THE GREAT BRITISH BAKE OFF, C4, 8pm
IT’S the final tonight and even though I love the show, I don’t particularly care who wins this year. Unlike past series, there’s no-one in the current batch of bakers who has captured my imagination and sympathy. In fact, do I even know their names? I think I’m just calling them “the Scouse girl”, “the posh girl” and “the man”.
Having said that, I’ll probably still blub when they announce the winner and hand out the bouquets amid family and friends.
The bakes in this latest series, the first since the jump to Channel 4, seem to have been more challenging than previously, but even with the extra skill required the show has still kept its jolly, casual, amateur feel.
For tonight’s final, the three remaining bakers must produce a batch of loaves and then, for the technical round, a biscuit bake, while the showstopper is a fancy, wondrous patisserie affair.
BOBBY SANDS – 66 DAYS, BBC4, 9pm
FOR a very abrupt change of tone and subject, tune into this feature-length documentary about Bobby Sands, the IRA prisoner.
Sands, and nine others, demanded to be recognised as political prisoners and embarked on a hunger strike to bring attention to their campaign.
This film shows how they gained worldwide notice, but also changed attitudes in their own cities and towns. We hear that in 1981 Northern Ireland was stuck in a “relentless cycle of violence” but it then took a dramatic twist when the prisoners began the new tactic of the hunger strike. Bobby Sands’s protests, and his death, “broke through the mental partition – everybody had to pay attention to it”.
The film uses extracts from Sands’s diaries, plus interviews from two very different men – Gerry Adams and Norman Tebbit – to tell the story of his campaign and its effects.
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