The Great British Bake Off review – the great British nod off

Bake Off, with its turgid puns and carefully calibrated intake, is a tedious village fete turned into TV. Or it's like a cake, comforting and familiar, depending which side of the sofa you are on

SW: With a ha ha, or a lol as they're now called? It's more about the tent with the pastel units – unchanged – isn't it? And the grounds. They're dead lucky with the weather on Bake Off.
GF: The sun always shines when you're baking, and when Mary and Paul are around. Sheep! A black lamb, gamboling. Quick, bake him, with rosemary.
SW: Black lambs are the new grey squirrels, snowdrops the new daffodils. Otherwise it's all very familiar. The Great British Nod Off, The Great British Eff Off, frankly.
GF: Twelve brand new contestants ...
SW: The usual with a sprinkling of non-whites and youths and unlikely burly, beardy blokes, to prove – prove! – that baking isn't just done by Mary Berry types. But really it's more symptomatic of Britain than of baking. They had to work hard to find them, a cynic would say.
GF: Cynic. [About a contestant, I hope] He is sooo annoying.
Sue Perkins: Now, there are two ways to make a swiss roll: first of all you push Roger Federer down a hill, secondly ...
GF: Predictably.
Mel Giedroyc: [A bit later, to urgent, this-is-a-difficult, swiss roll rolling string music - could it have been William Tell, did they miss a trick there?] By my Swiss watch, one minute precisely, one minute to go …
SP: Maintaining strict Swiss neutrality.
GF: They're on a roll!
SW: [Groans] Oh yeah, I forgot, you are Mel'n'Sue.
SP: [Later, at outset of cherry cake technical challenge] You've got two hours to pop Mary Berry's cherry ... [tiny pause] in the oven and bring it out again.
SW: Two hours to pop Mary Berry's cherry! Ha! When would that have been, the 50s? Two hours though, take it slowly ...
GF: Noo! She didn't mean it like that.
SW: Yes she bloody did, did you not hear that pause? I hope she meant it, it's the only good one so far.
SP: [On conferring] I'll class that as cherry aid.
MG: [On the end of the task] It's time to say cherry-o to this particular technical challenge ...
SW: Aaaagh! Shut up! They are soo annoying. Also the ongoing – for five series! – thing about them only really being there to lick the bowl. It's so tedious, and provincial, a village fete turned into television.
GF: Well I like it, and them, and their predictability.
SW: Because you ARE them.
GF: The rubbish punning is knowing and intentionally painful. Bake Off is like a cake, comforting and familiar. You can change a few minor ingredients, but basically when you know it works, and people like it, you should stick to the recipe.
SW: Yeah, because comparing cookery television to cookery and recipes has never been done before.
GF: Shush. [Turning attention back to telly, where this week's star baker Nancy is demonstrating her cake guillotine] Let them eat cake! Quite a good one no? [Hits series link on the remote control. Again]
Operation Wild (BBC1) has baby pandas, sick animals being made better, Clare Balding … basically, it's a 100% guaranteed winner. So in Cameroon, a gorilla called Shufai has a bad arm. A team of pioneering animal medics flies out specially, from Britain, with lots of fancy equipment, they set up an operating theatre in the jungle. Yes, a team, flies out, sets up an operating theatre, specially, in the jungle, to save Shufai's arm. Which they can't do in the end, it has to be amputated. But Shufai is going to be OK. Yay! Is it just a teeny bit bonkers, though? I mean the species, of course, is important, as is its habitat. But all that to (not) save the arm of an individual animal, even one with a name and who shares 98% of our DNA? I imagine if you work for a charity that helps not animals but people – 100% us, children perhaps, in Africa, anywhere – and you're watching, you're probably tearing your hair out.

Master bakers Mary & Paul and the incomparable presenting duo of Mel & Sue are back for the fifth series of The Great British Bake Off.