Slo-mo, bad voiceovers and Mary Berry's specs: rewatching the strange first series of Bake Off

Ten baking enthusiasts are about to take part in a very special contest. It’s the first ever Great British Bake Off.

So began a low-key little BBC Two series, all the way back on August 17, 2010 – a bygone era when David Cameron had just taken over 10 Downing Street from Gordon Brown, Prince William and Kate Middleton were yet to become engaged, and Fabio Capello’s England team crashed out of the World Cup in South Africa after a 4-1 thrashing by old foes Germany.

Nobody predicted this unassuming cake-making competition would go on to become the biggest on UK television and a bona fide cultural phenomenon. And if they claim they did, they’re lying.

Now the first seven series – aka “the BBC years” – are available on Netflix. Revisiting the early episodes make for intriguing, instructive viewing. It’s Bake Off but not as you know it. On your marks, get set… retro bake!

The first thing you notice is the “fab four” stars – a dream team that would stay intact until only Paul Hollywood decided to “follow the dough” to Channel 4 in 2017 – and how different they look. Younger, obviously. Well, except in Mary Berry’s case. Like Louis Walsh on The X Factor or a Baking Benjamin Button, Berry seems to have aged in reverse since arriving on our screens.

This is very much pre-makeover Mazza Bezza: less make-up, less coiffed, specs instead of contacts, a drab coat rather than a snazzy floral bomber. She was 75 here and looks it. Now she’s a sprightly 83 but could pass for a decade younger. One thing is reassuringly unchanged, though: she gleefully tastes some rum and Sue Perkins cracks a joke about Berry’s pupils dilating with pleasure. Textbook Bake Off.

Hollywood was the least famous of the quartet back then and looks endearingly unstarry: less hairgel and spray tan, less alpha strutting, sporting a man-at-M&S, Country-Casuals wardrobe complete with plaid shirt and dad-jumper. Whisper it but he’s rather sweet – still steely blue-eyed but yet to become the Simon Cowell of soggy bottoms, let alone invent the fabled “Hollywood handshake”.

Presenting pair Mel Giedroyc and Perkins both sport unflatteringly lumpy grey blazers but the main eye-catcher is Mel’s bad hair: a choppy, feathery bob styled with too much product. She looks like Natasha Kaplinksy’s just fallen out of bed. Thankfully, Sue looks much the same as today: quiff, specs, sarcasm? Check, check, check.

The duo begin the series largely pun and innuendo-free (the closest they come is Mel saying of some cake mixture: “Crikey, that’s stiff”), although as they relax into their roles, the silliness levels gradually ramp up. They’ve always been supportive of the bakers but here they’re sincere too – telling them to be proud of themselves and thanking them for their hard work, as well as offering a shoulderpad to cry on.

The most jarring aspect of Ye Olde Bake Off is the narration – a “who said that?” male voice, belonging to actor Stephen Noonan. Sober and unsmiling, it’s newsreader-ish in tone. Did producers think they needed an authoritative male voiceover to make the show feel less feminine and add gravitas?

Noonan’s interjections are instructive, practical, talking about mixing methods, crumb textures and the science of baking, with no hint of jaunty warmth. It has a distancing effect, like viewers are observing the action, rather than feeling right there in the tent. For subsequent series, Mel and Sue took over. Rightly so.

For the debut series only, the tent moves from town-to-town each week on a sort of sweet-toothed nationwide tour. It’s Antiques Roadshow with spatulas. As if this wasn’t gimmicky enough, the locations were themed: puddings in Bakewell, biscuits at Scone Palace, bread in Sandwich and so on. One imagines this wasn’t tenable long-term. Where would later innovations like Forgotten Bakes Week and Free From Week take place? Plus it can’t have been much fun taking down the bunting and transporting those Smeg fridges.

Presumably because it’s mobile and hosts fewer bakers, the tent is smaller than the current marquee but still decorated with twee touches and kitted out with high-spec equipment. Through the flaps, amusingly, you can often often spot members of the public milling about like lost tourists, wondering where this canvas construction full of stressed, sweating foodies has suddenly appeared from.

