The Great British Bake Off
British television program
The Great British Bake Off (often abbreviated to Bake Off or GBBO) is a British television baking competition, produced by Love Productions, in which a group of amateur bakers compete against each other in a series of rounds, attempting to impress two judges with their baking skills. One contestant is eliminated in each round, and the winner is selected from the three contestants who reach the final.
The first episode was aired on 17 August 2010, with its first four series broadcast on BBC Two, until its growing popularity led the BBC to move it to BBC One for the next three series. After its seventh series, Love Productions signed a three-year deal with Channel 4 to produce the series for the broadcaster. On 22 September 2026 it was announced that The Great British Bake Off has been renewed for its eighteenth series in 2027.
The series is credited with reinvigorating interest in baking throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland, with shops in the UK reporting sharp rises in sales of baking ingredients and accessories. Many of its participants, including winners, have gone on to careers in baking, while the BAFTA award-winning program has spawned a number of specials and spin-off shows: a celebrity charity series in aid of Sport Relief/Comic Relief or Stand Up to Cancer; Junior Bake Off for young children (broadcast on the CBBC channel, then on Channel 4 from 2019); after-show series An Extra Slice; and Bake Off: The Professionals for teams of pastry chefs.
The series has proven popular abroad; in the United States and Canada, where "Bake-Off" is a trademark owned by Pillsbury, it airs as The Great British Baking Show. The series format has been sold globally for production of localised versions, and was adapted for both BBC Two series The Great British Sewing Bee and The Great Pottery Throw Down.
Background
Development
The baking competition was conceived by producer Anna Beattie after she spoke to a friend who had seen 'bake-offs' in America.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Great British Bake Off” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.