From a paediatric doctor to a podium dancer: meet the 2026 stars of The Great British Bake Off

The new contestants of this year's Great British Bake Off don't know how lucky they are. Usually when a new intake arrives, all eyes are on them. After all, this is a show with such a long and storied history that its audience is primed for the slightest culinary mistake. But this time around the contestants will enjoy a temporary reprieve, because this is the year when Bake Off becomes The Nigella Show, and everyone will be so busy going moon-eyed over its glamorous new judge that they'll barely even give the bakers a second look. Nevertheless, as is tradition, Channel 4 has just sent out its contestant biographies. Using them, and no other quantifiable data, let's rank their chances of success from worst to best, just for the hell of it. Things aren't looking great for Clara. A Portuguese 'fantasy girlie', it is said that her signature style is 'chaotically beautiful'. As everybody knows, this is code for 'Clara is not detail oriented'. What's more, her official show biography states that she believes 'the first bite of a bake is always with the eyes'. However, the first bite of anything is with the mouth. Eyes, by their very nature, cannot bite things. This failure to understand basic anatomy will almost certainly be her undoing. Again, everything about Mo sounds like a whopping great red flag. In his contestant questionnaire he professes to not owning any cookbooks, calls himself 'chaotic and random', declares that he enjoys 'winging it' and admits that he has never really watched The Great British Bake Off before. Worst of all, though, his description of Lawson is: 'I remember my mum loved watching her growing up.' Being disorganised is one thing. Not watching Bake Off is one thing. But referring to Nigella Lawson in the past tense, as something only enjoyed by elderly people? This will not do. Danni sounds great, but I fear they are not long for the world. Describing their baking style as 'Chaos, chaos, chaos!' (there's that red flag again), they also describe their superpower as never giving up. 'Even if I fail and fail and fail and fail, I just get back up and keep going and try again in a different way.' I don't want to appear psychic here, guys, but I'm pretty sure Danni failed. Bake Off has been on the air for so long now that all its contestants tend to lapse into type. As such, Gary is this year's 'nice older man'. He's pleasingly brief with his answers in the questionnaire, and appears to live very happily with his wife and all their animals. This is all good, of course, but expect him to be quickly outflanked by all the hungry youngsters who primarily see Bake off as a way to grow their Instagram followers. Shannon is the exact opposite of Gary. By a wide margin, her questionnaire is the longest of the year, running to almost 2,000 words (for reference, Gary's was about 500 words long). But what a wealth of information it is. For instance, we now know that she was a back-up baker on the show last year, that baking for the judges turned her stomach into 'a swarm of butterflies' and that 'Nigella brought this sensational presence into the tent, a kind of calm elegance that made the whole space feel homely and safe.' She seems lovely and earnest but – and I'm aware this is rich coming from me – the woman badly needs an editor. The 'daddy of Birmingham drag', Gabe describes themself as a 'professional nuisance'. This may bear out. In their questionnaire, Gabe reveals that they did shots with Nigella, previously had their bum smacked by Alison Hammond and was ready to cream pie themselves in front of Noel Fielding. Every year I do these, without fail, I end up being followed on Instagram by one Bake Off contestant. I have a feeling that this year it's going to be Gabe. From what I can tell, Moyin likes to present as the high achiever of the group. He was an under-20 100m champion, could make macarons by the age of 14 and makes a point of noting that he often attends seminars on global political thought. Alas, his questionnaire has given him away, in that he gives a full-blown spoiler in it. I won't repeat it, but it does involve Danni and genitalia. In other words, Moyin is a huge gossip and cannot be trusted. Yannis seems like a very composed, very thoughtful man. He is a Bangladeshi, born in Vienna but raised in London. He claims that Bake Off is the show that helped him learn to speak English. He puts great emphasis on caring for people. He is, as you will have seen, a paediatric doctor. So in that regard, I hope he does horribly here. The world needs more paediatric doctors and fewer people determined to leverage their stint on a cookery competition into semi-regular appearances on Sunday Brunch. Only instant failure can correct this cosmic unbalance. Now we get to the bakers I think will actually do well. Based on his bio, Tom has the makings of a potential winner. He seems deeply unfazed by the prospect of appearing on Bake Off, not only because he describes himself as 'super chill' but also because he seems to believe that it was his divine right to end up on the show. Also he claims to be obsessed by Nigella, which is the correct answer. The primary thing to remember about Nikki is that she was once a podium dancer at Ziggy's nightclub in Basingstoke in the 1990s. In truth, I am a little worried about Nikki, because in the questionnaire she described her baking style as 'flavours, combinations and colours', which is such a weirdly rudimentary statement that I'm worried she also describes her favourite film as 'noises and shapes'. But, hey, anyone who danced on podiums in Basingstoke can almost certainly push through. Connie loves baking cakes so much that people literally call her 'the Cake Lady', and she isn't upset by it. Plenty of the other bakers go out of their way to name Connie in their bios, too, which has to be a good sign of how well-liked she is. She also keeps a jar of fruit permanently soaking in rum, which is what poachers did in Danny the Champion of the World. What I'm trying to say is that Connie sounds like someone who could poach animals for a living, and I'm too terrified to put her lower on the list. Molly has been baking since she was six. However, that isn't why I think she will win Bake Off this year. No, I think she will win Bake Off because her bio states that she is 25% of the way through a 350,000-stitch cross-stitch landscape of Rivendell. Can you imagine the patience, the attention to detail, the sheer bloody-minded obsessiveness required to do such a thing? Clearly this is the woman to beat.