Great British Bake Off: Did Channel 4 Just Pay £25m For a Tent?

With Sue and Mel out as hosts and word that neither Mary Berry nor Paul Hollywood are locked in, it looks like Channel 4 just paid £25m for a tent.

The sudden implosion of the beloved cult hit The Great British Bake Off (known in the states as The Great British Baking Show, due to Pillsbury) must seem confounding to most Americans as we sit on this side of the pond and watch the fireworks. How could the BBC let such a popular program go, over a measly £10m? How could Love Productions have been undertaking these hardball negotiations without making sure their talent was locked in, no matter what? Why didn’t Channel 4 ensure that when they bought the program, the stars would come too?

The fact is, unlike here in the US, programs don’t move from station to station. Whereas we are far more used to the capitalist model, where one channel decides to drop a program and another swoops in to rescue it (recent examples include Community and The Mindy Show), this is simply not the way in the UK. It’s based on how TV started out over there versus over here. From the getgo, TV networks in the US are private companies acting on a capitalist model. We only had three channels in the 1970s (NBC, ABC, CBS), but they were always run for profit.

The UK only had three channels in the 1970s too, but they were ones funded by tax dollars: BBC 1, BBC 2 and BBC 3. And though there are more channels there now, the same way there are in the US, it means that the diversification of entertainment has hit the television industry over there from a completely different angle. US viewers look at NBC, CBS, FOX and ABC’s falling ratings against a landscape of Netflix, HBO, Basic Cable, Amazon, Hulu, and shrug that this is merely capitalism at work. In the UK they look at the same thing happening to BBCs 1-4 and see a national crisis. After all, why should tax dollars continue to fund the BBC if Netflix gets similar numbers?

British Tax Dollars at Work. Image via BBC

Now, there are a lot of reasons the UK government should continue to fund the BBC. I am not saying it shouldn’t. The BBC produces a level of quality intellectual television that simply doesn’t happen unless you are underwritten by government dollars. Those government dollars also support a level of quality British actors which the capitalist system of American Hollywood often fails to match. (The sheer number of Brits helming our major productions is a testament to that government investment.) But one can understand why government number crunchers and wonks, who don’t value art for art’s sake, would look at these falling ratings and see this as throwing money away. At least in the 1970s, those Shakespeare plays got an HUT rating of 16 and a 28 audience share.

Which brings us to what happened this week. Pre-Brexit, there had been a push by the Tory government to cut the BBC’s funding severely, and rewrite their charter in such a manner as to take down the public channels once and for all. Thankfully it lost momentum…. and then Brexit hit, and everything went out the window. But the BBC has resolved to tighten their belts so that the next time the wolves are at the door, their bottom lines look tidier. That meant taking a stand when Love Productions pushed for more money. Quite simply, no one in Love Productions thought to lock their talent down before the move, because it never assumed it would come to a move, because the BBC has never refused to pony up like that before. And the assumption, the moment negotiations fell through was that ITV, BBC’s biggest rival, would scoop it up. Not Channel 4.

LONDON, ENGLAND – MAY 08: Mary Berry, accepting the Feature award for ‘The Great British Bake Off’ and Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain pose in the Winners room at the House Of Fraser British Academy Television Awards 2016 at the Royal Festival Hall on May 8, 2016 in London, England. (Photo by Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images)

If the show had gone to ITV, they might not have lost Sue and Mel. With ITV competing to produce “BBC level” programming, it would have been a bit ugly, but in the end, another battle in the ongoing war between them. But going off to Channel 4 is something altogether quite different. This marks it as pure naked capitalism, and exactly the sort of eating away at the BBC from underneath that will be pointed to the next time the right wing attempts to cut BBC’s funding even further. As Sue and Mel obliquely pointed out in their statement yesterday, it’s government funding to the BBC that let the channel nurture and grow GBBO from that very first one off season (which wasn’t that big of a ratings getter at the time!), as a Children In Need fundraiser with long history segments and a tent that moved from locale to locale, to the monster ratings getter we tune into seven seasons on. To let the BBC spend all that money and then take it away from them and sell it to the higher bidder is morally wrong.

Will Mary and Paul refuse to go with the program? We’re still waiting for that answer. Their ties to the BBC are not as strong as Sue and Mel’s. (Sue and Mel, like many of the BBC presenter set, appear on a host of BBC programs between them. It is financially in their interest not to participate in undermining it.) Mary Berry does have cooking shows that run on the BBC. But Paul does not, and both make more via cookbooks and food branding than they do television. (Though the fame and exposure they’ve gotten from GBBO hasn’t hurt.) They may decide it’s worth it to stick with the program, and not take the moral stand that Sue and Mel have.

Next: The 10 Best Bakes from Great British Baking Show Season 3

But even if they do stay, both the show, and the BBC, have been badly wounded, and all over a measly £10m (which in the entertainment industry just isn’t that much money.) Was it really worth it? (And what will happen to the PBS airings, now that the show will no longer be distributed via BBC Worldwide?) We’ll find out when Series 8 comes out of the proving draw next year.