Baking bubble.

Saturday, October 10th, 2020

Not an actual bubble, just me imagining one.

I guess we don’t follow the “this month on Netflix” and the “new on Amazon Prime” stuff as carefully as we should, because I was surprised to see that a new season (“series”) of The Great British Baking Show was becoming available on the Netflix, week by week, three days after the UK airing of the popular program. Produced this year!

And so we watched the first one this evening, and heard about the vast, vast, vast amounts of preparations and cast and crew quarantining together amid intricate scheduling and precautions, precautions, precautions, because they were producing a large, unscripted, very touchy-feely show during a pandemic.

So they used a bubble. Not a real one of course, but the sort of strictly enforced isolation with testing that the NBA used with some success. The usual 12-13 weeks just on weekends schedule was compressed down to six weeks, the contestants had families (and in some cases, pets) quarantined with them, it was all…quite complex.

And then they did the usual thing of making elaborate gooey cakes that were either overflavored or underbaked or ended up as tragic accidents on the tent floor. Apparently the ratings for this pandemic edition have been quite high, and it has been widely viewed in the UK at least as an antidote to lockdown.

I guess here, too.