Matt Lucas has lasted three seasons on The Great British Baking Show, and that’s three seasons too many. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. But fool me three times? The joke is up, man!
In Lucas’ first season on GBBS, I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt—maybe he needed some time to work through the kinks of the baking series. In the second season, when I still couldn’t be bothered to laugh at his jokes, I hoped I was the problem, that I was just being too picky. But with this most recent season, in which the host made racist jokes and quipped around about former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, one thing was made clear: It’s time for Matt Lucas to get the boot.
Before you rush to tell me I’m wrong, and that Lucas deserves one more chance at the GBBS hosting gig, let the people speak for themselves. Fans of the show have bonded over Matt’s absolute destruction of it, coming together to figure out a way to ensure he doesn’t come back for another season.
Great British Baking Show viewers have drafted a petition, urging the BBC, Channel 4, and the entire United Kingdom to remove Matt Lucas. “This year’s bakers seem less tolerant of his antics than previous years, and Noel's disdain for Matt grows more apparent with each passing episode,” the petition reads. “It can only be assumed that the sketches that kick off each week's episode are written by Matt and in which Noel must begrudgingly participate.”
You don’t need to tell me twice. Lucas has been cursing The Great British Baking Show in several ways, each more atrocious than the last. First, he goes to great lengths to distract the bakers. Other hosts, including Noel Fielding and Sandi Toksvig, have also been criticized for their bumbling quips delivered amidst tense baking challenges. But Lucas pushes it one step further, forcing bakers to call their own time and asking to eat their dishes. Just stop, man!
It’s not just his distracting nature. Lucas dumped quite a few off-color jokes into this season of GBBS as well. During the controversial Mexican Week episode, he and Fielding joked about whether the country is a real place, and let this total piece of dung fly: “There will be no Mexican jokes,” Fielding said at the beginning of the episode. Lucas responded: “What, not even Juan?”
Draft up the severance pay now. Lucas deserves to be fired for that alone. Even if producers wrote it (which, in that case, fire the producers too), the host should’ve protected his own integrity and refused to read the line. Clearly, though, this is a problem with Lucas. At the beginning of the season, he played buddy-buddy with Dawn, a contestant who worked with Boris Johnson—who, TL;DR, is not a goofy, fun, lighthearted guy.
Something very eye-opening happens at the end of Lucas’ third season on the show, too. In the recent GBBS finale, Fielding calls out sick, leaving Lucas sole hosting duties for the biggest episode of the year. The stakes are high, and, naturally, Lucas flops around like a fish out of water, trying to distract the bakers away from their hopes and dreams.
He forces Abdul to announce a time call in another language. He stalks Syabira around the tent, asking her about quail eggs and nibbling bites from her bread. Even Paul and Prue seem tired of his antics, which are just abominable. The only person who laughs at his floundering jokes, which are as unfunny as an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, is Syabira. Poor, sweet, Syabira, throwing Matt Lucas pity laughs as she sweeps every single challenge.
So, if the UK sees that petition and actually goes through with firing Lucas, who should we hire to host The Great British Baking Show? Stanley Tucci, another bald man with some actual taste and whimsy. Hire him and his amazingly gorgeous British wife, Felicity Blunt, to host the series. They both love to cook, and would make for wonderful replacements on the show.
It’s likely that Matt Lucas and his gauche Hawaiian shirts will be back for another season of Great British Baking Show next year. And guess what? I’ll still watch every dang episode, furious that he gets to stick around and continue to get under all of our skins. Hopefully, though, he’ll abandon his criminally unfunny schtick. Maybe, then, I can start to understand why the show continues to employ him.
