Ruby Tandoh and the curse of the twitter trolls

As those of you who have been following our weekly What Ruby Baked column will know, our gal Ruby Tandoh has made it into the Final of The Great British Bake Off 2013. Hurrah! But while Rubes is probably feeling pretty pleased with her efforts, her achievements have somehow managed to inspire vicious, bitter rantings from Twitter’s army of armchair bakers.

The last one is basically a hate crime. But since it’s on Twitter, people think that’s fine.

Twitter is the ideal forum for narcissistic, hateful, pointless people to broadcast their opinions to the world, as well publicised cases involving public figures such as Caroline Criado-Perez and Tom Daley have shown, but this baker bashing really takes the biscuit.

A brief search for ‘GBBO’ and ‘Ruby’ will show that in the last 24 hours alone, she has been called a ‘bitch’, a ‘whiny pouty cow’ an ‘annoying rat’, ‘the worst person on earth’ , ‘pube head’, and ‘spoilt bitch’ by complete strangers.

These people are also insisting that the competition is a fix, and that she is only in the final because she has been fellating judge Paul Hollywood (who has already had to publicly defend himself against these allegations) in between tasks. Managing to fit that in on a tight baking schedule would be an achievement in itself.

What has she done to incite these reactions? Bake some cakes on TV. BAKE CAKES. C-A-K-E-S. How can anyone get so enthusiastically angry about a girl who bakes nice cakes that other people judge to be nice?

The problem is that these people seem intellectually incapable of realising that GBBO is a show designed for entertainment. It’s not a documentary about a group of bakers trapped in a tent in the Home Counties who must bake their way to freedom, one gluten-free loaf at a time.

The producers cut down hundreds of hours of footage into some semblance of a storyline and characters, and unfortunately for Ruby, her insecurity and tears, combined with her background, have made her ‘the ex-model student crying one’. Compared with ‘the confident smiling one’, ‘the funny Welsh one’, and the creative ‘style over substance one’, she never had a chance.

However, the bored, slap happy little trolls that lurk on twitter refuse to accept this. Twitter gives these socially inept weirdos a forum to broadcast opinions that no one they know in real life cares to hear about. Browse any of their twitter accounts in which they detail their sad little lives in 140 character snippets, and you will lose faith in humanity in minutes.

Ranting about a stranger on TV gives them a sense of validation, as they falsely believe that anyone cares for their expert opinion. The fact is that GBBO is a pre-recorded show, the outcome decided months ago, so an entirely irrelevant person from Coventry proclaiming that she is shit and it’s a fix will have no impact whatsoever.

It’s not all bad news for Rubes though. In a fantastic twist, these twitter twats don’t realise that by complaining so much about Ruby, they have generated a huge amount of publicity for both her and the show (so much so, that it will be moving to BBC1 next year on the back of this year’s ratings). She has had a huge amount of exposure and will most likely have a successful cookbook out within the year.

As for the cherry on top, if I understand a recent Daily Mail article about her ‘crying her way to the Final’ correctly, it sounds like she also has magical baking tears. Laugh all the way to the bank, Ruby.