TELEVISION REVIEW: Jamie's Best Ever Christmas; Channel 4, Monday. River Cottage Christmas Fayre; Channel 4, Monday. Come Rain Come Shine; UTV, Monday; In and Out in Half an HourRTÉ1, Sunday; 100 Greatest Toys with Jonathan RossChannel 4, Sunday
YOU COULDN'T turn on the telly this week without seeing some familiar-looking chef wrist-deep in a turkey. Most off-putting. Every TV cook seems to have been given a Christmas special this year, as if there's a collective campaign to ratchet up Christmas-dinner anxiety,and it hasn't been pretty. There's nothingvisually appealing about someone jamming a pound of butter under the blue-white goose-pimpled skin of a giant bird – and they were all at it. It's apparently the thing to do to keep the bird "moist" – a nausea-inducing word at the best of times.
Most entertaining of them, as usual, was Jamie Oliver and his Best Ever Christmas, if only because of his energy and his cute children, and his butter with cranberries and sage sounded the nicest. Not that I’ve any intention of doing it, of course, but that’s the way of TV cookery programmes: the more you see, the less chance you have of actually bothering. Most fantastically irritating was Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Christmas Fayre – a no-brainer, really, because any programme that isn’t about the Tudors with the word “fayre” in the title is to be avoided. His useful advice (pulled from a parallel universe where people care about such things) included the tip that “after-dinner mints make perfect roof tiles for our gingerbread house”. He did an item on how to make a hangover cure that involved him pretending to be worse for wear after a Christmas bender – a tricky task, because Fearnley-Whittingstall’s rubbish at acting (though, to be fair, it was probably filmed on a sunny September afternoon). The recipe involved an equally bumbling posh bloke called Tim, with alarming sideburns, popping around with a bottle of his home-made beetroot juice to make the cure. “Mmm, you can feel that cleaning you from bottom to top,” said Hugh – and in case that’s causing any disturbing visual images of how he administered the concoction, it might reassure you to know that he drank it.
David Jason was, for years, the star of Christmas TV with Only Fools and Horses, and although he spent ages as Detective Frost it has been hard to see him as anything other than his brilliant wide-boy creation. In the modern fable Come Rain Come Shine his character, Don, could have been the Trotters' neighbour. A cockney ex-docker living in a spick-and-span council flat with wife Dora (Alison Steadman), he was happy in his retirement, especially as his property-developer son was so obviously doing so well. Fetching up to a birthday party in his swanky house with the Bentleys out front, Dora hands his son's wife "just some bits for the party", only to see that the event is catered and there's no need for the home-made birthday cake. They've moved way beyond that sort of humble homeliness. But then it goes pear-shaped for the son, and his credit-fuelled life collapses. It turns out that there's no real cash and no plan B when disaster strikes. He loses his job, the creditors are on his back and, not having the sly smarts to put the house in the missus's name – as we now know is all the rage here – it is repossessed. On his uppers, with no one to rely on but family (moral number one), he brings his snobby wife and son back to live with dear old Dad and Mum in the high-rise. And that's when Don starts doling out the drama's messages in dialogue that veers dangerously in the direction of Hallmark.
“Money’s only money, isn’t it? Cos when I look at you I’m the richest man in the world.” Swiftly followed by, “I always thought the best thing you can give your kids is yourself.” But does the son listen? Not a bit of it. The daughter-in-law turns out to ’ave an ’eart of gold, and she knuckles down and gets herself a job as a shelf stacker while the Flash Harry son continues to chase a quick buck. Don has to learn to accept what Dora has always known: their son is a feckless neer-do-well with notions. It all comes right in the end, of course, this being Christmas and it being an overlong and treacly though well-acted modern fable.
In In and Out in Half an Hourwhat could have been a sickly-sweet documentary turned out to be both endearing and uplifting. The title of the film, which was shot at Dublin Register Office, refers to the number of marriages there every day: one every 30 minutes. The camera caught a cross section of couples as they turned up for their big day, and followed others to get a the stories behind the romance. They were all ages, sizes and nationalities, and their reasons for choosing a civil ceremony were many. For some it was simply preference, or that they were divorced and unable to marry in a Catholic church. For others it was budget, time or convenience.
The reasons for getting married were equally varied. “For our children and our grandchildren; I think it’s proper,” said one glamorous granny surrounded by her extended family. “We’ve been together a couple of years,” said a groom sheepishly, only to be corrected, sharpish, by his new wife. “Well, we have been engaged for seven years.”
It was all happy and hopeful and an antidote to the gloom, and the registrars, Julie Morgan and Anne Bradley, were lovely, determined to make everyone’s day special, despite their obvious workload and their clear awareness that a minority of the marriages are not what they seem. People, said Bradley, are often surprised to find that the registrars are employed by the mental-health-service wing of the HSE and not the Department of Justice – there’s an easy joke in there somewhere, but it was too cheery a documentary for that.
Sham marriages, usually Asian men paying eastern European women in the hope of getting European residency papers, aren't, they said, too difficult to spot. Typically these "couples" don't speak the same language or even pretend to know each other's names, but there's no law to prevent it. There's a different documentary to be made about that. Bradley encourages the couples to bring their own music and to make the ceremony as personal as they can, "and if I was ever offered a free ticket to a Shania Twain concert, I wouldn't take it," she said, slotting the most-used CD into the player. Was it Twain's Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under?Of course not. It was Twain's romantic Forever and Always.
Bad bounce Jonathan Ross makes the move sideways and downwards
How the mighty have fallen. Back on the screens and with a goatee and raffish tash, Jonathan Ross looked as though he should be wearing a painter’s smock and standing in front of an easel – instead of counting down, over three hours, the 100 Greatest Toys as voted by viewers. Every week on the BBC he got to interview A-listers, but his first programme for his new employer was a run-of-the-mill time-filler. It was the format viewers will recognise from countless other 100 Greatest programmes. A collection of randomers, mostly actors you don’t recognise and TV presenters you’ve never seen before, telling not entirely fascinating personal anecdotes about the subject in question. So for the toys version we heard from one that “the most consistent toy in my whole life is the roller skate”, that “when I was in university we used to play Risk” or that “Spirograph combines the fun of drawing with the geometry of a maths lesson”. Toys have rarely sounded less playful. Presents are mostly sorted by now, but for any aunts
and uncles still with shopping to do, the number-one toy was Lego – and there’s no arguing with that.
