The Love Productions megahit is now on its second series for Channel 4, but it remains a tricky recipe to pull off

Crew members describe it as “a nightmare to cook in” and “hell on earth when it rains”, an “incredibly noisy” place that plays havoc with echoing sound.

Few can nail precisely why The Great British Bake Off’s tent – neither studio nor OB but an unlikely combination of the two, housing both a kitchen set and a gallery – is the right place to test the nation’s best bakers.

But the iconic location is a constant reminder of the modest roots of one of TV’s biggest hits as a whimsical BBC2 show that uprooted each week for a culinary regional tour.

Wisely remaining anchored in one location since series two, The Great British Bake Off has been in its current Berkshire home for four years – and has since navigated a move from BBC1 to Channel 4, where it brings in around 9 million viewers a week.

“Some producers like to take the real world and shove it into a TV studio,” reflects Love Productions chief executive Richard McKerrow, who famously shopped the idea around for four years. “We try to shape our ideas around the real world as far as we possibly can.”

The crew treat it as a studio shoot, albeit an unusual one. There can be unbroken stretches of filming of up to five hours in which a 30-strong troupe of jib- and hand-held camera operators, story producers, food specialists and sound crew dance across a set bustling with up to 12 contestants, plus roaming judges and presenters.

“Occasionally, I’ll go out to a big wide and there’s 50 people standing back to back, trying to stay out of everybody else’s shot,” says series director Jeanette Goulbourn.

“You get to know the bakers’ personalities, what their reactions will be. You’re building a story, layer upon layer”

Kieran Smith, executive producer

It long felt an anomaly that Bake Off was commissioned out of factual, particularly once the educational inserts dropped away. Yet it’s the combination of competition format points and documentary sensibilities, switching between multi-cam and handheld, that continues to shape this set-up.

“Once you get the set-pieces out of the way, it feels like a minidocumentary,” says executive producer Kieran Smith. “We tell the story of each bake from beginning to end, the ups and downs, people’s reactions – all the things we were told would be too boring.

“As you spend time with the bakers, you get to know their personalities and what their reactions will be. You’re building up a story, layer upon layer.”

CREATING A SUPPORTIVE ATMOSPHERE Bake Off is the friendliest competition on TV, with group hugs and bakers helping each other when recipes go awry. The atmosphere is at least in part the result of a carefully cultivated culture of support that starts with the story producers. “They build those relationships almost one on one,” says series director Jeanette Goulbourn. “In the tent, it’s a constant battle between wanting to send in story producers, getting everybody off the floor to get wide shots and having people interact with each other, which is when you can get magical moments.” The bakers are rarely telly wannabes, which requires an extra level of sensitivity. “There are moments when they might not want the camera on them,” she says. “The story producer will ask the camera operators to stop and, where possible, we do stand back. It’s incredibly tense when there’s something stressful happening – it’s horrible to watch. “The bakers are emotionally invested and if something goes wrong, those emotions are real.” The bakers’ well-being can be influenced by their place on set too, which is why they get moved around. “If people are doing similar recipes, you weigh up whether they should be on the other side of the tent. Or if one person’s really loud, should we not put them next to the quiet one? “And you don’t want them to think they’ve got a lucky bench. Some hate being at the front or the back; they have this theory that if they’re middle-back, Noel is more likely to come and distract them. But they’ll all be on every bench at some point.”

Jib operator Arun Taylor says improvisation holds the shoot together. With precious little rehearsal or down time, the crew stay nimble to capture the unfolding drama.

“While we’re doing a four-person shot at a counter, something crucial could be happening behind and someone will be asking the operators to take a step back,” he says.

“Everybody’s on the edge of somebody else’s frame all the time – it’s about that mutual respect, knowledge and awareness of what’s going on. More than any other show I’ve worked on, it’s not just the camera crew thinking about the angles – everyone has to.”

Once cameras roll, he says: “It’s like an avalanche – there’s no stopping anything, really. As in a documentary, if anything happens, it happens.”

Bakers meet only once before the first shoot, at dinner the night before. Stepping into the tent can be a heady experience, and the real-yet-not-real kitchen set-up discombobulating.

This is where the food team comes in. Home economist Faenia Moore likens day one to the first day of school.

“The more stressed they get, the more attention they need. By show two or three, some say they don’t want you there, others never lose the attachment. It’s a big deal: they’ve not used these ovens before, cooked in this space or shared appliances. It’s a game of diplomacy.”

As contestants get knocked out, the camera crew can focus more intensely on each remaining baker without treading on each other’s toes. The same cannot be said for sound.

“At the start, the ambient level is quite high but when you get to six bakers, suddenly conversations get quite isolated and carry across the tent; judges are conscious that their comments may carry too,” says sound supervisor Richard Meredith.

“It’s a balancing act to keep the ambient level high enough to give us the right bubble, but just low enough so we’re not encroaching on each other’s stories.”

Sound operator Dave Hardy adds: “The quieter it gets, the more everyone whispers. Some are quite guarded about their family recipes, as they don’t want to let them out to the world.”

PRODUCING THE GOODS Home economist Faenia Moore has a plea to anyone auditioning for the next Bake Off: “Don’t bring cupcakes or quiche, please, ever again. Or pork pies. We’re done.” Moore, who critiques baking standards at the auditions, admits to going “a bit Simon Cowell” after tasting aspiring contestants’ sweet and savoury concoctions for eight hours. “You can tell within three minutes if someone’s trying to bluff Paul Hollywood; it’s like cheating a science exam,” she says. “Sometimes you can sense the sob story coming on.” There’s an argument that Bake Off raises the standard of baking, which then ups the stakes for each subsequent series. One happy side effect: hitherto rare ingredients become common household items. “Nothing’s sacred any more. It’s like reading a thousand cookery books at once because the bakers all have different ideas,” says Moore. Bakers get to say where they want their ingredients to be sourced from, though unrealistic expectations of seasonality remain an issue; Moore winces at the memory of spending £70 on 600g of cherries. Fellow home economist Katy Ross says: “If they shop at Asda, you buy their ingredients there because that’s what they’re confident with.” She recalls buying high-quality coconut essence for one baker, only to be told he didn’t like it. “He brought his own really bad-quality stuff – it cost 50p from his corner shop.”

One important element is the weather, which tests the crew both inside the tent and out.

“The view outside changes each week,” says director of photography Sam Montague. “The bakers will sometimes suddenly remember where they are, stop what they’re doing and look outside.

“The tent is the studio but the moment you step out of it, you have to have a location mentality. We put in a system to allow us to seamlessly move between the two scenarios. The tent has a studio talkback system and a studio way of recording everybody individually. Outside, we instantly flip into single-camera location mode.”

Inside temperatures can range from -6°C to 38°C, but fans and heaters are too noisy to use. And then there’s the fact that it is a studio with windows.

“If it’s raining and cold, the plastics on the inside windows are down, but if the sun comes out, it blazes and we have to put scrims on, otherwise everything outside turns white,” says series producer Jenna Mansfield.

When Bake Off came to C4, some wags quipped that it had paid £75m for a tent. Notwithstanding that it actually bought a deeply experienced crew and rock-hard format, it also got something no studio can replicate: the atmosphere created by the tent.

As Goulbourn concludes: “These bakers really are living this little pocket of Bake Off. It’s about being removed from reality.”