Fans of The Great British Bake Off — known stateside as The Great British Baking Show — adore for show for its subtle charms: its propensity to place its good-natured contestants and double entendre–loving hosts front and center. So when the show announced a major shake-up in its move from the genteel BBC One network to the splashier Channel 4, a move that involved axing hosts Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins and judge Mary Berry, folks were worried the gingham altar would be altered forever.
And yeppp, things have changed.
The revamped show’s trailer, which Channel 4 dropped yesterday, inserts some major flash — not to mention Sir Paul McCartney — into the mix, in this stop-motion horror show that asks baking fans to imagine what it’d be like if their choux pastries and eclairs had tiny little faces and cheery personalities as they beseech you to eat them.
“Win or lose, sink or swim,” sing two faces of batter before they’re mixed together into a physical and existential oblivion. “We’ll never give in,” cry a try of vol-au-vents, right before one of them, in the literal act of “giving in,” grotesquely erupts its filling out of its mouth. “Play the game, fight the fight” implores a loaf of bread, its face changing from frown to complacent smile as it’s sliced away into nothing.
This is nightmare fuel. Everyone knows it.
Compare that to the trailer that ran for BBC One’s final season of the show, which was scored, cheerfully, to “Make Someone Happy.” Even the notoriously curmudgeonly judge Paul Hollywood (the only holdout returning to the Channel 4 version) is allowed to smile here:
As The Telegraph says of the new trailer, “Essentially, if Paul Hollywood had fallen down the rabbit hole rather than Alice, Wonderland would have looked like this.” Pretty much.
• The Great British Bake Off | Coming Soon On Channel 4 [YouTube]
• All Great British Bake Off Coverage [E]