Other small-but-crucial format differences abound. It’s a binge-friendly six-parter, rather than the familiar 10-week epic. Ten amateur bakers compete, not the now-standard dozen, and there are ruthless double eliminations during the early episodes. During the technical round, the judges pick the three best and three worst bakes, rather than ranking them all. And shock horror, there’s no Star Baker award for the week’s most impressive performer. That wasn’t introduced until series two and the show is slightly less feelgood without it.

Meanwhile, makers Love Productions try too a tad hard with the filming: there are sped-up and slo-mo sequences, plus a sepia tint for flashbacks during judgely deliberations. The crew needed to listen to contestant Louise Brimelow, who reveals that her motto is “KISS: keep it simple, stupid”.

In oh-so-BBC Two news, there are not one but three historical segments – one per round, all featuring multiple boffins. Early Bake Off took its “inform, educate and entertain” mission seriously.

The judges are more straight-faced and exacting too. They give running feedback to Mel and Sue as we go along. For the technical judging, they don’t just cut a slice of each cake – they hack them all in half and stand them on their side to compare the centres. It feels like country show judging, rather than for the cameras. You half-expect them to start pinning rosettes on ponies.

Conversely, the standard of baking is markedly lower than it is nowadays. Creations are more basic and rustically presented than today’s ambitious gourmet offerings, while the technical challenges – Victoria sandwich, scones, treacle tart – have the distinct whiff of a Home Economics lesson. Bakers also bring pre-made elements into the tent. The contest was still feeling its way and nobody had seen the show before, so there was more variation in skill levels.

Bake Off contestants were pleasingly diverse in background right from the start: there’s a black single mother (Annetha Mills, one of the early standouts), an Asian Brummie (Jasminder Randhawa, who goes far) and a female police sergeant (no-nonsense Brimelow, who’s like Juliet Bravo via Happy Valley). However, the age range was more limited: bakers span from 24 to 51 in series one, whereas now we get teenagers to seventy-somethings.

It’s not really a spoiler to say that first series was eventually won by Edd Kimber – still one of only two male champions in eight series (the other being series three’s John Whaite). The youngest baker at a fresh-faced 24, Kimber might have had an unpopular job title (debt collector, boo!) but he was consistently excellent and endearingly nerdy, confessing from the start: “Baking is my life.”

Kimber edged out fellow finalists Miranda Gore Browne (the posh, oh-do-stop wittering one) and Ruth Clemens (the ultra-competitive, Suranne Jones-y one). All three have gone onto make a career out of baking, as has fellow contender Jonathan Shepherd – a squeaky-voiced sweetheart who looks like Zack Efron but sounds like Joe Pasquale.

Emotions ride high, even in episode one. There are tears from Scotland’s ruddy-cheeked, silver-haired Lea Harris, who drops her cake getting it out of the oven, and Welshman Mark Whithers, whose cake sinks in the middle because he keeps anxiously opening the oven door. The dapper bus driver wears a tie in the tent, which we didn’t see again until Nick Hewer in the recent celebrity edition. Poignantly, Whithers died from cancer three years after taking part.

Perkins is particularly lovely with this weepy pair, taking lots of time to comfort and console. Bake Off’s trademark camaraderie comes through during the double elimination, with fond farewells and group hugs. “It’s very sad but that’s the Bake Off,” concludes Hollywood, in a premonition of his hardman image.

Ratings for the first series averaged 2.77m, peaking at 3.03m for the latter stages – one-fifth of the levels they would eventually reach. As the show inexorably improved and word-of-mouth spread, viewing figures climbed by a couple of million for series two, then just kept rising like a well-proved loaf.

Rewatching the first series is like leafing through an old photo album, wincing at the fashions and growing wistful at how young everyone looks. It’s charmingly lo-fi, more like one of those modest Bake Off copycats: the painting one, the pottery one or the sewing one.

The editing is less whizzy, the tone more earnest and the delightfully daft wit yet to shine through, meaning that episodes feel longer than they do now. Yet it’s still fiendishly compelling, so you can see why it was a slow-burning hit - even if it’s impossible to predict just what a juggernaut it would become.

Series 1-7 of The Great British Bake Off are available to watch now on Netflix UK. The show returns to Channel 4 at 8pm on August 27