The commissioning editors of the Great British Bake Off must be well pleased with their viewing figures: a cool 9.1 million. Pity the poor folk who turned down the series that’s tantamount to a publisher rejecting Harry Potter.

But isn’t it ironic that this orgy of sugar and refined carbs is the jewel in the crown of food TV? It’s not as if most of us really need to be sat in front of a screen, drooling at a procession of fattening confections like a bunch of Billy Bunters in a pre-diabetic coma. What’s more, we Brits already know how to bake most competently.

“It’s the eating of vegetables that most of us find challenging”

Instead, wouldn’t it be ace if this TV formula turned its attention away from toothsome treats to the remedial area where we urgently need cooking help: vegetables? Face it, it’s the cooking and eating of vegetables that most of us find challenging. Forget five-a-day most people are struggling to manage two.

Taking the long view, vegetables have never been either a growing or cooking strength in Britain. On the surface, we’ve become a nation that loves red peppers and rocket, but deep down, we’re still vegetable dodgers. Cooked vegetables have ceded ground to pillow packs of salad leaves, which appear to tick the box of a healthy vegetable presence on the plate. In truth, we don’t even seem to have much time for those over-priced bags, given that nearly 70% of the contents get binned.

I felt deeply depressed on several occasions returning to the UK after being in Italy, where vegetables are strikingly biodiverse, seasonal, locally grown and truly appetising. By comparison, most of what’s on sale here is old, tired, often imported, and consists of taste-challenged cosmetic cultivars picked for transportation.

Even with our climatic limitations we could grow many more interesting vegetable varieties in the UK than we do, but there’s a massive job to be done helping people see the cooking potential in our vegetable portfolio.

So bring on the Great British Vegetable Challenge. Get Yotam Ottolenghi in as a judge. He’s done more for the vegetable cause in Britain to date than any native of these isles. Then our ‘water cooler’ TV conversation might revolve around celery, not cupcakes.

Joanna Blythman is a journalist and author of What to Eat