Lent Day 26 - Baking and Soccer

Thanks to the rules my mom laid out when I was younger, I have a huge gap in movie viewing. Basically the entire 1980s. Prior to 1989, I had seen exactly four movies in the theater. (I discussed this previously in a different post.) Batman 1989 was the changing point for me. But I haven’t gone back and watched a lot of the movies that people my age watched and loved. This includes: ET, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Gremlins, Goonies, Mad Max, Breakfast Club, Jaws, Fantasia, Gone with the Wind, Wizard of Oz, any Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street movie. There is just a big gap in that time frame. The same thing actually happened with television, but this was much later. For a while, Heather and I started getting TOO into our tv shows. We found our lives were being dictated by making sure we kept up with shows. We would DVR episodes and then try to catch up. But things were piling up, and our nights were all spent watching TV. So we just quit. We went years without watching anything - didn’t have any TV supplier at all. If we wanted to watch things, we had streaming services and digital movies. It actually was quite freeing. But, that means that we have a huge gap in television viewing. We also are not huge fans of horror shows, and I can’t stand really anything with zombies in it. We have never seen the following shows: The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Sex in the City, The Walking Dead, Parks and Recreation, Arrested Development, Ozark, Supernatural, Family Guy, American Dad, Rick and Morty, South Park, House, Buffy, House, Law and Order, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia… We just recently watched Breaking Bad, and we are working through Better Call Saul. If we have seen CSI or NCIS or any other letter based shoe, it was at someone’s house. We quit Big Bang Theory before it was over. We got onto the Gilmore Girls bandwagon years after it was done. 

The reason I mention this is that it explains why I never watched the Great British Baking Show until a few weeks ago. I love cooking shows, and we used to watch them all the time. But when we quit tv, we stopped watching the Food Network too. Since we weren’t actively watching anything, we weren’t exposed to any promos for the show. I would see it popping up on various websites, but I didn’t understand why people were so obsessed with it. It’s just a cooking show, and a BRITISH one at that. British food has a reputation for … well … sucking. Why would I care about a British baking show? This past holiday season, though, I started working my way through a few cooking shows on Netflix. I found Nailed It to be hilarious. I watched Maya Rudolph’s Baking It. Then I went through School of Chocolate. Heather and I loved Big Brunch with Dan Levy. Soon, though, I had gone through a lot of the shows I wanted to watch. And Great British Baking Show kept popping up, taunting me. I knew that my niece and brother-in-law watched the show religiously. So I finally gave it a shot, starting with Season 10. (Which was actually Season 13? I’m still confused about how things are being counted.) 

It is so much more than just a baking show. It is nothing like an American cooking show. It isn’t all hectic and jammed full of noise and fast action. It is very calm, actually. It is gorgeously set up and shot. The contestants are so genuine and real. The hosts are not cruel. Even Paul Hollywood (that can’t be his real name), who is supposedly all grumpy and mean, is actually funny and thoughtful. The two hosts - Noel and Matt for seasons 8-10 - are quirky and funny. But there is this sweet nature that runs through the show. The two hosts move around during the tasks and chat with the bakers, often coming up with silly comments and questions to make the bakers laugh. That could come across as distracting or annoying. Instead, the contestants say that it actually breaks the tension they are feeling. Noel is my favorite - he is just so weird. Also he provides infinite jokes about the fact that he looks like Professor Snape. (The picture I included at the start of this I entitled "Snape and Voldemort on Spring Break.) He’ll start these absurd comments and just keep going with them. “Whose cake do you want me to knock off the counter?” he’ll whisper to one contestant. “It’s Peter - the baby faced assassin!” One lady accidentally knocked a fellow contestant’s offering onto the ground. She felt horrible. The judges took that into account when judging, so there was no harm done. The next episode, she was obviously nervous about the whole thing. She was jittery and constantly checking that she wasn’t in anyone’s way. Noel walked up and said, “That was brilliant last week, knocking Dave’s buns over. Get him out of the way.” She had a shocked look on her face and started protesting. He kept going, “Who’s it gonna be this week? You can take them out one by one. I think you should go after Mike.” By this point, she was laughing and - just like that - she wasn't nervous any more. 

