It's time someone challenged Mary Berry on how tremendously out-of-touch she really is

As we crouch beneath rickety Ikea tables in protect-and-survive mode waiting for North Korea to incinerate America and all Trump’s special chums, it is of some comfort, at least, that Mary Berry has declared her dining-table years over.

A feeble bomb shelter is possibly all that our tables – if we have them – are now good for, especially as the kitchen is where Berry says she eats and entertains.

“Most of us, I think, live in the kitchen,” she told a Cheltenham audience over the weekend. “We’ve given up our dining room, finally.” And this is all very heartwarming, the image of Berry by the stove having chosen between the big dining room table and the big kitchen table, but far as I can see, no agitator stood up and shouted, “I actually live in the kitchen as my landlord made that into a bedroom too. So I sleep just one metre south of the stove, with my feet in the recycling!”

And no one said, “But Mary, millions of people never eat at a table at all for various complex reasons mainly stemming around intergenerational lack of wealth.”

And no one did this because firstly this was Cheltenham, land of the kitchen supper and the inheritance tax dilemma, but also because being mean to Mary Berry is like roughly waking a basket of sleeping kittens with an air-horn. You just don’t do it. It’s churlish.

Berry – honk the national-treasure klaxon – is never quite challenged on her tremendous out-of-touchness, mainly as all the Jaspers and Fenellas who surround her in the media and the food landscape are thoroughly complicit. Berry and Bake Off both abide in a cosy cloud-cuckoo land – indeed that could be seen as responsible for their meteoric rise in popularity.

There’s no real shame in this flagrant escapism; I do it all the time. But the food world is steeped in privilege so ingrained that those in charge don’t even know what they’re saying and how it sounds.

A recent episode, for example, of Mary Berry’s Big Crowd Pleasers on BBC2 primetime focused on pizza. Mary announced merrily, early doors, she had never ordered a home-delivery pizza in her life. This was a fact to be celebrated, it seemed, rather than fudged.

Imagine for a moment Levi Roots marshalling 30 primetime minutes on jerk chicken and his opening gambit being: “I’ve never eaten it.” But instead Mary’s sense of wonder on working class life was seen as both glorious and relevant.

And besides, she could be schooled on pizza by two lovely young English boys called Tom and James from Dorset, who “loved pizza so much they went all the way to Naples to discover its secrets” and then started their own very successful business. Furthermore, they would be popping by her football-pitch-sized lawn in a bespoke street food van to teach her about Italian authenticity.

Under normal circumstances, this would be the sort of television broadcast shortly before a bloody, passata-splattered class war revolution. Yet with Berry, we merely smile wanly, both at her and the BBC team who stuff together these portions of 27 minutes of head-banging codswallop which says nothing even fleetingly sane, never mind relevant, about either Britain or eating.

But, with regards to “the end of the dining room”, as professed by Berry, the great irony is that while its very mention will cause sadness and inadequacy among the skint, it will cause just as much among high-earners and those who aged 40-plus now are totting up their inheritances.

“Oh crikey, Mary Berry has said that no one eats in their dining room anymore!” Fenella will say to Jasper, crestfallen. “And our breakfast bar only sits six comfortably! The kitchen can’t extend any further! What on earth can we do?”

At this point the pair will glance furtively at their £250,000 “Dig-a-Basement Kitchen” architecture plans which were put on hold due to joint sheepishness over keeping the entire neighbourhood rattling like peas in a jar for seven months solid while they dig under their Edwardian terrace. Plus the neverending lorries, shouting builders and the strong chance you might ruin the foundations of the home next-door.

“But,” Fenella will say, “Berry says the kitchen is the heart of the home. We need to make it snug and inviting for our children... y’know, when they are here. They need to see me, with their own eyes, warming up this Hello Fresh build-your-own-dinner pack as they sit at our eight-person solid oak kitchen table. Anything less is neglect!”

Berry says she relies on dimmer lights and candles to make kitchen entertaining more inviting. But it will take more than a bag of Ikea tea lights slung around willy-nilly for the majority of Britain to live like Mary Berry.