Archive for the ‘Distractions’ Category

Two weeks on from my Week 5 post and we have just had to endure the heartbreak of losing Mat from the tent. He was so lovely. It made me sad.

The week before we lost Alvin. Another lovely guy, though obvious choice for elimination. After that is when the competition got really tough, and as I discussed last time, this was always when Mat was going to struggle. To go from Star Baker to out though is pretty harsh.

Here are my power rankings for Week 7.

1. Tamal

Wow was I wrong on this one. Two weeks later and he has had two excellent weeks. His creations have continued to impress and winning Star Baker this week was well deserved and a clear choice. If he continues on this form it will be a struggle to beat him.

2. Ian

A couple of dangerous weeks for Ian but his showstopper demonstrated that he can work magic. He actually seems to do better when we pushes the boat out than when he plays it safe. Hopefully, he will realise that and keep pushing it.

3. Nadiya

Go Leeds! I don’t think Nadiya is a likely candidate to win as her performance is a little too inconsistent. However, I think if things stay as they are she could easily earn herself a place in the final.

4. Paul

Paul has had a tough few weeks. He produced some amazing stuff early on but mistakes have really let him down. He does not strike me as mediocre baker though – I think he will go big or go home, and either is clear possibility.

5. Flora

Flora is lovely. However, she is not going to win. Her bakes are just not as good as the competition. So despite being clear of elimination this week, she falls at the bottom of my list. She could find herself in the final, but only by virtue of Paul having a nightmare one week and Nadiya having one the other. Without coasting through though, it will be all over.

Up until this week, I feel like it has been easy pickings for the judges. Stu, Dorret, Sandy and Marie were obvious choices to leave the tent. As of week five though, things have started to get tough.

This week we lost Ugne. It’s a shame to lose the new Chetna this early on. She did some brave things and they consistently came off. Just not consistently enough to save her from elimination. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying she was kicked off the Great British Bake Off because it’s a racist show that gets rid of foreigners. I’m not saying that…

I’m actually not. Anyway, here are my thoughts on the remaining contestants:

Alvin

Alvin has had some bad bakes. Watching him cry at his pile of build-it-yourself box pieces was heartbreaking. Then other times he is finished in half the time and sitting around waiting. He does consistently produce excellent flavours though, so I think will hang on in there as long as there are other less-than-perfect bakers. Whether he will go all the way though seems unlikely.

Flora

Ah, the token posh girl. She reminds me a lot of Martha from last year. A good solid baker, but a lack of flair and consistently will eventually be her downfall.

Ian

I can’t believe Paul described Ian as being in trouble. It would have been stupid to eliminate someone who had so far won three star bakers out of five. He is likeable and modest, definitely a potential winner.

Mat

Mat is not the most exciting baker in the world, but tends to perform consistently middle of the field. I think he will continue on until the competition gets really tough.

Nadiya

Yeah, go Nadiya, flying the flag for Leeds! If she can nail more of the technical challenges, she could be a potential winner too. Which makes sense given she is from the town that invented jelly tots and Thai gumbo.

Paul

Paul produces some incredible stuff. He had some shaky moments early on but could continue to improve and go a long way.

Tamal

Injecting cakes with a syringe? This man is amazing! Whether he can consistently deliver with enough flair though, I’m not sold.

Predictions

If I have learned anything from the books I have been reading it is that predictions are almost certainly going to be hopelessly wrong. However, that is the fun. Here are my top three potential leavers this week:

• Tamal
• Flora
• Alvin

We’ve been watching the TV show Humans. I got it on iTunes series link, in which you pay a couple of pounds more and get all future episodes too. So they better actually make this second series! It was a good chance to dust off my Apple TV.

It is a pretty weird show. It’s partly a science fiction exploring the idea of a future in which most labour is done by robots, and the consequences of sentient robots. However, it is also partly a family drama about the twists and turns of every day life.

This makes it feel a bit stupid. It’s like if a character out of Coronation Street decided to blackmail MI5. Even with my suspended disbelief I thought this was just a ridiculous way to go.

