Sticky Sweet Comfort Food
Even though she was my hero in Bake Off and in many ways the Greatest Living Human I'd sort of avoided most of Nadiya's BBC output. She's been awkwardly crowbarred into the identikit chef model where in reality she's nothing of the sort. Therefore her often quite whacky recipes seem oddly out of place in the light and spacious model kitchen, cooking over the "Greatest Inoffensive TV Background Music Hits of the Early 00s". It all feels rather stiff and safe, when the great joy in watching Nadiya is her effusive joy and honest reactions.In the defense of the production team there is a pandemic on - so the slightly awkward "cut to professional chef doing what amounts to a short promo vid" was likely meant to be a cooking guest spot and the (by the end of the series) forced "let's all get the crew to have some food finale" bits make the whole thing seem off-balanced. I mean - it's a cooking show with Nadiya, you get to see her bake stuff and grin happily, there's a camera in the oven which is quite cool. It does the job essentially.
What I sort of hope is that she gets even more of an identity - she's done "travelcook" shows before and they always work much better than this. There's another in the pipeline but... you know. Circumstances. The most important thing is that she's happy and baking on the Beeb - I still remember being overjoyed with happiness when she won Bake Off and her having this career at all is utterly magnificent.
score 6/10
owen-watts 23 October 2020
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw6198808/14790
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