ombre

In reading the above comments on lamb and Standish, I've got to say that I think lamb was telling her exactly what he thought would get her to walk away from slough house and the service and never look back. He was shaken that she was kidnapped (and that she is such a vulnerability for his team - look at cartwright white knighting into the park!) and wanted to get her out of there.

I loved the derry girls ep, having seen an episode or two of derry girls on Netflix, and even dug the next year's show, with the cast of... I can't remember the show's name but it was about queer life, iirc. Both were very personable people with real chemistry between them. This year's show had a real millstone around it's neck. The whatever the anniversary of channel 4?!? Lots of random people who know one another in passing and are primarily famous for being talking heads? Oy. That's a heavy load to lift. I'm sure it sounded good in some board meeting but... But if they wanted to just bring the derry girls back every single year I would absolutely tune in. Honestly, if they got that gang together to be terrible at a different activity every *month* I'd probably be down with it. Pottery. Basketweaving. Fixing car engines. Bring it!

I'm a little shocked that there was any cattiness about whether Tasha was faking it. Girl was white as a sheet some time before she went down. I'm finding this season less stratified than other seasons and love it. Dan (who started out reminding me of Richard burr from one of my favorite early seasons but has recently been a little more goofy) came on strong at first but is now having to really buckle down. Matty, who seemed like a prime candidate to head out in the early middle eps instead gets star baker. The fact that it really feels like any of them have a shot (especially if they hit that moment when some of them just catch fire) is making this a really fun season to watch.

I'll agree with everybody else who's saying how lovely this season is. Allison seems a great addition. Genuine and a really generous performer. I think abbi leaving so early is one of my biggest disappointments in all of this show. (I mean, other than the whole past season, obviously). I've been having so much fun seeing what ingredients she came up with and am really bummed that we don't get to see what she'd do in the next weeks.

I actually gasped when Amos was sent home. A gasp! In the first episode! It seemed that there were plenty of people who'd been more consistently bad and he'd had that knockout technical. On blueberries - I hate cooked blueberries (they're a perfect fruit when raw. It's such a waste of perfection!), but recently became aware that part of what I hate about commercial "blueberry" baked goods is that they're used as a sweet flavor and much of what I love about blueberries is their tartness. And *then* I discovered that there are some areas where the blueberries tend more towards just sweetness (looking at you, maine) and so people whose tastes were developed through those blueberries have a very different sense of what "blueberry" should taste like - in Maine, most blueberry stuff seems to just be sweet and people seem to think that's as it should be and thus anybody whose tastes were shaped around the idea that maine blueberries are the epitome of blueberry also thinks it should just be sweet. Whereas I, someone who thinks there should be a complex flavor profile to blueberry stuff, think that cooked blueberries are flavorless because they lack the zing of the tart fresh blueberries. Which is a very long way of saying that I can understand why they might be wary of blueberry flavor and consider it flavorless. On the whole, a genuinely enjoyable hour. I was utterly unimpressed with last season but am really rather excited to see this one. There are so many ways that a bake can go wrong without making even the simple challenges races against the clock and contraventions of the laws of gravity. There is as much drama in the question of "is this too soon? Too long" as in the race against the clock. It's fun to see human beings nervously drinking a cuppa as they debate those questions. It's fun to see them swiping nibbles of one another's ingredients and just interacting in those down times. You can imagine being in that situation. Cheers to the production company for finally going back to that more varied texture of storytelling! And a deep and profound gratitude to the lady who thought that yep, it's time to add a mess of beaver jokes to bake off. Genius. Well played.

What a tough job SL and DHP have! To play not just people who were celebrities in their own right (julia more, of course, but so many people here have such a strong sense of Paul!) but also have such a strong and relatively recent portrayal from j&j. (and, of course, radiant as julia and Paul's relationship may have seemed in that movie, it also had the advantage of getting to shine particularly brightly in comparison to the rest of the movie). I am enjoying this show, but feel like I'm seeing the performances in triplicate - how julia would have been, how MS would have been, how SL is, all piled on top of one another. It makes time with the other characters feel so calming and restful!

Well, it's not a TV show (yet? I hear this will be going to Hulu?), but there's a cozy mystery book that just came out that's based on bake off - the golden spoon. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Golden-Spoon/Jessa-Maxwell/9781668008003 I'm listening to it as an audiobook while getting over covid and so far I'm liking it (which is to say, I'm enjoying it, but I did also recently try to put my cat's leash on my bowl of risotto and stood there in confusion not totally understanding why the cat was still yowling and why the risotto was so solidly indifferent so... Maybe take my opinion with a grain of salt!) Eta: well. That was silly and fun and a great way to surf along over the crazy temperature swings that have been messing with my sleep. Great literature it is not, but a silly fun variation on bake off? Sure. Absolutely.

