September 12th was a dark day for Britain’s amateur bakers as the news broke that Love Productions would be taking the much beloved institution that is ‘The Great British Bake Off’ away from BBC and to Channel 4 after being purchased for a huge sum.
Collectively the nation banged our rolling pins against our keyboards as we took to Twitter to share exactly what we thought about this new recipe for a well loved classic.
Then just when we didn’t think things could get worse, long time hosts Mel + Sue announced via a multitude of baking puns that they wouldn’t be going to C4.
Here’s some of the key stats about the #GBBO drama that’s unfolded:
- As of midday on the 14th, since the news broke about C4’s acquisition around 6pm on September 12th, there have been over 240,000 tweets posted around #GBBO
- There were just under 150,000 tweets posted on September 13th about GBBO – that’s almost the same figure as the launch episode.
- 28% of all emotion bearing posts have expressed sadness, whilst 24% have expressed anger. 6% have expressed disgust at the turn of events.
- The split between the post author’s gender (which for episodes of GBBO is usually twice as many females as males) has been significantly decreased, with 31% of distinguishable posts coming from males and 37% from females. Looks like it’s taken some major news to get those male fans to come out of the proving cupboard!
- The account with the most followers that posted about the news was actually @NYTimes, who posted both announcements on Twitter to their 30 million followers.
- It seemed everyone had an opinion on the matter with posts from influential accounts such as The Onion, Jeremy Clarkson, Zoella, CNN, Lord Sugar, Piers Morgan, Jack Whitehall, Vanity Fair and Davina McCall.
- #Breadxit has been used 6,401 times – it’s easy to type, very hard to pronounce!
- The following words have been used in multiple tweets:
Sad – 5,521, Awkward – 1,565, 🙁 – 1,344, Disloyal – 1,032, Shit – 1,001,
Upset – 836, Shame – 709, Mistake – 535, Riots – 524, Despair – 473 - Following the news on Sept 13th around 4:30pm that presenters Mel + Sue wouldn’t be continuing to host, 35,783 tweets were posted in a one hour period.
- That’s 596 tweets a minute – nearly 10 a second – and we’re all meant to be in work at that time!
- 30% of all those tweets expressed negative sentiment.
- The ‘loudly crying face’ emoji – 😭 – was posted in 1,250 of those tweets.
- 36% of tweets expressed sadness, 21% anger and 10% disgust.
- Influential accounts who posted showing their disappointment in that immediate hour included Zoella (6million followers), Piers Morgan (5 million), Scotty T, Rylan and Jack Dee.
Mel + Sue Announce they are leaving
We look for spikes to recognise key events – well the two spikes are clearly shown in this volume graph – the Mel + Sue news in particular.
Below are the overall emotions expressed within tweets around GBBO.
A sneak preview of one of our new graphs – but it really shows how that Mel+Sue news hit us hard!