There have been moments when a baker is breaking down, just overwhelmed by the deadline they are facing. One of the hosts is then shown calming them down with a pep talk or a dumb joke. Then, in something I rarely have seen in my many years of watching shows, the contestants HELP EACH OTHER. This happens all the time. Someone will finish their stuff a few minutes early and ask “anyone need anything?” A contestant will start to drop something, and another will run over to help catch it. They share ingredients and cooking tools. They offer advice and encouragement. I’ve watched seasons 10, 9, and 8. The ninth and eighth seasons were during the pandemic, so the contestants, judges, and hosts all lived together in a big hotel near the tent where the show is filmed. It was easy to see how close the contestants all got. I find the show isn’t just a background show to have running like the Food Network shows. I’ll put it on and immediately get invested in it; it actually is counterproductive to my work. I usually can’t have it on when I’m typing - something that never was an issue with Food Network. I just started Season 7, which has a different host with Noel. She seems cool - and I’ve heard that the older seasons are even better. That’s another thing that is crazy - just how many people we know that are fans of the show. Every so often, I’ll just text on of them.  “Oh no! Jurgen!!!!!!” And they’ll reply back “I know!!!”

I’m also continually fascinated by how WEIRD British food is. They’ll say, “Today Paul and Pru want you to make eight perfect goolifurps. They should have a delicious wanflarp center, and be coated in smooth chocolate.” I’ll have no clue what a goolifurp is, but I’ll be excited to see the contestants figure it out. They had to make a jelly art. What? A pastry cornucopia. Huh? They include marzipan all the time - which I find disgusting. And then it’s a riot when they try to make something from another region. During Japanese Week, most of the contestants did Chinese flavors - and nobody cared. Mexican Week was hilarious. The judges said how Mexican food is bright and colorful - basically a bunch of stereotypes about Mexican culture. None of the food was actually Mexican; we had a better handle on real Mexican from living in Houston than any of them did. One time, Paul had them make s'mores. “I’ve never had a s’more,” one contestant moaned.“I’ve never seen one. I think they’re an American food.” The sample that the judges talked about where HORRIFIC. They had a biscuit on the bottom, a huge ass Marshmallow that had been lightly browned around the edge, and chocolate ganache. What the heck? But those things make the show perfectly British and so entertaining. I also love the accents. Contestants come from all over the region, so there are Irish and Scottish accents - in addition to the many different dialects from the different regions. It has been such a fun show to watch;  I’m really glad that we finally discovered it. 

While on the topic of all things British, the other show that we have completely fallen in love with is Ted Lasso. The journey that this show took to its creation is wild. Back in 2013, when NBC purchased the rights to English Premier League, they ran a series of commercials with an American football coach talking about English soccer - and clearly not knowing anything. The coach was played by Jason Sudeikis. He had an assistant coach played by Brendan Hurt named Coach Beard. The commercials were a huge success, and Sudeikis and Hurt talked about how they thought that there was a lot more that could be done with those characters. Years went by. Hurt was a struggling actor who was stuck doing dinner theater and bit parts. Sudeikis blew up into a pretty successful comic actor. Six years after the commercials ran, Sudeikis called Hurt and said, “Hey, I talked with Bill Lawrence, and he thinks we can do something with that Ted Lasso thing.” If you don’t know, Lawrence is the creator of Scrubs and Cougar Town, among other things. In other words, he knows what he’s doing. They got the group together, brought in Brett Goldstein as a writer/producer/actor. The show was born. 

