‘Great British Bake Off’ Returns With a Trailer Straight Out of Lockdown

Great British Bake Off (GBBO) 2020 has a trailer, and as might be expected, it’s straight out of lockdown. Having been filmed minus Sandi Toksvig and the Hollywood handshake, with the new Channel 4 series airing on 22 September and heading to Netflix for U.S. viewers on 25 September, the trailer documents one brave boy’s journey to get his grandmother a precious bag of flour, intercut with scenes of desperate bakers.

Because this is a British, comedy-adjacent trailer, the desperation shifts in pitch from “oh, they could be talking about Drugs!” to “lol, no, it’s obviously flour,” recalling the height of U.K. coronavirus lockdown when supermarkets ran out, mills had to go into overdrive, and the kind of people who religiously watch GBBO baked, baked, and baked some more. Is this trailer another tiny chapter in the U.K.’s strange fetish for high-stakes personal ingenuity and resilience in the context of a crisis that could be easily surmounted with community support and state-supported bolstering of food supplies? Yes. Just enjoy it.

New host Matt Lucas — still on the books despite his comedy pedigree as the co-creator of Little Britain, which has recently been pulled from streaming services and has always been some of the most multifariously dreadful comedy ever to air on British television — revealed that the first signature bake was Battenburg, the pink-and-yellow checkerboard sponge, earlier this week. He said that he tried “12,” which would mark a departure from the usual baker’s dozen of 13 contestants, but maybe it was just the sugar.

It’s been a strange series for a strange year already: GBBO 2020 was filmed in a coronavirus bubble, which put paid to the Hollywood handshake and accelerated filming through four weeks rather than the usual 11. What might replace it? The Hollywood elbow bump; the Hollywood spatula prod; the Hollywood “yeah, this is good baking, but remember that I, the all-powerful Paul Hollywood can break your spirit at any moment and am in Masculine Control here” nod. Hellish, all.

Much remains uncertain, but what’s clear is that GBBO is back, and its trailer couldn’t be more on-brand if it tried. Who knows what they might do with the traditionally zany opening credits?

• Everything You Need to Know About The Great British Bake Off 2020 [ELDN]
• Great British Bake Off Lives, But the Hollywood Handshake Is History [ELDN]