It’s the combination of steel and serenity that makes us love Mary Berry: she will not forgive your soggy bottom, but nor will she act as if it’s a cosmic calamity, because it isn’t. At the age of 80, she is one of the few extremely prominent older women on popular television; that she does it all in supreme jacketing, whether floral or fuchsia, bomber or blazer, is an added bonus. The occasional flurry around her snappy dressing – the highly colourful silk number from Zara that sold out in 2012 after she wore it on Bake Off – seems neither to unduly impress nor flatter her.
She was born in Bath into relatively comfortable surroundings four years before the Second World War began; she was of an age to dimly apprehend the traumatic upheaval taking place, and old enough to have had, by 1945, a sense of the precarious and momentous times she had lived through. Only a few years afterwards, at the age of 13, she contracted polio and spent three months in an isolation ward; she recovered, but had endured both a painful separation from her parents and two brothers and witnessed distressing scenes and suffering. Even now, she told OFM earlier this year, sympathetic viewers write to her suggesting recipes for the arthritis they think causes the weakness in her left hand and arm, in fact a legacy of the illness.
Berry’s childhood also saw rationing – and her mother’s insistence that the family forgo sugar in tea and coffee in order to enable the occasional cake or pudding. That sense of the balance between restraint and indulgence is a constant; Berry’s recipes, as elaborated in more than 70 books, cover the culinary waterfront, taking us from the fish pie supper to the flashy bit of patisserie (think of those fiddly mokatines, tiny squares requiring genoise sponge, crème beurre and fondant icing from a recent episode of Bake Off). They cleave to the idea of the special occasion, as distinct from the school of cookery that envisages every day as a blur of exotic ingredients and recherché processes.
Berry’s career – from her first job demonstrating electric ovens to her partnership with Paul Hollywood – has been a story of the quiet application of effort and honing of skills. Now, when she chews a piece of pastry contemplatively and declares it overworked, or looks disappointed at the dullness of a ganache, we trust in her judgment. And when she’s delighted by a light- as-a-feather eclair or a perfectly executed decoration, we know it’s not a put on.
Part of GBBO’s success comes down to its simple ethos: it’s a programme for people who actually like baking, rather than people who want to be famous. We know some biographical details of its participants; but they do not go on intense personal journeys on which we are forced to accompany them. The programme’s humour, jokes and general silliness are counterbalanced by the actual usefulness of knowing hard facts about how to make creme pat and shortbread; and that germ of good sense and proportion must surely emanate from the most endearingly grounded member of its presenting team.