The show is called It's a Sin, a reference - I've always assumed - to the hauntingly lovely Pet Shop Boys song of the same name which was popular in the 80s queer/disco culture in which the show is set. I haven't seen the show but everything I've heard is that it's excellent. I think it streams on HBO.

Jeepers. If that's the send-off for Shy it's a brutal one. And especially because we know that if things had happened in a slightly different sequence - if they'd tried to bribe Midge into silence first and *then* she'd had her moment with Shy - it probably would have played out very differently. If she'd known that he was basically trapped and isolated, was reaching out to one of his few potential human connections, would she have rejected him like that? I'd like to think she wouldn't but who knows. Perhaps it is yet another cautionary tale of the perils of show biz. I'm assuming the lump on the street was Lenny and the next episode will also be a cautionary tale. It's hard to see how they would bring Shy back for a better ending with so few episodes left, but that was one painful parting shot. I'm willing to suspend disbelief for the moment and see where they're going with this, but... well... it's a comedy. Comedies end in weddings and fruitfulness. You don't get to build likeable characters like Shy and then torture them pointlessly and still be a comedy. Jason Alexander's character may have been tortured on his way out the door, but clearly it's giving him the germ for his first great play in decades. Sophie is clearly about to land on her feet. Etc. If you both pointlessly torture a friend and still claim to be a comedy it shows an utter disregard for the humanity of the character. We know Lenny is going to have trouble, but that's tied up with Midge's conflict between being a Good Girl/Wife/Mom and an Important Comic. Lenny's torture is already baked in. I'll be very disappointed if Shy's torture doesn't have some larger narrative purpose. Otoh, this was the best-written episode in forever. Kudos to Kate Fodor. Ahahahaha - I got nosy and poked around to answer a question in my mind and discovered that which I'd forgotten - there is another season forthcoming. Eleven episodes seems like enough time to right things for shy, where three episodes doesn't. Okay, I'm okay with this loose end for now, but I reserve the right to be pissed if doesn't get tied up better by the end of the *next* season! :D

I cannot remember any other season when the bakers seemed so genuinely relieved to be done. In other years it's felt like a joke: yeah, we'll be glad this is done, but this has been fun and I'm glad I did it. But this year it felt exhaustedly heartfelt. Eff this tent and the horse it rode in on. I wish them all well and would thank them for going through this for our entertainment. I hope it will help them achieve things they want to achieve. And I'm so glad they're done and can stop coming back to the tent.

In past years, I've rewatched each episode before the next one showed. This year, enh, once suffices. For me, the difference comes down to pacing of the season and not having anybody in the tent who seems to know more than me. In other seasons there have been moments when bakers would get into "I'm doing this because..." or "this works because..." or "I'm utterly doomed because..." and this season there isn't as much of that. Perhaps they have that knowledge but nobody's asked them a question that got that response. Perhaps they're just following recipes and crossing their fingers. It seemed like our two Scots gents had a bit more of that knowledge, but one went home early and Kevin was too useful for his zingers. I suspect that Syabira (they're just *now* telling us about her science background?!?) also has some of that knowledge, but they're too interested in saying that they'd skeptical of her flavors, so that's all she gets to talk about. That said, I feel like I'm in a minority of thinking that all of the non-contestants have been much more palatable this year than in past seasons. Paul was verging on being positively supportive* at the start of the season, and Prue does seem to be going out of her way to find something nice to say about each bake. And Noel and Matt are both doing a better job of being supportive and reading the moment and not, say, making deeply inappropriate sexual jokes about minors.** I suspect that they've heard and tried to take to heart the criticism, but people are so used to disliking the team that it's hard to hear their attempts to improve. Like when you hurt your ankle and suddenly anything coming within three feet of your leg sets off your nervous system in high alert. Which rather makes me wonder if there's *any* way for the show to find its appeal again. Perhaps with a wholesale turnover of staff. I think one of the things that the Pottery Show-Down has done well is that the staff turns over so often that a) nobody feels bigger than the show and b) you get the sense that everybody has another gig that they'll be quite happy to back to, rather than loving being a petty monarch of the world's tiniest fiefdom. Anyway, I thought the technical was *excellent* (and was surprised that so many of them did do it well - that takes some decent technical writing! - and relieved when Sandro figured it out at the very end. Janusz was lucky that he got out enough of the rice to not break the judges' teeth! But the fact that he could get the rice out so easily showed that golly, he really was basically giving them raw dough. I liked the showstopper - it would be a *tremendous* challenge to do structural work with something that has to be both hard and soft - but was bummed that it took up the final of patisserie week, which usually gets such fun assignments. And I think that's kind of the problem with this season - missed opportunities for *baking* fun. I generally don't mind a broader definition of "baking." I like when they give assignments like cannoli or doughnuts or other things that use a dough but not an oven. To my mind those challenges are saying - yes, well, you know the basics, but how well do you *understand* how doughs work? But you can only replace so many of the baking challenges with something else before you a) stop being a baking show and b) rather waste the contestants' prep time. If you're (reasonably) taking the time to fill your head with creme pat and sables and shortcrust and all the other basics of *baking* then any time spent boning up on things outside baking is wasted time. We've seen some glaring holes in their general knowledge (Syabira and all the elements of lemon meringue, Janusz and custard, etc), so I'm not sure these guys *did* do much work memorizing common recipe ratios, but also the expectations of a contestant's general knowledge now seem rather boundless. Which is to say, I like the usual Patisserie Week showstoppers, was looking forward to them and... it feels like that moment when you think you've got a chocolate chip cookie, you're excited for a chocolate chip cookie, you bite into it and... oatmeal raisin. Which would be fine if that's what you were expecting, but since your brain got hungry for chocolate chip is profoundly disappointing. I miss the patisserie showstoppers. I miss Bread Week. There were things I was looking forward to and instead... oatmeal raisin. * Relatively speaking. ;) ** Yes, I know. A high bar indeed.

