What was Bingate? Great British Bake Off incident from 2014 explained
For viewers of certain TV shows, there are moments which stick in the memory - and sometimes pass into fandom folklore - which may make no sense to other people.
There have plenty surrounding Big Brother and I’m a Celeb over the years - George Galloway pretending to be cat, or Joey Essex being unable to tell the time in the jungle, for instance, but the Great British Bake Off has its fair share.
One of these is Bingate, which happened during the show’s fifth series in 2014. Back then the show was still a BBC programme, presented by Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins with Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood as the judges.
It came on a filming day that was blisteringly hot, during Dessert Week - the same stage of the competition that we are at today in this year’s iteration of Bake Off.
The flashpoint was the creation of a baked Alaska - a difficult dish combining ice cream and sponge cake inside a meringue, which has an extra layer of difficulty in hot temperatures.
To keep their ice creams from melting, contestants placed them in the shared freezer - but two out of freezers were broken and so space was at a premium But when Iain Watters, a Northern Irish construction engineer, returned to the freezer he found his ice cream had been removed and left on the counter.
It had been Diana Beard, who while she was making space for her ice cream, had accidentally left Iain’s out in the heat. He was so angry that he threw the melting ice cream, sponge cake and all into the bin - saying to the presenters that it had been “a total disaster” - although producers of the show later said that it had been out in the warmth for only a minute, implying that the heat had been mainly to blame, not Diana.
It meant that Iain was eliminated as he had nothing to offer the judges, who told him that in fact he would have been better off presenting a partial or a melted pudding than the empty plate he proffered.
Diana said she never meant any harm and was “devastated” by the reaction. Iain, meanwhile, handled the attention graciously, saying he bore no ill will towards her and that the incident had simply been “a bit of heat and a bit of ice cream.”
But social media, being as it is, seized on the incident. As it was during the heyday of the Twitter hashtag, #bingate soon began trending and people took sides, with some accusing Diana of sabotage and others defending her accident. Others took a step back and said that the show’s editing had fanned the flames. The fallout from Bingate saw the BBC receive hundreds of complaints, with the tabloids running front-page stories, and breakfast television discussing it.
Diana withdrew from the competition shortly afterwards, citing an injury from a fall, though rumours persisted that public backlash had played a role.