Nonsense aside though, it remains enjoyable overall. Any TV show that references Asmiov is going to pick up points. The story lines connect together a pace that moves fast enough to keep you interested. Plus it’s funny watching Jen from the IT Crowd trying to interact with a comp-ut-or.

The Dales is a documentary, but I use that term loosely, as it was created by ITV.

It opens with rolling shots and dramatic music. Adrian Edmondson announces he is going to tell us all about this unforgiving place. “Remote communities, isolated farms.” Really? Yorkshire? I’m sure it can be hard, but I’m not convinced it is Lapland, or even the Isle of Lewis.

Despite what Google Maps might suggest:

There is no doubt it is a beautiful part of the world though.

It follows a number of people around including a community-owned pub, a 16-year-old boy who has just quit school to work on his family farm full time, a village brass band and even the local vicar. She doesn’t take herself too seriously:

“The end of the day is feet up with a bottle of beer and a bag of crips”

Probably for the best. She had 8 people at a service, which is a good day apparently, and with no music to sing to all the hymns are a cappella.

Overall it is very light hearted. There is no serious revelations of dramatic problems, just a fun look at some of the interesting people that live in The Dales intercut with shots of Adrian Edmondson looking at beautiful scenery as if he is Brian Cox.

Conveniently, it is available on iTunes for about £8.

Fertility treatment can have a number of side effects. One of which is that it can work too well. This is what The Gosselins found out when they decided to add one more to their twin girls – and got an extra six!

Someone recommended it to me I watched the one hour special and a few of the 23-minute episodes out of morbid curiosity. They seem to cope very well. Their shopping is done at a wholesalers and they drive a full-size van but otherwise they live isn’t too crazy.

I imagine the family adapts. For example Kate sleeps in until 8am! Jon having already gone to work by this point. I didn’t think parents got to do that, let alone when you have eight kids. That is not to say it does not look like hard work – they pretty much have no other life, obviously.

They do totally cash in when they go to Shady Maple (a buffet restaurant). Under 4’s eat free!

Aside from the entertainment, the show might actually provide a useful purpose too. As Kate points out when they are invited onto a TV chat show, if they can cope with eight, it must give new and prospective parents hope that they can cope with one.

TV Dinners is a show in which Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall investigating people’s dinner parties. Sort of.

As far as I can tell, it seems to be a show where Hugh travels round the country making fun of posh people. To me, the message seems to be “your life might have problems, but at least you didn’t spend nine months waiting for a custom-made table and multi-coloured chairs, and then make individual desserts for each colour, served by two hired waiters.”

And it goes on. There are men so obsessed with chilli that they put it in everything and brew their own chilli beer. This is all combined to make their wives their tenth wedding anniversary meal. The woman who goes to Harvey Nichols to get bones for her stock. The racing enthusiasts that hand out forfeits for forgetting to wear a club tie.

Of course it could be that you are incredibly clever and sophisticated if you throw a Futurist dinner party in which you blindfold your guests for the entrées, have a fish course that is just for smelling before going in the bin, and having a communal dessert that you all lick because cutlery is banned. However, I think we also need to face the possibility that you might also be a complete twat.

Luckily, there was a Yorkshireman to the rescue. He had a great recipe for puddings (I haven’t tasted them, but I’m judging it on proximity to my recipe) and when Hugh asked what he was going to do with his roasting joint, he replied that he was going to cook it. No fuss, just great meat. Champion.

Louis Theroux’s second documentary to arrive this year is “Transgender Kids”, a look at children who are transitioning.

It makes sense. Louis voices the question many people think at first – “what if we’re wrong?” It’s true that some changes are irreversible; you can only go through puberty once. However, as the doctor points out, we know the risks of not allowing people to transition. In contrast, we don’t have much evidence as to how many people transition back to their birth-assigned gender, and I’ve never heard of it.