I've kept thinking about this for the last day. You know what I would watch until the cows came home? A show like this - building skills and techniques and knowledge, giving time to practice, but also regular tests - where everybody was starting from scratch with a totally unknown skill. One year it might be baking (baking's good because the projects are so short from inception to completion). One year it might be metalworking. Or archery. Or playing guitar. Or masonry. Or whatever. Start from complete scratch. Play it out like the pandemic bubble (so they have resources to practice as much as they want). Or play it out over a longer time period but find a way to make sure people had plenty of resources to practice. Let people feel inspired by just how much an adult *can* learn. How much they can bring other skills and knowledge to bear on a new skill.

It's a highly scientific process. I stare at them ravenously through the glass door smelling the caramelisation and cheering on the gradual spread of the crinkly bubbly browning until I can take it no longer.

Also, the non-bread bread week. That's usually the moment when you really start to see who understands the *science* of baking. As near as I can tell, most of this year's peeps are just following someone else's recipes without any understanding of how as why they work. The thing that I've found most delightful in earlier seasons is the way everybody starts off just being general recreational bakers and at some point they all just go mad and spend every waking moment practicing. There's something magical in getting to watch someone level up like that and by seeing them do it it gives you a sense of endless possibilities. If you took several weeks and just baked from pre-sunup to post-sundown, you, too, could become magic, could make that extraordinary thing on the screen. Giving viewers *that* feeling is a gift beyond measure and makes for must-see-TV. But I think they *get* there by carefully crafting the shape of the show. The first ep is just shaking off the jitters. Something familiar and comforting and relatively easy. Someone will fail just because of their jitters. The next ep is teaching the bakers to respect the clock. Don't get too fancy, figure out how to scale back when needed. Then, week 3. Bread week. You have to understand the pacing of not just the fiddly elements but of the bake itself. You have to know how much time for this or that rise, how much for the bake. You're going to have to make some tradeoffs because there's not enough time to do it the way you would at home, so know *which* corners to cut. In the next weeks, with their mix of ingredients and techniques, if they don't have the skills from the first three weeks (time management, changing plans on the fly) *and* if they don't have a breadth and depth of general baking knowledge then they sink. The magic that shows up in the last last three weeks, when they often just take flight, only comes through those skills that the show *builds.* and this year it doesn't seem to be building those skills. Perhaps that is because they didn't think this round of contestants was up to it - that they didn't have the depth of knowledge to build from. But it would have been nice to see how these lovely people might have managed if the season *had* nurtured their skills the way it usually does.

I would feel remiss if I didn't step up here to preach the gospel of the toaster oven smores. Nine chocolate chips per Graham cracker half, with mini marshmallows perched in between. Maybe once a decade I find myself with all the ingredients in the house at once, but it is a magical moment!