‘The Great British Baking Show’ Is the Key to Understanding Today’s Britain

It is becoming increasingly clear that Britain no longer really exists. I’m not sure exactly how long this has been going on. Last year, for instance, the nation formed from the 1707 Act of Union between the English and Scottish crowns very nearly tore itself apart de jure, holding a nervous and fractured referendum on Scottish independence. The vote was eventually won by the “No” camp, preserving Britain as a political entity, but it was clear the moral victory had been lost regardless. The “Yes” campaign made an exciting and convincing case for an independent Scotland, to which people could be proud to belong. The “No” campaign, by contrast, utterly failed to make anything like a case for Britain as a concept — only a case that it was safer financially to preserve it. (For the time being, anyway: With our government apparently engaged in the project of extracting as much short-term value from the nation’s assets as possible, you worry that the very ground beneath your feet might vanish the moment it ceases to help some banker in London’s spreadsheet add up.)

It’s astonishing to think that not even a century ago, Britain was the largest, most effective and arguably the most brutal empire the world had ever seen — one of the fundamental political institutions that structured the entire world. This might explain why British national identity, such as it is, continues to manifest itself in signifiers left over from the days of Empire: gin, tea, cricket, flags, those wretched “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters, all of them now zombified and divorced from their material basis. Their appeal is the dream of an endless summer of Pimm’s, bowls and thwarted romantic expectations on the lawn of a great country estate, as if this lifestyle could ever be made possible without the violent exploitation of around one-third of the population of the earth. Ten years ago, adorning oneself with these signifiers might have been considered a somewhat alternative statement. Since then, though, they’ve gained a great deal of popularity, to the point where they’re firmly established in the mainstream of middle-class culture in the British Isles.

There’s no greater proof of this than Britain’s most popular television program: “The Great British Bake-Off.” In America, where it airs (and streams) as “The Great British Baking Show,” it has already become the latest in a long line of imported British hits: Think of it as the new “Downton Abbey.” The show is a reality-TV competition in which charming amateur baking enthusiasts are challenged to make lavish cakes and tortes, savory pies and obscure European loaves. Each week, the least successful baker is sent off with hugs and well wishes, until a winner emerges.

At first glance, “The Great British Baking Show” seems as though it must be a recruitment video for membership in some twee and cutesy new reboot of the Empire. It’s all there. In the grounds of some indeterminate country estate, at the height of summer, a group of people are gathered in a tent full of bunting and flags and a pair of hosts all wry jolly-good-ness, to ... bake some cakes and bread. It’s the exact distillation of everything awful about the British home-counties middle-class way of life that, for whatever dreadful sins I committed in a previous existence, I was born into.

It’s the passive-aggressive niceness of it that I find so grating — the tedium of a competition whose outcome is decided by whether or not exactly two people think the lemon comes through properly, in which everyone is a good sport and the worst thing that could happen is a bit of trouble balancing the star anise with the turmeric (you want to be careful of that, warns Paul Hollywood, one of the judges) or getting into a bit of a tizzy because you put the oven on the grill setting, for which Sue Perkins, one of the hosts, will console you with a matey hug. The only thing that could possibly make the show worse is if, at the end of each episode, everyone stood up and sang the national anthem.

And yet when I actually sit down and watch the thing, I find it hard not to be sucked in. Despite everything, there’s just something so compelling about it. Every episode is essentially the same, unfolding with an identical triad of tasks, to give the show the dull, thudding rhythm of a daily routine. But, as with your actual daily routine, you come to survive by finding small joys. The contestants themselves, for instance, become like the people you might work with at a boring, unsatisfying job: some loved, others despised, for the most part in complete disproportion to their actual merits or demerits as human beings. Occasionally, something truly unexpected and weird happens. In one episode in the latest season, a contestant (a prison guard called Paul) decides for some reason to bake an entire bread tribute to Cecil the Lion. A few seasons ago the BBC found itself at the center of an almighty media row after a contestant threw his baked alaska in a garbage bin.

It’s this combination of bland inoffensiveness and genuine compulsion that, at least on some level, explains the show’s popularity: This is the recipe, after all, for successful television. But the fact that “The Baking Show” makes for good entertainment does not even come close to explaining the position that it occupies in contemporary British culture. “The Baking Show” is not just a show that manifests a lot of important things about Britain, or its Empire-nostalgic popular culture. This is a show that is, at its core, a battle for the very heart of Britain — a battle that prioritizes baking skills, yes, but a battle nonetheless.

In the final episode of the most recent season of “The Baking Show” to air in Britain — though not yet internationally, so some spoilers follow — there were three contestants remaining. One of them, Ian, was exactly the sort of middle-class stay-at-home dad you might expect to win a national baking competition that airs on the BBC. Competing against him, however, were two contestants with less typical “Baking Show” backgrounds: Tamal, a gay doctor whose parents are from India, and Nadiya, a hijab-wearing daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants. When Nadiya won the season, there were at least two sets of competing reactions. On one hand, most people were happy that bluntly funny, emotional, likable Nadiya — the contestant who provided social media with the best reaction GIFs — had triumphed. On the other, right-wing newspaper columnists were going nuts, complaining about political correctness from the liberal BBC and furiously attempting to find some juicy familial link between Nadiya and ISIS.

Soon, think pieces were published across the political spectrum about what Nadiya’s victory meant for Britain. (Are we all going to be wearing hijabs soon because we’ll be forced to by Shariah law, or because they’ll become fashionable independent of any Islamic cultural or religious context? Here’s what a baking competition tells us about this....) It was at this moment that I began to realize something: “The Baking Show” doesn’t just present a static, zombie image of an ideal Britain that can never exist. It defines the nation in a dynamic, living way. The outcome of the contest itself decides the image that the country holds of itself. For the Britain of today, it serves the function of an epic poem.

So maybe I’ve been wrong: Maybe Britain hasn’t really ceased to exist completely. A lot of what constitutes “Britain” has lost its material basis — has lacked it since the Empire collapsed, really. Like a Christmas tree, it has been cut off from its roots but continues to give the illusion of life, as it stands in a bucket of water, nourished just enough not to lose all of its needles while it is still in the living room. But “The Baking Show” can help Britain grow new roots. For instance, it can provide the nation with its first genuine hijab-wearing celebrity — no small thing in a year where the dominant narrative throughout the West has been the increasing marginalization of Muslims from public life.

Admittedly, a television baking show is a fairly limited material basis for anything, but hey: There’s not really a whole lot else we do well here anymore. For now, at least, it’s the best life support us poor British suckers have got.