The Downfall of Steph Blackwell

What the low point of Great British Bake Off says about reality TV

Hi, and welcome to Big Little Moments! Each week, I’ll cover a game-changing moment in pop culture, explore what it meant at the time, and how it has influenced culture since. I’ll mostly stick to TV, but sprinkle in some movies, video games, celebrity drama, anime, you name it! The moments are big and small, but all are worth exploring, and tell us something about where we’re at today. 

To kick off the new blog, what better topic than the subject of my latest hit Tiktok - Great British Bake Off! Specifically, I wanted to talk about the most gripping, heartbreaking moment of the whole series, how we got there, and how the show has changed since. Today we’re talking about Series 10’s finale: the fall of Steph Blackwell, and perhaps the most disturbing moment of my favorite TV show. But first, some context:

I first caught wind of Bake Off in 2014, as many Americans did. As a lifelong fan of The Food Network and its many offerings, a show like this was never going to miss me. My mother, a  recent cable TV cord-cutter, had been hungry for cheap streaming content and came across the show on the PBS streaming app. In one of the most confusing deals of television history, PBS bought the rights to series 3-7, re-labeled them seasons 1-5 (out of chronological order!!!), and renamed it Great British Baking Show, due to Pillsbury’s copyright of the term “Bake Off” in the US.

American audiences were primed to fall in love with Bake Off. From the gentle spirit of friendly competition, to the gorgeous English countryside setting, Bake Off was a balm to the angry, sweaty cooking content festered on American networks over the past decade. Nearly all the cooking competition shows of the time followed a simple formula: give your contestants an impossible task, and whether they fail or succeed, you’ve made great TV. 

In Hell’s Kitchen, chef Gordon Ramsey (the anti-Mary Berry, come to think of it) screamed at armies of incompetent chefs as they time and again failed to complete dinner service at a busy Las Vegas restaurant. In Chopped, perhaps the Platonic ideal of this category, contestants were handed a basket of clashing ingredients (think: alpaca hot dogs and carrot ketchup) and asked to make a three-course meal. Even the prestige offerings of Top Chef regularly featured disastrous team challenges and contrived eliminations, immunities, and Last Chance Kitchens endemic to reality TV.

But Bake Off was different. Because the show didn’t offer prize money, contestants weren’t competing to pay for a parent’s medical bills (an American pastime) or start a life-changing business, and we could focus on the baking. Each episode felt like a friendly tutorial, introducing novel concepts like “crumb structure,” “proving,” and “Essex.” Contestants didn’t bicker and backstab, in fact they helped each other sometimes, and were genuinely sad when someone left. A rosy tint of genteel English cheer washed over us, and we were hooked.

In 2019, following a switch to a new network in the UK, and the departure of the entire cast of hosts and judges aside from Paul Hollywood (a story there, to be sure), Netflix acquired the exclusive rights to air the new episodes in the US. This took Bake Off from a cult hit to an American mainstay. The show's old-fashioned charm extended even to its production schedule: episodes were released one week at a time, in direct contrast to the popular whole-season binge model Netflix had been known for. American fans came to know the contestants like friends, with brief glimpses into their lives week after week.

Now, to Steph: following a mostly unsurprising (but popular!) season in 2018, Bake Off 2019 had a lot riding on it. The immediate standout in a crowded field was Steph Blackwell, a 28 year old shop assistant from Chester. With her funky bangs and piercing gaze, Steph’s charm was as obvious as it was immediate.

More importantly, Steph was good. Good good. From early in the competition, Steph marked her spot as the premiere baker of the show. Her treats were precise, creative, and exquisite. Each episode, she pushed herself further than the last. It wasn’t enough for Steph’s bakes to be good, she wanted to be great. When Steph received critiques we could see the wheels turning in her head, cataloguing and evaluating each piece of feedback. You could practically hear her inner monologue - “this was good, but it could be better.”

On episode 6, Steph completed a trio of back-to-back Star Baker wins, something only achieved once before in Series 5 by Richard Burr (who also didn’t win his season! Hmmm). It was the final stretch of the show, and Steph’s win was all but guaranteed.

And yet. As we closed in on the finale, it became apparent Steph’s rampant perfectionism was eating away at her. In the semifinal round, she looked so nervous she could faint. When the final episode of Bake Off 2019 began, there was something off. Steph gave off an even more frantic, nervous energy than usual as she paced back and forth around the tent that day. The show seemed to reach a fever pitch of excitement. Despite only having 3 bakers left, the tent felt more claustrophobic than ever.

After a mostly-fine chocolate cake round, the trio of bakers went into the technical on basically even footing. The judges liked Steph’s German chocolate, but it was slightly overbaked. “Slightly, like ‘ugh, that’s annoying,’” Steph said after the round. “I always want it to be perfect.” 

