Carrie; The Great British Bake Off

“Why remake Carrie, a story of teenage bullying, alienation and the vengeful violence it can fuel, for the modern age? Babe, look around! We’ve got the internet now. We’ve taken teenage bullying, alienation and the fuelling of vengeful violence to levels that De Palma and King, with all their vaunted capacity for darkness, could never have imagined! We are, to use a construction popular among the very youth of whom we are speaking, Carriemaxxing these days. The question is not why remake but quite why it has taken this long. De Palma’s masterpiece is a lean, mean thing, taking just 98 minutes to move from opening credits to high-school mass barbecue. Flanagan’s is an eight-hour series (and there are signs of seeds being sowed for a second already), so much in the way of plot and characters has been added. But the new Carrie has not fallen victim to the streamer’s curse of bloating. Almost everything and everyone is there for a reason, and if the whole plays more like a teen drama with extra bite than a straight up, blood-soaked horror event that is no matter when the former is clearly what it was designed to be. It’s also kinder than the film – perhaps intentionally, perhaps as a byproduct of having to flesh out the ‘baddies’ who cannot remain elemental villains over such a long period if we are to stay interested in the story and their fates – but again, in an increasingly unforgiving world, this feels welcome and right.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“This is not the Carrie I know and love. The relentless misery Carrie suffers at the hands of the world around her is painful to witness and uncomfortable to read, but it’s also what makes her retribution, drenched in blood as she burns her small town to the ground, so satisfying. “Sometimes being a bitch is the only thing a woman has left to hold on to,” King notes in another novel, Dolores Claiborne – but it’s never more true than in Carrie. After a lifetime of horrific abuse and rejection, Carrie earned her vengeance. With Prime Video’s Carrie, Flanagan had the opportunity to do something magical, with a reinvention that told the painfully human elements, and its gloriously bloody fallout, through a bright, 21st century lens that could maintain the story for a further 50 years. Instead, it’s an ironically puritanical way to portray the ultimate revenge story, attached to its core material only by name and a few key scenes. Honestly, by the metric of “teenage girl with telekinesis”, he should’ve just made a gritty remake of Matilda. At least that would’ve been a twist we wouldn’t have seen coming.”
Tilly Pearce, The i

“It seems Bake Off viewers are demanding as well as quite keen on those bits where the bakers talk about their lovely mum or the gran who taught them to bake and is no longer with us. Because the audience has (via the show’s website) come up with the idea of each baker bringing a relative into the tent. Mums were the favoured choice of companion, perhaps unsurprisingly, but there was a tricky dilemma for the drag artist and costume designer Gabe, whose domestic arrangement involves being in a romantic “throuple” or, as Gabe prefers to call it, a “boyband” — Gabe, Ellis and someone called Tyler. How delightfully Channel 4. Ellis got the nod, but how Tyler felt about being excluded was not mentioned.”
Ben Dowell, The Times

“The list of showstoppers encapsulated the crazy genius of this show. A mother-of-the-bride hat made of carrot cake! A Dolly Parton wig topper made from banana sponge filled with caramel rum and banana jam! A mojito-flavoured sombrero! All bonkers, all brilliant. Nigella was particularly taken with the flavours of Dolly: “Oh my God, it’s intoxication by banana.” The technical challenge, though, was not right at all. The audience apparently voted for the bakers to have a mystery box of ingredients, from which they could make whatever they liked. No! The whole point of the technical challenge is that they are supposed to make the same thing, and their efforts are lined up on the table so we can see the difference. This week we got a motley assortment of cakes and tarts.”
Anita Singh, Telegraph