TV preview: The Great British Bake Off (BBC1, Wednesday 8pm), the Beeb’s grand goodbye to GBBO

Plus: Saving Africa’s Elephants: Hugh and the Ivory War (BBC1, Monday 9pm) and Fatal Experiments: the Downfall of a Supersurgeon – Storyville (BBC4, Tuesday 10pm)

The Great British Bake Off (BBC)

I really don’t think there is anything useful I can add to the vast coverage that the Great British Bake Off, or GBBO as it’s usually abbreviated, has received in recent months. Besides Brexit, there have been few other topics that have stirred the British public as much as the fate of this innocuous, or seemingly innocuous, cake-making competition.

Anyway, you need to know that the BBC is waving goodbye to one of its most successful shows, to which of course it did not own the rights to the name or format, but did exercise some emotional pull over most of its presenters. So this week Mel Giedroyc, Sue Perkins, Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry will be picking a winner for the very last time for Auntie. Actually they aren’t, because there’ll be two Christmas specials for us to gorge on as well, but, whatever Channel 4 does with its newly acquired GBBO, it just won’t be the same. Will it, I wonder be even better? An almost heretical thought, I know, but, with the money they’ve paid for it (an incredible £75m) they will be sure to at least make a stab at baking a better show. Personally, I’m GBBO-intolerant in a way some people are gluten-intolerant, so I have to try very hard not to spew up at the sound of all the sentimental twaddle about Bake Off. I’d better stop there, eh?

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is a man who has come a long way since River Cottage. In Saving Africa’s Elephants: Hugh and the Ivory War, he now traverses the Ruvuma river in southern Africa, and surveys the African savannah in a microlight, as if he were some particularly well-spoken multi-terrain moral predator, searching for the reasons why Africa’s elephants are, once again, facing an uncertain future, and those responsible that.

It is, sorry to say, quite an old story, this, but no less worthy a cause for all that, and The Independent has a proud record of environmental campaigning, and in particular raising money to protect what’s left of the African elephant population, which is being diminished by 30,000 a year.


 The Great British Bake Off 
 (BBC)

Familiar as the basics are – the massive demand for ivory in China and the Middle East fuelling an incessant and highly profitable demand for tusks in poor corrupt African societies – there are still revelations. You may not know, for example, that the “front line” in the ivory wars has moved back to Mozambique, where things had improved since the end of the civil war there three decades ago. DNA testing of tusks seized at, for example, Heathrow airport – we witness a seizure of thousands of tons – can help identify the latest poaching hotspots. Investigations on the ground confirm the grim picture. There is something intensely poignant about the sight of slaughtered elephants, these wise and emotionally intelligent creatures, and the vanity and insanity that fuels their demise. You’ll have to judge for yourself whether there is any hope for the elephants of Africa.

Highly recommended is Fatal Experiments: the Downfall of a Supersurgeon. This is the tale (with two more episodes to follow), of Paolo Macchiarini, one of world’s most famous surgeons, and no stranger to controversy. He has high hopes for stem cell research and a new type of synthetic organ – revolutionary, imaginative, life-saving stuff. But he has also been accused of using terminally ill patients as human guinea-pigs and using unorthodox, in the wrong way, science. Macchiarini himself appears, and, with his handsome looks, designer stubble, and fashionable gear looks like he has come from central casting as the idealised modern-day version of an Italian renaissance artists. Filmed more like an action movie than a documentary, this is a story that will beguile and perplex you.