For the technical, Paul assigned one of the most difficult challenges to date: six identical twice-baked stilton souffles with triangular crackers on either side. The technical went by in a flash, and in the final seconds of the round we hear the defeat in Steph’s voice. Her souffles hadn’t baked long enough the first time, and her final product was a wet, gloppy disaster. The other contestants - David and Alice - did considerably better. For the first time in the series, Steph walked into the final on her back foot. 

The rest is history. The final challenge - a picnic basket of illusion treats - sealed Steph’s fate. Her “picnic in the park” with orange buns, strawberry macarons, and a lemon cake in the shape of the hamburger were adequate but clearly not perfect. Her cracker basket crumbled in the final moments of the competition, and with it, her chances of winning Bake Off.

The judges were just going through the motions by the time they got to the feedback portion. The star of the series, the second-most-winningest contestant on the show to date, would lose to someone who had never been Star Baker. In tears, Steph confessed to the camera, “maybe ten weeks was just one too many.” 

This isn’t to say David didn’t deserve the win. If a marathon runner keeps in first place for 99% of a competition, but finishes in second place, that person gets second. A Bake Off finale demands that the winner ace the final, and David did just that. 

Bake Off fans, for the most part, pointed their ire at the show and its de facto leader, Paul Hollywood. We’d watched the cheery, low stakes sedative of a show bring our favorite baker to tears. In Scott Bryan’s opinion piece Bake Off is Broken - Here’s How to Fix It, published on the Guardian, he says:

“If Bake Off was ever supposed to sour, it wasn’t supposed to happen in 2019. It was meant to happen when it controversially moved to Channel 4 three years ago, not when we were all collectively distracted by Henry’s snazzy ties or Helena’s obsession with the undead.”

Indeed, Bake Off felt broken. But the solutions Scott Bryan offered in his piece (more older bakers, make the technicals easier, give nicer critiques) are easier said than done, and perhaps miss the core paradox of reality television. Any competition show, regardless of its cutesy exterior, is at its core a Willy Wonka-style morality play where the weak and disorganized are picked off one by one. Any television show that’s lasted 12 seasons will have an active fanbase, and with it heaps of psychological pressure. It doesn’t matter that Bake Off offers no cash prize. The prize is the attention, glory, and appreciation of victory multiplied by the number of eyeballs watching. The higher Bake Off’s platform rises, the further the fall for its losers.

In the weeks after the show ended, Steph Blackwell came forward about her history of mental health issues. She’d struggled with major anxiety and an eating disorder from a young age, and it was clear that the pressure of the show got to her. Since the show, she’s written a cookbook called “The Joy of Baking,” and become a vocal advocate for mental health. 

It’s only been two years since Steph’s season, but we’ve each lived a couple lifetimes since. In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, our reliance on comfort television has exploded. We’ve come to expect more kindness and sincerity from it. To some people, it means everything. 

When I began writing this article, I was quick to defend Bake Off. I found the endless hot takes and hyperbole a bit much, when the core structure of the show was identical to the format set 12 years ago (minus the history lessons - bring those back!). Yes, the challenges were at times over-ambitious, and without Mary Berry to check him, Paul’s ego continued to inflate. But at its core, it’s still everything I wanted in a show. 

In the wake of the most recent episode, the semifinal in which Jürgen was eliminated, I’m not so sure. It seems the producers want to have their cake and eat it too (not sorry for the pun) by delivering heartfelt moments of overcoming the odds, while also still sticking to its rigid rules and structure. Lizzie can produce a tear-jerking, wildly imaginative showstopper cake celebrating her neurodivergence, and then get sent home all the same. Jürgen can display unmatched technical prowess for 9 weeks, and then get sent home because Paul didn’t give him a handshake. 

We’ve seen this issue, but magnified and dipped in glitter, on Rupaul’s Drag Race. Perhaps more than any other reality TV show in the world, Drag Race fans wrap their identity into the show. Like a black hole it has pulled the entire world of drag into its event horizon, and as a result the show holds the weight of the drag community on its shoulders. Best exemplified in All Stars season 5, the season famously ended in a tie between Monet X Change and Trinity the Tuck. Producers of the show faced an impossible choice, and a noxious, angry fanbase ready to mow down either winner. By ending in a tie, Drag Race said that there is no “right” answer, and a show of sufficient size will always have angry fans.

Maybe that’s the true lesson, the zen koan we Bake Off fans must sit with and ponder. To love a reality show contestant is to watch them buckle under the weight of that affection, eventually. 

I hope that, in some small way, Steph Blackwell has taught fans to be kinder to contestants. And maybe it’s the Democrat voter in me, but I have some little hope that a massive institution like Bake Off has the power to right itself from the inside, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Anyway, go buy Steph’s cookbook. And to Paul Hollywood - watch your back.

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