up to £100,000 a pop.
The lady clearly has talent for generating headlines and could stir up a furore again, although it’s the wonders of live press conferences that can cause the most mayhem – as President Trump will testify.
Another essential ingredient of a successful TV silly few days story is a scheduling row with the BBC.
The Beeb got very angry indeed when Channel 4, having paid £75 million for the rights to Bake Off, had the audacity to move the programme from its “traditional” slot on Wednesday evenings to Tuesday up against the new BBC culinary effort, The Big Family Cooking Showdown.
This, the BBC opined grandly, was against the interests of viewers who might want to watch both programmes live.
Never underestimate the power of scheduling rows to generate political waves such as former Culture Secretary John Whittingdale threatening to ban the BBC from running its most popular shows in peak time against ITV on Saturday evenings.
He’s a former Culture Secretary for a reason.
Academic research into silly programme rows would almost certainly find that the BBC invokes the interests of the viewers when it is in danger of suffering a soggy bottom, and is happy to give viewers a free choice when it has the upper hand as in Strictly versus X Factor.
This time – wisely – the BBC blinked and moved the Cooking Showdown to Thursdays after a less than illustrious 1.7 million debut audience amid tepid reviews.
The show has perhaps suffered from an absence of totally outrageous press conference ad libs. An attack on the BBC licence fee by Rosemary Shrager would surely have created sizeable headlines in The Sun and the Daily Mail and might have pushed the numbers closer to the original Bake Off’s opening night audience of 2.2 million.
ITV might yet enter the fray by scheduling a particularly popular show against Bake Off to try and stop it getting into its stride.
The really dramatic off-screen Bake Off rows never amounted to a row of beans.
The aggressive snatch of the cakes happened at a sensitive time for Channel 4. When it was writing cheques for £75 million and behaving like a red-blooded commercial broadcaster, privatisation had not been fully ruled out and Channel 4 and the British broadcasting industry as a whole could have suffered a serious blow.
Fortunately it has not happened and the privatisation threat has been watered down to the possibility of having to move to Birmingham.
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The BBC, with its licence and funding campaign over and one that resulted in a qualified victory – certainly compared to what might have been – could have played hard-ball.
The BBC had the contractual right to insist that Channel 4’s Bake Off could not launch until 29 August 2018 and could, in the interim, have launched its own rip-off version with three of the original presenters, sufficiently different to avoid the lawyers.
It was wise to avoid that course – however tempting.
Where are we now, when the issues are the rather more mundane matters, such as whether the cakes are rising fast enough or are sufficiently moist?
Bake Off II arrives in an increasingly difficult environment, compared with seven years ago, for programmes heavy with sugar.
Forget salt and fat, sugar is the new enemy of mankind, as many medical and scientific programmes on Channel 4 and BBC television have, and presumably will continue, to argue.
But you only have to watch, not necessarily taste.
What happens next to ratings?
The BBC is likely to have a perfectly respectable BBC 2 programme on its hands but with a 2 million ceiling. Unlikely break-away hits don’t happen very often, particularly when they have to be designed in response to a huge hit that has been whipped away by rivals. It could also slowly sink after launch.
The critics liked what they saw of the Channel 4 Bake Off and noted how faithful it is to the original.
The worst recipe for disaster is to buy a programme that pulls in regular audiences of more than 10 million, rising to 16 million for the final, and then to painstakingly remove the elements that combined to make it a success in the first place.
Channel 4’s chief programmer Jay Hunt, who will be long gone before this year’s final, has avoided all those mistakes.
It can be predicted with reasonable confidence that Channel 4’s Great British Bake Off – with advertising revenue boosted by sponsorship – will be a moderate commercial and ratings success.
It will have done well if it manages to attract more than half the size of its BBC One audience.
Whatever happens it has already enriched some of the endangered silly few days of summer.