The man at the heart of the biggest scandal to hit the Great British Bake Off since Custardgate has said he has no regrets about throwing his baked alaska in the bin but challenged the programme's account of how it came to be ruined.
Wednesday night's controversial episode saw Iain Watters, a construction engineer from Northern Ireland, eliminated from the show by judges Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood, after he threw his show-stopper baked alaska in the bin because the ice-cream had melted. The programme appeared to show that fellow baker Diana Beard had removed his batch from the fridge leading to the episode to be labelled Bingate.
Watters told the Guardian that he did not believe the programme-makers' and Beard's claims that the pudding had only been left out for 40 seconds, saying it was long enough to ruin the dessert.
His first public comments on the row came as the BBC disclosed that shortly after the controversial episode, the fourth in the series, was filmed in the spring, Beard quit the show due to illness. "The night before episode five, Diana made a decision not to come back. This is not connected in any way to what happened in episode four," a BBC spokesman said. Beard denied accusations of sabotage on Thursday and said she had been "stitched up" by the programme makers, after a torrent of abuse online.
Watters condemned the online abuse that was directed at Beard after the episode, which he said was unfair and unnecessary, and was keen to stress he bore his fellow contestant no malice.
"I feel bad for Diana because she's had quite a mauling on Twitter and I don't like all the nasty comments that have been directed towards her," he said. "I think it's a bit unfair and I do think they could have edited the episode a bit better."
But describing the moment, he said: "After I made meringue for the outside of my baked alaska, I went over to the freezer to check how my ice cream was re-freezing, as it had melted slightly on the outside just before I put it in. Then I realised Diana had left it out of freezer. She moved it out of the way to put hers in. That was the reason it melted.
"I've chatted to Diana a couple of times since but I've never asked her why she did it. The Bake Off told me it was out of the fridge for only a minute but I think it had to be a lot longer than a minute to melt as much as that. I was just really shocked that it had been taken out of the freezer. I don't know why it was taken out."
But after a barrage of online outrage, presenter Sue Perkins jumped to Beard's defence on Twitter. "Iain's alaska was out of the freezer for 40 secs," she wrote. "That's it. No sabotage. 40 secs of normal temp would NOT be enough to reduce it to liquid."
She added: "All getting a little inflamed for my liking. Am off. This is a show about CAKES. Please, let's save the ire for real stuff."
Watters said that two of the Bake Off freezers had broken the day before, leaving a shortage for the bakers to use for their puddings. He also disputed Beard's claim on the show that they had each been allocated their own freezer space. "This is an important point – we didn't have designated freezers, as Diana said on the show, and a couple of freezers broke down the day before so we started with five freezers and we went down to three.
"The freezer I was using at the start of the day had got filled up with other people's ice-cream. I went over and there was a space in the freezer on the other side of the tent, which Diana and Nancy and Chetna were using, so I stuck mine in there. I had no reason to believe it would get taken out by anyone.
"I was outraged but I was more frustrated because I had been so focused the last hour and I had all the components made and I was frustrated that it had been taken out. It would not have been melted and ruined if it hadn't been removed from the freezer."
Berry and Hollywood's decision to eliminate Watters from this week's round after he binned his dessert rather than presenting it in its molten form proved as controversial among fellow contestants as it did among the outraged British public.
"It was more of a technical error than a baking error and it maybe should have been taken into account a bit more," Watters continued. "There was a lot of discussion afterwards off camera between the contestants and a lot of the bakers thought they shouldn't have thrown anyone off the show that week because of the way it happened.
Iain's Alaska was out of the freezer for 40 secs. That's it. No sabotage. 40 secs of normal temp would NOT be enough to reduce it to liquid
— Sue Perkins (@sueperkins) August 27, 2014
"A lot of the bakers wanted me to stay and didn't want me to be held responsible and there were quite a lot of tears on the day. There was a lot of frustration on the day at the lack of freezers. Everyone was annoyed there wasn't enough for us all to use. But I was the one that threw it into the bin so in the end I was responsible for it."
However, Watters was adamant that he didn't regret his actions at all. "I don't regret throwing it in the bin. I would do it again," he said. "I didn't want to serve something in that state. I'm not a complete perfectionist but I'm someone who likes things to turn out as I intended them to. It was more frustration."
But he seemed to acknowledge the whole saga was something of a storm in a mixing bowl. "In the end, it's only a reality show involving baking," he laughed.
