Death threats are absolutely fucked up. But the show didn't orchestrate the death threats on melting icecream/Bingate lady, Diana, any more than it made Deborah accidentally steal Howard's custard!
The death threats (and the construction of Ruby Tandoh as some kind of manipulative temptress using tears to wiggle her way unjustly through to the final in her season, which also turned very unpleasant) were from the kind of nasty online conversations that are outside the producers' control.
I hate drag. I think it's misogynistic blackface that caricatures women in deeply unpleasant ways. But drag is currently incredibly mainstream, whether I like it or not. The Great British Sewing Bee, another 'cosy' feelgood programme directly based on GBBO, has had no less than three drag queens as contestants in recent series. Having one on GBBO just cements that drag, by the standards of current mainstream programming, is entirely compatible with 'cosy'. Gabe wouldn't have been cast had the producers not considered him sufficiently cosy.
Ruby Tandoh says in a thing she wrote for the New Yorker last year that the holy grail of casting for GBBO is 'the unlikely baker' according to their head of casting:
It is hard to think of another show that screens so carefully not just for personality type and talent but also for that more slippery variable, purity of intention. Producers find themselves in the position of trying to cast one of the best-known shows on television—one that routinely makes people famous—with people who care about neither television nor fame. They have to sniff out clout-chasers, and pick through government databases for things like criminal convictions and undeclared baking businesses. Even unrealized dreams can be suspect. When I asked Sophia Reid, the head of casting, about Dylan Bachelet, the Pixar-cute twenty-year-old retail assistant from Season 15, she said that she had been nervous about him at first. “I knew Dylan wanted to be a chef,” she told me. “How’s that gonna land?”
The show attempts to present Britain in microcosm, which is why casters have scouted on the street and plugged into Facebook groups—Black dads in London, Irish badminton players, that kind of thing. The holy grail is what Reid calls “the unlikely baker.” To Kieran Smith, the show’s executive producer, that’s someone like Rahul Mandal, the Winnie-the-Pooh-esque nuclear scientist from Season 9. “The moment you get a Rahul . . . ,” Smith mused, bowing his head. “There is someone who is unintentionally funny. There is someone who probably never wanted to be on television in their life.”