Now that it’s on Netflix for all to enjoy, there is no longer any excuse for us all to not have discovered the true beauty of BBC’s The Great British Bake Off. The low pressure atmosphere of GBBO is a welcomed relief up against the nail-biting stress-inducer that is FOX’s MasterChef or Hell’s Kitchen. But have you heard about BBC’s newest offering? It’s called The Frack Free Bake Off and it’s starring Oscar-winner Emma Thompson alongside her sister, Sophie.
Well, I lied. The Frack Free Bake Off isn’t actually coming from BBC, nor is it a real show in the traditional sense at all. The Frack Free Bake Off does star (and was created by) Emma Thompson and her sister, yes, but it was designed to be a spoof of GBBO that also would serve as a form of protest against fracking. Specifically, the sisters wanted to protest against Cuadrilla, an oil and gas exploration company that had been drilling on a Lancashire site.
The Frack Free Bake Off finds the sisters partnering with Greenpeace to bake cakes on the same site that they are advocating for, despite the fact that “protesting” had been banned on the site since 2014. In fact, Emma was stopped by police and questioned before she could enter the site. She told them what she was planning to bake: “One’s a solar-powered cake and one’s a wind-powered cake.”
Speaking on her motivations for the spoof, Emma Thomspon said:
“I’ve been aware of this issue for a while with my work with Greenpeace, and it came to a head for me when David Cameron went to the Paris climate conference and signed on to the protocol and then on the sly at Christmas, when nobody was looking, gave the nod to 200 fracking sites in Britain. It proved to me our Government is saying one thing and doing the opposite.”
You can watch the full episode of The Frack Free Bake Off below, and you can also check out some of the earlier clips.