Your kids are still grumpy after being forced to stay up all night for the Toy Show, and visits to the supermarket are starting to resemble the final 20 minutes of James Cameron’s Titanic. It can only mean that pre-Christmas madness is upon us, and there is no surer indication of midwinter insanity than the onslaught of Christmas lifestyle specials clogging up our screens.
Meghan Markle was first out of the tinsel-bedecked traps last week with her manic and tragic Netflix special (featuring a reluctant Prince Harry and an anchovy salad from your worst nightmares). Now it’s the turn of the eternally chirpy Jamie Oliver – aka the ghost of television cook-athons past – with Jamie’s Cook-Ahead Christmas (Channel 4, Monday). It’s been an age since Oliver was the hip young chef du jour – 25 years in fact, when commissioning editors in the UK were astonished at the sight of a working-class man rustling up a toasted sandwich without burning the kitchen down or half-inching the silverware.
A quarter century on, he remains performatively amiable, though you do have to wonder about the title of his new show. Say it out loud, and Cook Ahead sounds like Cook A Head: is cannibalism the new gluten-free? It is not, and Oliver instead shows us how to rustle up some pre-made treats that we can stash away until Christmas Day, when we’re too stressed/sloshed/sobbing in our bedroom like Emma Thompson in Love Actually to acquit ourselves adequately in the kitchen.
The dishes tend towards a sort of ironic 1970s kitsch – with Oliver presumably flashing back to his own childhood, what with his recipes for Christmas stuffing served up in a flange mould, and an arctic log that seems to have rolled in from 1975. You keep expecting him to whip up some Angel Delight or sing the praises of steak-and-kidney pie in a tin.
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In a way, the cooking doesn’t matter – the point of the show is to bask in Oliver’s joy for mucking about with a food mixer. Where Markle was stressed to the nines (tens if that is possible), Oliver is 90 per cent banter, 10 per cent kitchen competence.
You can’t help but think that, in an alternative universe somewhere, Oliver would make for a great Late Late Toy Show presenter. He’d breeze through the bit where the kids are rude to him as they explain how to operate a remote-controlled dinosaur, and he’d have great fun chinwagging with a nine-year-old from rural Cavan with a statement mullet.
It is, of course, an open question whether anyone in the real world is sufficiently organised to start their Christmas cooking this early in December. Still, even for those who aren’t – ie most of us – this is cheery seasonal telly of the first order. Yes, it’s the same old Jamie – his recipe really hasn’t changed since the late 1990s. But his marvellous matey-ness continues to go down a treat, even if you wouldn’t know one end of a 1970s-styled artic roll from the other.
