The Great Celebrity Bake Off review: Louis Theroux is harbouring an all-consuming ambition

The documentary maker’s witty pizza cake is no match for a very personal choux-stopper

Nominative determinism or not, it becomes clear with a lightning intensity very early on that Jenny Eclair is going to be the star baker in this first instalment of Bake Off‘s annual charity run. She and she alone is able to combine proper baking skill and the kind of witty, playful imaginative touches that you need to succeed in this hard-bitten world of cakes and cookies. She leaves her competitors, Louis Theroux, Russell Howard and Ovie Soko, with the crumbs from her table, groaning as it was with a cornucopia of custardy fancies.

Make no mistake, behind the sugary compliments and the candyfloss camaraderie of The Great Celebrity Bake Off for Stand Up to Cancer (Channel 4), there is a competitive element, especially on the part of Theroux, a man whose naive persona is inadequate camouflage for what I assume to be an all-consuming ambition.

It is, in the end, the showstopper that does it for Eclair. Themed on “your perfect day”, she sets about recreating an incredible-sounding adventure she had once enjoyed in Barbados. It involved swimming in the azure Caribbean with, erm, pigs, which I suppose makes a change from dolphins. With some inevitability, Eclair and the others are ordered to build their reveries using 30 choux buns, and of course, the eclair (cake version) is the result, here used to represent the limbs of Eclair (human comic version). Her chest is fashioned from bright pink marzipan atop a profiterole torso. Her innards, if that’s not too brutal a term, are lemon whipped cream and the pigs are crafted from choux and pink icing. “This is so original and amusing”, declares judge Prue Leith, “it is just brilliant.” Quite so.

Grudgingly, I have to give some credit for one of Theroux’s efforts, a superbly constructed faux pizza cake, based on a biscuit, but swapping white chocolate for mozzarella, raspberry jam for tomatoes, and chocolate chips for olives. He even takes the trouble to use a blowlamp on the white chocolate to give it that authentic wood-fired oven-baked look. It is witty and smart, but the cooking lets him down a little. As for Russell, well his virtually raw Napoleon (mille-feuille) dish can’t actually be tasted by Leith and Paul Hollywood because of the risk of food poisoning. By contrast, Ovie makes delicious-tasting but unrecognisable messes.

But their presence is all the more appreciated, because, after all, failure is much easier to laugh at than success. I should also make mention of hosts Sandi Toksvig and Noel Fielding, who provide the gluten of consistency.

Anyway, Jenny Hargreaves wins. That’s her real name, by the way. She adopted “Eclair” when she was a teenager, at a disco in Blackpool, when she was pretending to be French. I wonder if she’d called herself instead Jenny Brie or Jenny Renault Five she’d have enjoyed the same success and gone on to win the Perrier Award for comedy, let alone be a contender to become Le Meilleur Patissier-Celebrite 2020. If she does win the final, then I hope someone names a cake after her.