Christmas is the time even the most committed secularists among us become vulnerable to spiritual sensations, whether it is being moved to tears by beautiful carols sung in a church, storied centuries of music, architecture and intimations of the divine rising all around you, or helping with the preparations for a school nativity play and musing that Herod may indeed have been on to something with that massacring of the innocents thing.
My own yuletide act of faith is centred round food. Every year I watch the festive cookery programmes and pledge that this time, this time I will succeed in feeding my family something succulent, seasonal and altogether sensational, instead of breaking out pack after pack of Supanoodles until it’s at last time to decamp to my parents’ house on Christmas Eve to be fed three delicious squares a day by Dad, plus interim snacks, until New Year’s Day.
Last night I worshipped at the altar of Jamie’s Cracking Christmas (Channel 4). Either he has calmed down over the years or my tolerance for Oliveration in general has increased, but either way it’s a lot easier these days to see the food through the “bish-bash-bosh”ing and “lovely-jubbly”ing that is so much a feature of the man and the brand. Nobody makes it look easier or more inviting, more rewarding, more worthwhile, more altogether possible that you – yes you! You, even with your mean little kitchen, meagre understanding and dead palate – could conjure up a feast. Come, all ye faithful and watch him spice a goose, steam buns, Wellington a fillet of beef and tart up a panettone. Let the spirit – ideally via a Le Fizz cocktail made of vodka, ice, elderflower liqueur, lime and soda water – move you.
By the end of an hour spent watching him roast potatoes, smash garlic, thicken gravies, scatter pomegranate seeds and add brown sugar or star anise to everything, I knew that this year, in this house, things were going to be different. My redeemer liveth and, even better, he putteth all his recipes on channel4.com/crackingchristmas. Lovely-jubbly.
Less uplifting was the last of the same channel’s neat little Confessions Of … series, which closed its four-part run with a look at how teachers and their profession have changed over the past 50 years. What unfolded was likely to undo any good Jamie’s joie de vivre had done you, along with any vestigial belief you might have had in humanity’s history or future being, by and large, one of linear progress. All the contributors – except those who had retired – looked knackered. All those who had known life before Ofsted spoke of halcyon days when you could teach what you wanted, when you wanted and there was a presumption of competence rather than a forensic search for failure.
Of course there had been improvements. Teachers can no longer hit their pupils – one man had knocked a boy’s tooth out in the past “and we didn’t think anything of it then” – and sexual relationships between those in a position of authority and their charges are illegal. But over the same period that authority had broken down – or been broken down, you might argue, by a series of policy changes that made it clear that the teachers’ own governmental bosses held them in contempt – leaving teachers at the mercy of threats and violence from children and their parents.
A strong, if essentially downbeat, finish to a brilliantly executed series. I’d like a second one, on journalists, lawyers, social workers and parish priests please. Thank you.
We also reached the end of BBC2’s Posh People: Inside Tatler last night. Think of it as the unwatchable in pursuit of the unreadable. Features editor Sophia Money-Coutts went castle-hopping in Scotland before the referendum to see whether the aristocracy was for or against independence (spoiler alert – they were against it). We then took a jolly squizz at Tatler Russia, where it is simply money, rather than the number of black labradors you have buried in the grounds divided by number of smoking jackets multiplied by death duties, which determines your status.
As it is the season of goodwill, let us simply congratulate the BBC on wringing three hours of non-insight into a magazine for, by and about the 10 dozen-or-so people still managing to hang on to the land their forefathers were given by William the Conqueror and whose vowels sound like they have been gently polished and laid away in tissue paper between each use. I am very glad my licence fee has gone towards this extended advert. I believe Debrett’s says each one of us is now entitled to a handwritten note of thanks from Sophia Money-Coutts, a slide down Lord Palmer’s silver staircase at Manderston (“Wonderful people come in and clean it”) and an annual haunch of venison from the Buccleuch (pronounced “Oh, FFS”) estate. Simply marvellous. I’m off to shoot something myself now.
