Noel Fielding on his Bake-Off co-hosts and Dick Turpin co-stars

“Don’t panic. It’s okay,” Noel Fielding told members of the Television Critics Association last month.

He’d been asked about if he was still going to be on The Great British Baking Show, now that he has his own Apple TV+ show, The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin, which debuts its finale Friday.

Noel reassured everyone: “They let me out of the tent briefly to get on a horse.”

The co-host of GBBO, which will film its 15th series later this spring, is now on a horse starring in The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin, where he plays the titular historical figure—though as the title suggests, the show is fiction.

Turpin was known for highway robbery, and was also “a poacher, burglar, horse thief and killer,” as Wikipedia so delightfully summarizes his life.

Like on The Great British Bake-Off, Noel Fielding is working alongside other comedians—though here, it’s an ensemble of comedians and comedic actors.

The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin executive producer Kenton Allen said, “Bake-Off’s live improv, because you’re looking to real people and you’re kind of thinking on your feet, whereas Noel spends months with the writers writing a script for those actors that are going to come in.”

But there is a similarity to The Great British Bake-Off—and it explains the differences between in tone co-hosts Sandi Toksvig, Matt Lucas, and Alison Hammond.

“Comedy is a fun and interesting one,” Noel told me. “Everyone’s got their own clown, and they’ve got their own specific clown. Then there’s clown status. If you’re with someone who’s higher status than you, and you’re a low-status clown, then those characters usually work quite well together.”

“So, me and Sandi work quite well together, because she’s very high status, and I’m very low status. Same with [Hugh Bonneville’s Dick Turpin character] Jonathan Wilde. He undercuts himself, and gets undercut quite a lot, and I’m very low status.”

Noel said that, with Sandi Toksvig, “our double act worked quite well together, actually. But I do think every time a new character comes into it, there is definitely a shift in how the comedy works.”

That’s true of Allison Hammond’s addition to Bake-Off. “Everyone has their own way of working as well,” Noel added. “Sandi likes to write, so Sandi wants to get involved very much in the writing, [but] Allison is much more in the moment and natural, and very spontaneous and naturally funny.”

“We didn’t analyze our relationship too much—we just got on, and enjoyed spending time together,” Noel said about working with Allison Hammond. “It felt good, so we would just be going, Well, it feels good. Hopefully it’ll be good! We didn’t overthink it too much.”

“And yeah, we were pleased because I felt like how our relationship came across quite well on telly, in a natural way; we didn’t try to manufacture that,” he added.

On The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin, he told me, “everyone’s got their own role within the gang, and then they come across other weird characters in the world.”

And even though “it’s scripted, what you’re hoping to do is surround yourself with characters that work.”

It’s definitely working on the unscripted The Great British Bake-Off—Allison Hammond and Noel Fielding are a wonderful duo.