The Most Fun You Can Have Watching Television (or Why I Like Baking And Houses)

Kevin McCloud would be proud

I watch television, as I'm sure many of you do too.  If you don't, you should.  Just a bit.  Go on.  Try it, you might like it.

Anyway.

One of my very favourite programmes at the moment is The Great British Bake Off.

If you haven't seen it, a bunch of amateur bakers bake a variety of different, er, baked goods every week.  They have a Signature Challenge, a Showstopper Challenge and a Technical Challenge. Presented by Mel & Sue (famous for being amusing in the 1990s and called Mel & Sue all the time), there are also famous judges (Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry) from the world of baking who judge the baking (I honestly don't know how they dream these things up! Baker judges judging bakers - it's CRAZINESS in a tin).

Anyway again.

And I must apologise, for I fear I have led you up the garden path somewhat, by making it sound like I'm going to be All Serious about baking.  I'm not.  C'mon, chaps, do you know me At All?!

Whilst the programme is, of course, fabulous, with its quintessentially English settings (complete with bunting), earnest and inventive ingredient combinations and will-it-won't-it rise/set/cut properly cliffhangers, there is a game you can play alongside watching the programme, which can turn it from dainty lady-type watching to belly laugh hur-hur-ing in an instant.

Interested?  Read on.

It's very simple.  All you do is replace the word "bake" (in all its forms, bake, baker, baking, baked, etc) with the word "fuck".

Come with me a moment.  You'll have the Great British Fuck Off.  And Paul Hollywood saying, "Good fuck on this." And Mel & Sue questioning people as to how long they have been fucking.  And where did they learn to fuck?  Do they like watching other people fucking?  What's the most challenging thing about fucking?

And my very favourite, "When I'd go to my grandmother's house, you could smell the fucking as soon as she opened the front door."

I know, I know.  Yes, it's puerile.  But I defy you not to do it and laugh.

I'm not done though.

Grand Designs returns this month for a new season.  Hurrah!  Kevin McCloud playing schadenfreude with plebs with more money than taste!  Watch as he rubs his hands gleefully as Norris and Antoine don't get the roof on their house before the rains come down in November.  Delight in his gentle scoffing at sky-high sums of cash being spent on mixer taps on springs, enormous windows and painstaking mosaics crafted by blind nuns out of flattened hedgehog spines.

But, most of all, listen out for the tone of voice he uses when he faux-gingerly asks at the end how much the whole build has cost.  "So...how much...did it cost...in the end?"

And then, when you watch the reveal of each lavish room, with Kevin being shown around by the owner-builders, imagine that he's using the same tone of voice to ask, "So...er...have you...fucked in here?"

Because they will have done.  Hur-hur.