Review: Sam Lake: Cake

One minor sadness about the lockdown era is that we never got to see Sam Lake’s wedding cake, a five-tier affair that sounded quite the feat of architecture and engineering. The pandemic put paid to that grand design. But what about the wedding?

That’s the major crux of Lake’s debut hour, which takes us all the way from the happy couple’s saucy first date, here in Edinburgh, to the present day. There is always the suspicion with a wedding-related show that it’s just an excuse to stick the ceremony on the self-assessment, of course – tax-deductible nuptials – but Lake has a decent story to tell.

It’s probably a much more dramatic tale than when this show was originally due to debut in 2020, in truth, given all the dramas since then. But there’s an enduring theme, about how a new generation of matrimonial naysayers – and one particular cigar-chomping charmer – actually encouraged him to double down and go big, before it all went wrong.

You can imagine any party thrown by Lake would be pretty decent though, as he’s a genial host, welcoming this audience into his Cellar as if we’ve all popped round for an evening for Rosé and a spot of reality TV. You could happily see him hosting a chat show one day, perhaps one of those reality spin-offs, as he’s done solid research (watched lots of trashy telly). Perhaps not Bake Off though: that cake debacle may still be a bit raw.