'The Great British Baking Show' Season 16 Trailer Is a Light in the Darkness
Prue Leith, Noel Fielding, Alison Hammond, and Paul Hollywood in 'The Great British Baking Show' Season 14
Channel 4
Regular readers of Telly Visions will have noted the past few weeks have been a bit light in posting; much like 2024, the summer has been filled with family emergencies, and rescission means less help. It's a dark time, not just for public broadcasting, but for the world in general. We're heading into a winter that could be worse than 2020 in several ways, and people will need comfort TV to warm their souls, along with heat to warm their homes.
In 2020, that need was ultimately filled by The Great British Baking Show, which bravely found a way to continue making new episodes of comfort for viewers around the globe, as if it were a solemn duty. Since then, however, the series has encountered some difficulties. One of the sad truths about reality competition shows is that they are only as good as their most recent winners, and the results of Seasons 14 and Season 15 have done the show little favors. However, humans have short memories and long warm and fuzzies, and Baking Show has earned the right to retake its position this fall, if it's willing to behave better.
The first trailer at least understands the assignment. Voiced by comedian Joe Wilkinson, this is the second year the show has done an animated trailer, this time based on classic BBC-style science programming on space. But of course, the world of Baking Show we all long to escape to was not made from dust and gas, but flour and sugar, and its star will always be eggs.
Sadly, the series' synopsis was not updated to fit the grandeur of the trailer.
The Great British Bake Off is the ultimate baking battle where passionate amateur baking fans compete to be crowned the UK’s Best Amateur Baker. Throughout ten episodes, the series follows the trials and tribulations of the competitors, young and old, from every background and every corner of Britain, as they attempt to prove their baking prowess. Each week, the bakers tackle a different baking skill, which becomes progressively more difficult as the competition unfolds.
As always, the bakers will not be revealed until closer to the show's premiere.
Alison Hammond and Noel Fielding will be back as co-hosts, both in animated and human form. Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith will continue as the series judges, and we'll try to make it through. Leith, for the record, is not bowing out of Baking Show, not yet anyway. She has only opted out of the specific subset that are the U.K. celebrity-focused, fundraiser-based specials. Not because she's tired, but because she and Paul are quickly becoming the default judges for The Great American Baking Show, the next installment of which, The Great American Baking Show: Celebrity Summer, debuts on Roku in August 2025. Luckily, the majority of American Baking Show installments thus far have been seasonal one-off celebrity specials; Prue chose to help support the new product that needed her star power more.
Channel 4 states that The Great British Baking Show Season 16 will debut "autumn 2025," which probably means the end of September 2025, on Tuesdays at 8 p.m. BST in the U.K., followed by streaming on Netflix in the U.S. on Fridays. The Great American Baking Show: Celebrity Summer edition streams on Roku starting Saturday, August 16, 2025.
