Day 33 - Regain our sense of perspective.

Switch on the BBC at any given time and you are likely to find someone lying in a hospital bed moaning or someone blubbering that their soufflé hasn’t risen. The schedules seem to be full of hospital dramas or cookery competitions. In my imagination those in the hospital beds are suffering from severe food poisoning caused by an undercooked prawn risotto that a distinctly unmasterchef has rustled up, while claiming it was his life long dream to appear on a programme that has only been running about 5 years. (Maybe the crying chef is just a very precocious 4-year old with a beard. I don’t know.)

Anyway this week has seen a scandal on the Great British Cry Off, sorry Bake off.

With one contestant being the subject of death threats on twitter for alledgedly taking another crier’s sorry baker’s baked Alaska out from the freezer making the dessert inedible and meaning the poor, emotionally challenged wannabe chef got eliminated from the show that had been his ambition to appear on not only in this life but in all his previous incarnations too. Let me just repeat that. Death threats! On Twitter! Headlines on the Guardian website! 800 complaints to the BBC! It’s a cookery competition! Let me just repeat that – a cookery competition. It’s not an invasion of a sovereign nation or a trade treaty that will place power even more firmly in the hands of big business but a cookery show.

Are you a fan of the Great British Bake off? If you are, answer this easy question but don’t Google it. Who won the first series? See you don’t know, because it doesn’t matter, it is irrelevant. So this publicity stunt for the BBC has obviously worked, but we really do need to regain our sense of perspective.

Don’t forget if you like these rants you might enjoy my short stories or even my novel Maggie’s Milkman