Theroux has previously been accused by some critics of poking the bear with unjustifiably probing questions, or using the same tired format of looking dough-eyed into the camera while he watches people’s struggles. However, I saw none of that in this documentary. It was carried out carefully, bringing insight into a topic without leading the audience.

How dull.

Where exactly was the debate? There were a few topics, each candidate then said what they stood for in turn. That isn’t a debate. Has nobody who conceived of this show actually seen a debate or understood what a debate is?

There was a bit of back and forth between the candidates, but nobody really got to the meat of it. There were no real discussions of the advantages or disadvantages of different policies.

Nobody even said that much about their policies. If you didn’t already know what each party stood for, would you have watching that? Think of all the Green policies for example. They were hardly mentioned throughout the two hours.

Two of the candidates are not even fielding candidates in most of the country. According to The Guardian, one of the most popular questions after the debate was “can I vote SNP in England?” The answer is no.

Thus the SNP seemed mainly there to chip in “we’ve already done that” when an English politician put forward a good idea. That should probably be a wake-up call – we do trail Scotland on hospital parking charges, prescription charges and preventing letting agents from charing unscrupulous fees.

The one thing that Nigel Farage got right was that he was the only person saying something different. As person after person trailed out the message “we want immigration and to be part of Europe, but we want tighter controls on it”. Their answers blurred into one. Farage was the only person with something different to say. Is that the debate we wanted? One where Farage, king of the bigots, is the one offering an alternative?

Everyone else was too scared to step out of line. Nick Clegg pushed the boat out by asking the rich to pay “a little bit more.” It would have been far better if Natalie Bennett had at this point screamed “we’re going to make the rich pay loads more!” and Cameron to jam in “I think my friends pay quite enough.” But they didn’t.

In summary then, it felt like a complete waste of my time to watch it. Maybe we would be better to have a two party system with the ghost of John Stuart Mill running one party and Arthur Scargill running the other.

Long life the termination of Jeremy Clarkson. His actions, forcing the BBC to cancel the remaining episodes of Top Gear, have bumped Louis Theroux’s new documentaries into a prime slot on Sunday evenings. Though given Theroux has a history of speaking to violent, bigoted people, maybe we can expect “When Louis Met Clarkson” to be hitting our screens soon.

Theroux’s new two parter, entitled “By Reason of Insanity”, saw him visit the Ohio State psychiatric hospital to interview people who have been found not guilty by reason of insanity, or in some cases, not fit to stand trial.

It was no wonder this was the first time they have agreed to let cameras in in 50 years. The hospital looks great. Far from the questionable standards Norah Vincent encountered in Voluntary Madness, the building is clean and new, and the facilities look reasonable. Not quite up to the standards of Norwegian prisons, but still pretty good. Of course, it is a treatment centre, not a prison, but it was still heartwarming to see good facilities and good staff to help these people.

Indeed even after conditional release there is still a lot of support. One man who had recently been released was staying at a hotel and received daily drug deliveries to ensure that he stayed on track.

As Chris Bennion points out, we know the format by now. Theroux wandering around wide-eyed and looking innocent, slowly poking people with a stick until they spill their stories. However, it’s a format that works, so why not? The documentaries are both moving and revealing, bringing attention to some of the most sensitive topics in our society.

Five years on from starting River Cottage, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall up-scales, buying himself a much larger farm and a second one that he converts into the River Cottage HQ – a field kitchen, cookery school and vegetable garden all rolled into one.

It’s an irritatingly cool thing to do. Starting up a business or project is always an exciting thing to do, let alone the opportunity to be unjustifiably pretentious about food.

It’s also nice to see a human side to Hugh. In the first set of River Cottage series, he tends to succeed at everything. Turning up to livestock and vegetable shows and winning prizes with no experience. There is still plenty of that, but he also struggles from time to time. He burns his toffee and gets caught out in the judging. He runs out of oven space to cook all his chickens, and Gill has to save the day.

His ten bird roast was also very impressive. Goose, farm duck, mallard, chicken, pheasant, guinea fowl, partridge, pigeon and woodcock, all stuffed inside a turkey.