The great British TV chefs' rotating midlife crisis

Leather jackets, motorbikes, younger partners with curious Instagram accounts ... what’s eating our band of ubiquitous fiftysomething telly chefs?

“I think I am perpetually in a midlife crisis,” observed UN cake inspector Paul Hollywood last year, much as the Pope might self-identify as Catholic. Is Paul right? Rarely pictured offscreen wearing anything but motorcycle leathers, The Great British Bake Off judge certainly has the air of someone who has downloaded the Headspace app and is thinking about a Route 66 tattoo.

The most recent off-Bake Off story we heard about Paul, 52, saw him caught up in a wider New York Times exposé about people buying bots as Twitter followers. It was a bit too technical for me to get my head around, but for a feel of how quite bang Paul was to rights, you could do worse than his spokesman’s comment to the paper: “Paul deleted his personal account last week.” OK, got it. Whether his new girlfriend, 22, should have done the same with her Insta is a matter of debate. But we’ll come to Summer Monteys-Fullam shortly.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2q9RzFz