“The Great British Bake Off,” or “The Great British Baking Show” as it’s known on our side of the pond, is doing some damage control after host Paul Hollywood made an insensitive—okay, just plain gross, honestly—joke about diabetes.
Deadline reports that the semi-final of the tenth season (“the seventh collection” here in the United States) was broadcast in the United Kingdom on Tuesday. On it, a contestant made Chelsea buns, a dessert made with cinnamon, spices, lemon peel, and often currants. When Hollywood gazed upon the contestant’s take on Chelsea buns during the episode, he remarked that they looked like “diabetes on a plate.”
Cool, Paul, cool. The response after the episode aired was loud and clear: People are tired of those with a public platform, like Hollywood, making flippant jokes that feed the misconstrued narrative of diabetes being something you “deserve” or inflict yourself with by eating too much sugar. BBC cited this tweet, which brilliantly shows what “diabetes on a plate” actually looks like:
Deadline found this tweet from the charity Diabetes UK:
BBC’s article on the joke helpfully includes some actual facts about diabetes, and hopefully, this kind of spreading the word will counteract comments like Hollywood’s. There are two main types of diabetes, Type 1 and Type 2. Type 1 is where the pancreas does not produce any insulin; Type 2 is where the pancreas doesn’t produce enough insulin, or the body’s cells don’t react to insulin. Type 1 is often called juvenile or early onset diabetes, because while it can develop at any age, it usually shows itself before the age of 40, frequently during childhood. Type 2 develops later in life and linked to lifestyle—but that doesn’t mean people with Type 2 diabetes earned themselves a disease or that anyone gets to make fun of them for having that disease.
Hollywood’s apology left a lot of people feeling pretty lukewarm. He posted a picture of Chelsea buns on his Instagram with a caption that starts “A sweet treat, Chelsea buns…". Is this an apology or a #foodporn post? He then continues: “a remark re: diabetes I made on tonight’s show was thoughtless and I meant no harm, as both my grandad and my own mother suffer/ suffered from diabetes ... apologies X.” If you have family with diabetes, you should know better, Paul. A lot of commenters on the post say they weren’t offended, even though they or one of their family members has diabetes. The fact remains, though, that plenty of people were offended, and this joke spreads more misinformation about diabetes.
The makers of “The Great British Baking Show,” Love Productions, responded a bit more decisively, cutting the joke from the show all together. That means it won’t show up in reruns, and we won’t see it here in the States on Netflix, where in a twist to the Netflix bingeing model, the series is being rolled out in weekly episodes.
We’re glad Love Productions heard the outcry and stopped the joke in its tracks. “The Great British Baking Show” is famously the chosen method of self-care for many of us Americans, and we’d like to go back to simply reveling in all of its soothing, hunger-inducing glory.
