Come on, girls, make it a Ruby Tuesday: Why LIZ JONES is backing the woman female viewers love to hate to win the Great British Bake Off
- Liz Jones hails Ruby Tandoh as the 'mistress of the art of self depreciation'
- Says criticism of 21-year-old former model 'beggars belief'
- Essex student has been 'star baker' three times as final approaches
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Sweetness: Bake Off star Ruby has a vulnerability that's won over Liz Jones
She wouldn’t look out of place as a kitchen maid on Downton Abbey as, with an etiolated elbow (Ruby’s limbs are like a set square), she nudges one of her tawny curls out of her eyes, as green as a cat’s.
She’d fit in perfectly on the catwalk at Louis Vuitton, too, although the white powder often found on the end of a runway model’s nose doesn’t tend to be of the kind found on Ruby’s retroussé button: icing sugar, or self-raising flour.
Ruby has done some modelling, but unlike the catwalk queens, her arms have muscle definition, from kneading dough.
In fact, Ruby doesn’t knead dough in the way I’ve seen it done on food programmes before: she slings it at the bench despairingly, large eyes rolling at her own ineptitude.
Because Ruby, rather than moaning ecstatically at her own creations in the manner of Hugh and Jamie and Nigella (can you imagine a writer doing the same? ‘Oh, that last sentence of mine was perfection!’), she has often, during the nine weeks of The Great British Bake Off, seemed about to waft off in her floral tea dress to find a convenient lake to drown herself in.
I wonder she didn’t slope off to hang herself from the marquee’s guy ropes, the day her Charlotte Royale showed its innards.
Despite the fact she has made it to the show’s final on Tuesday, despite her extravagant beauty, and brains that aren’t made of bavarois, Ruby Tandoh seems to have no self esteem whatsoever.
Now that every young person has been brought up with the American attitude that we can all ‘be whatever we want to be’, Ruby is the mistress of a long lost British art of self deprecation.
‘It’s burnt,’ she wails, so the judges, Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood, have to console her, tell her that, no, it is not burnt, it is perfection. As are you.
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'Perfection': The 21-year-old student is the 'mistress of a long lost British art of self depreciation', according to Liz Jones
Self-deprecation is so long lost, in fact, that critics and viewers think Ruby, a 21-year-old philosophy student from Essex, is protesting too much.
That no one this beautiful could possibly be genuinely down in the mouth.
‘Like chocolate being prepared for a Black Forest topping, her false modesty is really beginning to grate,’ wrote Jan Moir in the Daily Mail.
‘You are c*** at baking,’ spat a viewer on Twitter. ‘Your opera cake was rubbish. Go back home E.T.’ (Ruby’s caramel skin comes from being a quarter Ghanaian).
Ruby has developed such a habit of peering up from under that bird’s nest of hair, almost afraid to find out the verdict on her baking, that many women have tweeted that she is letting the feminist side down by being so coy.
Many have accused her of flirting unashamedly with Hollywood, and that he in turn has given her Brownie points (literally, given her brownies points), which is nonsense.
Actually, I am all in favour of Ruby being so down on herself.
It is infinitely preferable, surely, to all those self-promoting third wave feminists who have self-belief oozing from every open pore, an oleaginous goo that makes them condemn any woman who is not like them, who doesn’t flaunt her fat thighs in cut-off denim shorts, who prefers perhaps to crouch before any door of opportunity, afraid of what lurks outside when she musters the strength to open it.
This criticism of our Ruby beggars belief. Take it from someone who knows: Ruby’s self doubt is genuine. I love that, rather than kneel before her oven, watching her meringues harden, you get the feeling she would rather just shove her head inside, and for it all to be over.
It has become a curiously British sport, to abuse a woman online simply for being quietly good at what she does (and Kimberley Wilson, too, her fellow contestant and closest rival in the final, gets abuse for being too cocky, for saying too often that she has ‘plenty of time’, and has done her best).
Tearful: Ruby often breaks down in tears on the show and Liz Jones says the baker's self doubt is genuine and she is the 'poster girl' for the shy
Never mind who is crowned champion this week, it seems you really cannot win.
But, fortunately for Ruby, it seems if you prod her skin with a forefinger, it springs back into shape. She has responded robustly, Rihanna fashion, to offending tweets.
‘The unfounded, unfiltered, lazy ranting of a bitter old witch,’ she typed in answer to one addled rant. She is determined only to focus ‘on the good bits’.
Hollywood revealed in an interview last week that potential Bake Off contestants have to pass an examination with a psychologist before they are allowed to take part in the show, which is so successful it moves to BBC One next season.
This is coming to something, isn’t it: that to compete in a TV show about making cakes requires a tin foil exterior to ward off all those negative vibes.
The world, once you stick your head above the parapet, has become intolerable.
After Ruby broke the glass bowl of her Magimix (does that date me, saying Magimix? Should I have typed Kitchen Aid? Will, now, the Twittersphere be alive with barbs about how old I am, how I should go back to the Seventies, perchance?), and wailed that she was so embarrassed she could not go on with her baking, a new hashtag instantaneously sprang up: hashtag middleclassproblems.
(Sorry, I’ve no idea where the sign for hashtag is on my keyboard, as I do not tweet, as I am far too busy having, you know, a life.)
Ruby Twitter
Ah, so this is what women have been taking umbrage with: Ruby shouldn’t moan because she doesn’t have real problems, like mastitis, or a minimum wage job as a cleaner, or cancer.
She has the use of all her limbs, and what gorgeous appendages they are, too.
This derision of so-called middle class problems comes from the Janet Street-Porter school of thought: you know, that depression doesn’t exist, that it is all in the mind (!).
Stick a metal skewer into Celebrity Masterchef finalist Janet and it would be damn sure to come out dry: see, I can do bitchy with the rest of them
So, on behalf of the nation’s shrinking violets, I hope it will be Ruby’s Tuesday. I hope she beats, too, fellow finalist Frances Quinn, who is too fiddly and inventive for my taste.
Ruby has, after all, been Star Baker three times (she nearly fell off the stool every time), has odds of 2-1, and deserves to win for her poise, her blushes and her modesty as much as her opera cakes and wonky garden shed made from carrots, with a caramel roof that even Mary Berry had never come across before.
Ruby deserves to win not for always giving it the inevitable 110 per cent, but for winging it, for saying her filo pastry was ‘a lot better than what I usually knock up’.
Ruby is the poster girl for the shy, the losers in life. Let’s hope winning doesn’t go to her lovely head.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2467751/Come-girls-make-Ruby-Tuesday-Why-Liz-Jones-backing-woman-female-viewers-love-hate-win-Great-British-Bake-Off.html#ixzz2iG5ayAnj
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