If baking is the new rock’n’roll (it isn’t), Mary Berry must be Mick Jagger, strutting and jutting her turkey-neck in judgement over our muffins like so many spurned groupies. Tom and Henry Herbert’s contribution to the cookery canon is more like what Ant and Dec gave music with Let’s Get Ready To Rumble.
“We’re not just neighbours, we’re brothers!” they said, as if to scotch rumours about two grown men who just can’t get enough of each other.
The Fabulous Baker Brothers (Channel 4, Wednesday, 8.30pm), named after a Jeff and Beau Bridges vehicle nobody remembers except for the bit where Michelle Pfeiffer seduces a piano, is not Serious Cooking but “baking for boys”.
Filmed in what looks like a medieval catacomb, the faintly anarchic tone (the boys posed with baps as comedy ‘breasts’ in the opening sequence) reminds you of a Disney TV movie about obnoxious teenagers sent back in time by an enchanted whisk.
However, there’s a yawning gap on TV for cooks happy to use processed cheese slices of the kind where it doesn’t matter if you leave the plastic film on. The banter was limp and the weekly “pie war” contrived but the gorgeous-looking comfort grub was anything but, and ideal for the current climate (weather and economic).
As the one with the whiff of the Andrew Lloyd Webbers about him paused to explain what baking parchment is for, you got the enjoyable feeling that not only could you cook this stuff yourself, you could probably have presented the show equally well too.
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