Voices: Bake Off without the smut? I find that hard to swallow

Wink wink. Nudge nudge. Dame Prue Leith, much to everyone’s surprise, wishes to check the relentless flow of double-entendre on Channel Four’s Great British Bake Off.

“I never get the jokes, you know... all this stuff about innuendo and things,” she told Nick Grimshaw on the Dish podcast, adding that she fervently hoped the addition of Good Morning’s Alison Hammond to the GBBO roster will raise the show’s tone. So, pack it in, infants. She has had it up to her soggy bottoms with your childish tittering. Oh, stop it at the back.

Personally, I find this hard to swallow. Ribald bawdiness is the humour that this thrusting modern nation was built on. We may be a small country, but we’re a great one too – and we know a really great one about the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Look to history: from Chaucer’s “lusty bachelors” to Shakespeare’s “country matters”. From PG Wodehouse to Monty Python, our culture is rich in nudge and innuendo. It makes the mighty look miniscule, it makes the pauper a prince. It’s not what you’ve got, it’s the way you use it. Size doesn’t matter when it comes to Little Britain’s soft power.

Frankly, I thought that Dame Prue was in on the joke. “I remember worrying a bit about your very large nuts”, she said consolingly to a hapless contestant as he surveyed the wreckage of his biscuit week. An innocent pastry was dismissed demurely as “long and thin and sausage shaped”.

And who can forget Dame Prue’s instruction on how to wield the humble piping bag? “Quite often I need two holes so that I can squirt… You squeeze the bag. When you meet that little bit of resistance, it usually means it’s full.” Freud would have had a field day.

Really, Prue must know what she’s up against. Higher powers have tried and failed to roll back our national collapse into fits of giggles. In 1930, the BBC’s Variety Programmes and Policy Guide for Writers and Producers stated: “Programmes must at all costs be kept free of crudities. There can be no compromise with doubtful material. It must be cut. There is an absolute ban upon the following: jokes about lavatories, effeminacy in men, immorality of any kind, suggestive references to honeymooning couples, chambermaids, fig leaves, ladies’ underwear (eg winter drawers on), animal habits (e.g. rabbits), lodgers, commercial travellers. When in doubt – cut it out.”

Ho hum. How did that turn out for the state broadcaster that brought you five seasons of Mrs Brown’s Boys? The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards jesters.

Granted, I am the sort of man-child who cannot pass the road sign for local cul-de-sac “Bell End” without sniggering. But I am hardly alone in this. Queen Elizabeth II reportedly “shrieked with laughter” when her close friend Sir Donald Gosling told her his latest gag – involving a horse trainer giving Viagra to a runner in the 2.30 at Newton Abbott. Let the levity rise like a piping hot loaf, Dame Prue. It’s what HM would have wanted.

It also plays a vital public service. The national conversation, when it comes to sex, is predominantly a dark one: our headlines are a grim reminder of the everyday harrasment, sexual assault and the humiliation of women. Yet there is lightness and love to be found in our procreative urge. A clever joke is a reminder of what it should all be about: fun.

I’m confident that the court of public opinion will no doubt find in my favour. In one corner, you’ll find the fusty and bloviating — Samuel Johnson, Margaret Thatcher, Ann Widicombe. None are high on my fantasy dinner party list. In the other, I would array Donald McGill’s big-bottomed ladies, George Formby’s eagle-eyed window cleaner, and the entire cast of the Carry On franchise. Sorry Prue, your boys are in for for one hell of a beating.

Of course, Prue is no prude. This is the force who once bravely decried the deafening absence of the wolf whistles that rain upon the ears of older women – a smart point well made about how society ignores women of a certain age and upwards.

Then again, the trick to innuendo is to carry on as if you’re none the wiser. So rest easy, GBBO watchers. I can’t help but think Dame Prue is pulling the other one.