Best television over Christmas? Easy – Alan Bennett’s Diaries (BBC2, Saturday). “I’m sure you’ve heard all the stories before. I mean, I’ve such a limited repertoire,” he says, with a modesty that may or may not be genuine, but makes you love him all the more anyway.
It’s our familiarity with the amiable Yorkshireman. “We all think we know him,” says composer Michael Berkeley, introducing Bennett on his Radio 3 show Private Passions, the recording of which we drop into and the music from which – Bennett’s private passions – is used in this.
Bennett shows us some old photographs. I think a Bennett family camera with a misaligned viewfinder has been passed down the generations, with the result that the portraits are all sky and no feet.
He also shows us the piles of papers, and bits of old cheque book, on which his daily thoughts – actually, not always daily; whenever they happen – are scribbled. And which, after heroic work from a typist called Sue and a clearly adored editor called Dinah, are turned into publishable diaries.
We visit his local barber, fishmonger and community library, plus Hay-on-Wye, for the book festival – “like a county show, with literature standing in for husbandry”. And his place in Yorkshire, which he still calls home. He talks amusingly about eyebrow trimming. And movingly about music. And touchingly about his partner, Rupert. And furiously about poverty, closing libraries, trains, the last general election and Brexit. Are you watching, Theresa May, every one else in the Tory party, the last lot, Richard Branson and Mark Littlewood of the Institute of Economic Affairs? There is even a little bit about writing, too. “The most a writer can hope for from a reader is that he or she should think: Here is somebody who knows what it is like to be me,” he reads. There it is again, that familiarity.
Regrets? Never having kept a donkey, although he was once licked by one, sympathetically, on the head. And he has famously been one, of course, doing Eeyore on his recording of Winnie-the-Pooh, but, “that’s less about being a donkey than me being a miserable sod”, he says.
Elsewhere, BBC GBBO began its swansong with The Great Christmas Bake Off (BBC1, Sunday). Four bakers from Bake Offs past – some (OK, one) more annoying than the others – return to the tent to make edible tree decorations, choux wreaths and multistorey Christmas cakes … But it is not really about the cakes (and wasn’t Christmas Day a bit late for us to be getting festive inspiration?), or about the competition (the episode suffered for the lack of any genuine tension). It’s a curtain call for the dream team – Paul and Mary, Mel and Sue.
Save your tears: they are back tonight for a final batch and to take another bow. Come on, hurry up, I want to see what Channel 4 does with it.
In Grantchester (ITV, Saturday), preparations for the church nativity play, which aren’t going that well anyway, to be honest, are rudely interrupted by a murder, with eerie echoes of a previous one. James Norton reminds us of his enormous range as the nice-but-sozzled Reverend Chambers, who seems particularly troubled and doubting at this time of year. And there is no room at the inn for the very pregnant Amanda (Morven Christie) – well, no room in 1950s polite Cambridgeshire society, for a woman who has run away from her husband with a bun in the oven (on your marks, get set, bake) and the hots for the vicar.
A bit bleak then, like the fenlands in winter. But things get a little jollier at the end, with a new arrival. Not the actual incarnation of God, I don’t think, just a regular baby, but still nice.
As was We’re Going On a Bear Hunt (Channel 4, Saturday). I find a lot of kids animation too shiny, perfect and plastic-looking. I’m thinking of Julia Donaldson adaptations (The Gruffalo and Stick Man) and Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes, which was on last night. But this adaptation of the Michael Rosen classic, by the people who did The Snowman, looks much simpler, less stylised and more book-like, as well as being loyal to Helen Oxenbury’s original illustrations. I prefer it; I especially enjoyed the long grass.
More importantly my children liked it – until the bear (voiced by Rosen himself), when they got scared.
