Where to Stream: The Great British Baking Show

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The Great British Baking Show just did something huge in “Pastry Week”: It finally acknowledged global warming and gave the bakers a whole bunch of fans. No, there’s still no air conditioning in the tent, for that would affect the sound equipment and probably scare away all the lovely pheasants, squirrels, and fawns we see in the background. But for maybe the first time ever, the bakers were given a major reprieve from an oppressive heat wave, and thank the baking gods for it.

If you’ve ever binge-watched the bejesus out of The Great British Baking Show on Netflix, you’ll know that the show has a heating problem. Namely, there’s always an episode — or a string of them — where the tent is so hot that it affects the bakers’ work. Caramel melts, pastry falls apart, ice cream becomes mush, and last year, Ruby Bhogal‘s tiered cake literally collapsed in on itself. Nevertheless The Great British Baking Show just insists the bakers get on with it. Yeah, you’ll see the occasional little tiny fan on the bench, but by and large, you’re not seeing any major operation to cool anything down (other than cakes).

Do the judges and producers know that the high temperatures can frazzle the nerves and wreck havoc on delicate sugar work? You bet! Prue Leith even asks fellow judge Paul Hollywood if he would have asked the bakers to make complex warqa pastry if he had known it would be this hot. He smiles like a cartoon villain and says yes. It’s always been taken for granted that the elements are just one more challenge the bakers have to contend with.

So why did The Great British Baking Show finally ease up and give the bakers fans?

Probably because it was very, very hot this summer in the United Kingdom — like, historically hot. There are a few passing references in this episode to a “heat wave,” but what you need to know is that all of Europe sweltered under three back-to-back heat waves this summer. These heat waves were extremely dangerous and deadly, as Europeans are less likely to have air conditioning than Americans. These heat waves also put the issue of global warming in the forefront of a lot of Europeans’ minds.

Speaking of the issue of global warming as it pertains to The Great British Baking Show, my esteemed colleague Karen Kemmerle has joked in the past that if you watch the quaint British reality show in order, you can almost watch the effect of climate change unfolding season by season. That is, the tent always got hotter towards the end of the season, but each year, it seems to just get…hotter. The bakers complain about it more, the light outside the tent shines just a little brighter, and more bakes flail thanks to temperature.

It is worth noting that this is the first time (that I can recall) the bakers getting access to any kind of cooling appliances. Not only that, but we saw Alice Fevronia carrying hers around the tent with her, and David Atherton even put a wet towel on his head to cool down. That means the heat in the tent was so bad, so awful, and so dangerous that not even The Great British Baking Show could keep calm and carry on like there wasn’t something weird going on. The heat needed to be addressed!

Climate change is real, y’all. Just look at how it’s affected the production of The Great British Baking Show!

Watch The Great British Baking Show on Netflix