GBBO: Baker, prove thyself.

I love The Great British Bake Off, as you might expect, given my penchant for baking foolish amounts of bread of a weekend. And recently I was interested to re-watch the very first series on some satellite food channel, somewhere between the travel and the porn channels. In that series, the famous cooking tent moved location each week, and tried to take in a regional cuisine - an innovation I had completely forgotten. Possibly the Beeb dropped that on grounds of cost, but just as likely it was a 'tweak' once they realised what a hit they had on their hands. Because it shows the exact moment when Great British Bake Off stopped being a programme about food and started being about soap opera.

Nowhere is this more clear than in Bread Week, the third show of every series. Because of the way the show is structured - and that need for conflict and drama that drives a TV show - it means the bread is always the poor relation of the other baking weeks. Across three tasks, the maximum time allowed for any challenge is four hours - and mostly it is between two and three hours. And if there's one thing that good bread needs, it's time.

Bread comes about because of the creation of gluten and the action of yeast. Neither of these things actually taste of anything you'd want to eat. The flavour and quality of a bread comes from the flour and its interaction with these two catalysts. For long periods of time, baking bread doesn't actually involve doing anything, except facilitating this process. Something that doesn't make for good television.

So in the world of Bake Off, we have short proves and catalysts to speed up the process. To drive the drama and create the footage of bakers anxiously staring into ovens that link the set-pieces. But the one thing you can't use to create flavour is less time. So you're forced to import flavour using ever-more crazy ingredients - chilli, chocolate, chihuahua - whatever. It's basically pretending bread is just a cake with yeast in it.

I understand how telly works, and long proves and autolyses do not make interesting viewing. But they could apply a bit of imagination to accommodate the fact that bread is different. Instead of two three-hour tasks, give them a range of things to do in eight hours. Better still, just after the gongs are given out, and the departing baker sent packing in week two, give 'em each a Kilner jar and say: come back in a week with a sourdough culture, we're baking a 48-hour loaf. That would test their mettle.