hat a week for The Great British Bake Off (Channel 4) to return. I am not sure there could have been a more appropriate time for this cosiest of television shows to come back, bringing with it the promise of a weekly distraction in the form of cake, bread and 12 decent people supporting each other through thick and thin batter. Until there is another panicked run on flour, eggs and yeast, that is, and we are left trying to join in with bread week using a three-year-old bag of tapioca flour and some out-of-date spices that may or may not have any flavour left in them, depending on which way you sniff them. In some ways, this series is far from business as usual. Filming was delayed by the pandemic; when it eventually began, the tent had moved to a new location and the bakers and presenters had formed a superbubble. Sandi Toksvig has gone, replaced by Matt Lucas. At first, Lucas wears the look of a competition winner getting his lifelong wish of a tour of the tent. He looks genuinely thrilled to be there and a little overwhelmed. There is a bit of tentative newness at the start – “Are you a fan of battenberg?” he asks more than one baker, during the battenberg challenge – but he settles in quickly. Soon, it is as if he has always been there. It helps that he and Noel Fielding are friends; their rapport is lovely to watch. That is not to say it has turned sickly sweet. The need for a bubble meant that, instead of turning up to do their filming at weekends, the contestants were there full-time. (Dave, from Hampshire, is getting ready for the arrival of his first baby, we are told, so I am sure his partner was overjoyed by this requirement.) It does not make as much of a dent on the overall feel as you might expect. Although there was an opportunity for a Big Brother-style reinvention, there is no significant change in tone or mood. It is a bubble, in more ways than one. If you missed the first two minutes of the episode, you would not know there was a pandemic going on. But then, for just over an hour in front of the telly on Tuesdays, perhaps it is OK to pretend there is a cake-fuelled alternative. That said, there is a hint of greater intensity. There are a lot of mishaps in the first episode. Usually, someone knocking a cake halfway across the tent floor is a once-in-a-series occurrence; in the old days, it was such a big deal that it might become front-page news. Butterfingers sounds like a technical challenge, but, judging by the number of upsets in the opening week, the technical challenge should be keeping your cakes upright every once in a while. The early episodes are always busy and full, giving each new, excitable cohort of bakers a fair shot while allowing the stars to shine. It is early days for favourites, and you never know how the breadsticks are going to crumble, but so far I love Sura, Loriea, Hermine, young Peter – who picked up one baking tip when he was 10, from an old series of Bake Off – and Lottie, who listens to Viking metal, because of course she does. I hope she stays, for her dry observations alone. More than anything, though, this week’s showstopper is one of the funniest I have seen in the history of Bake Off. I was near-hysterical at the prospect of Bob Marley and Freddie Mercury immortalised in sponge, like one of those budget seaside Madame Tussauds imitators filtered through a nightmare. Ordinarily, I only ever hope the bakers will do well in their challenges, so it was a bit sneaky to introduce a task that can only go very, very wrong. But, well, have you ever seen Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie rendered in fondant icing and cake, somehow looking like he escaped from that bit of Wall-E where the future-humans are tipped out of their chairs? Every time the bakers reeled off the name of the person whose head they were trying to make, I lost it a little more. I did not know that a cake bust of the former Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge was the thing to cheer me up this week. Truly, every one of those bakers deserved to stay, for taking part in that challenge and lifting the national mood.