The concept was that a high-profile billionaire and his wife get divorced due to his infidelities. She gets his soccer club - Richmond - in the divorce. And she wants to hurt him by destroying this thing he loves so much. So she hires an American football coach - and his loyal assistant coach - to lead the soccer club. At first, he is as unsuccessful as you would imagine he would be. Everybody hates him, but his relentlessly positive and kind-hearted approach to life starts to win people over. Sudeikis is really great in the lead role - his many awards have been well deserved. Hurt’s portrayal of brilliant, quirky, and slightly disturbed Coach Beard regularly causes me to laugh out loud. Goldstein’s profane and grumpy over-the-hill player Roy Kent is hilarious. But all of the surrounding characters have grown to be fully fleshed out treasures. The African players could be one-note stereotypes, but they have great depth. The jilted ex-wife character played by Hannah Waddington has become a regal powerful savvy female businesswoman who others try to emulate. And the show keeps getting better and better. Season Two actually dealt quite a bit with the topic of mental health - especially when it comes to men and athletics. "I promise you there is something worse out there than being sad, and that’s being alone and being sad. Ain’t no one in this room alone.” Some really good stuff. The Christmas episode in Season Two is one of the best episode of any show I’ve seen. It is touching and hilarious and so much more powerful than it has any right to be. I felt myself tearing up multiple times, followed by laughing at the inappropriate behavior of Roy and his niece. Ted Lasso the character has turned this down-and-out team into something so much more - it is a family. 
There is one plot twist that happened at the end of season two and that is front and center in season three.

This is where I get into SPOILERS. If you don’t want to read them, skip to the next paragraph. The character of Nick began as a team manager, stuck washing clothes and towels and stocking lockers. But he was a brilliant soccer strategist. Ted and Beard realized this and started to include him in decisions and training sessions. They elevated him to assistant coach. And they frequently adopted his advice on the team. At the end of Season Two, though, he went off on Ted and then left to coach a different team. The team that had just been bought by the ex-husband of Richmond’s owner. So far in Season Three, Nick has been rude and downright awful to Ted and Richmond. There have been a lot of people who have said that this change came out of nowhere and was uncharacteristic to the character. I was bothered when I saw these comments because I thought the show had been setting this up very clearly throughout. Nick wants respect. He never has had it. His mom treats him like a baby; his dad is cold, distant, and judgmental. Nick was a manager, a nothing. He thrived under Ted’s guidance. But then Ted brought Roy - who had retired and become a commentator on television - on staff as an assistant. Nick felt betrayed because he figured Ted would start listening to Roy instead. Nick didn’t feel special any more. Keep in mind, this was all in his head. A couple of times, his suggestions for plays and formations were quite successful - something that Ted was always quick to attribute to Nick’s genius. The attention given to Nick after these occasions caused him to get obsessed with the praise. He frequently would scroll through social media and watch press conference replays. He ate up every positive thing said about him. He started to buy into his own hype, and he let his perceived slights by Ted run rampant in his mind. By the end of the season, he had created this narrative in his head that he had been tossed aside by Ted and the team. Ted was shocked at the accusations because he had never been anything but kind and encouraging to Nick, and he apologized for anything he had done - even subconsciously. But it was too late. Nick had bought into the reality he had constructed. The entire story element was clearly and thoughtfully built. Anyone who didn’t see it coming wasn’t paying attention, or was just watching the show without giving it much thought. There even was a contrasting story line where team owner Rebecca was mentoring former party-girl model Keeley. The Rebecca-Keeley dynamic was clearly positioned as the opposite of the Ted-Nick relationship. I’m really confused as to how anyone felt the storyline was misguided. It made perfect sense. 

Back to the non-spoiler portion of this. If you haven’t watched either Ted Lasso or the Great British Baking Show, put them on your to-watch list. Both of them have a lot of positivity, which is something that the world needs more of these days. They are well constructed and executed shows that have a lot of heart. Plus you’ll finally get to find out what some of the baked goods in Harry Potter are, like pasties and sticky toffee pudding, AND you’ll understand more about soccer. Baked goods, humor, and positivity. Win win win. “If you care about someone, and you got a little love in your heart, there ain’t nothing you can’t get through together.” That’s right, Ted.