The Great British Baking Show alum Ruby Tandoh is peeling back the fondant layers on what it’s really like to compete inside the tent.
Tandoh, who baked her way into Season 4 back in 2013, shared new reflections in an essay for The New Yorker, published August 25. While the show (known as The Great British Bake Off in the U.K.) has long been celebrated for its heartwarming tone, Tandoh claims life behind the scenes wasn’t always as sugar-sweet as it looked on screen.
“In the listless couple of hours between challenges, we’d sit in a sofa-crowded snug in the east wing of the house, talking s— and selectively sharing baking tips,” she wrote.
Still, producers reportedly weren’t entirely sold on the contestants’ friendly vibe. According to Tandoh, executive producer Kieran Smith once admitted: “The boring thing that everyone talks about is that [‘Bake Off’] is kind. We didn’t start off by going, ‘We want to make a really kind, warm show.’ Bakers are quite unusual television characters. It came from them.”
Even so, Tandoh argued that the show’s “kind” branding didn’t mean contestants were spared the usual reality-TV tactics. She recalled sneaking out for cigarettes with fellow baker Glenn Cosby, where the two would gripe about “the challenges and the ambushes from producers.”
“Their overeager commiserations, the way they’d bait you into narrating your downfall in real time,” she wrote. “We took slow drags, discussing the merits of poaching meringue in custard as producers scurried across the lawn with ingredients veiled under gingham.”
She also revealed that competitors could often see the edit coming even while filming: “There would be longer clips of the front-runners and the people at risk of going home; the rest of us would serve as the rhythm section… Somebody would be set up as a dark horse. Somebody else would be tripped up by their pride.”
Tandoh’s essay arrives just ahead of the September 9 release of her fifth book, All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now.
Meanwhile, The Great British Baking Show returns to Netflix for Collection 13 on September 5, with new episodes dropping every Friday.