Nigella is on the road, driving at night. She arrives somewhere rural and barny, steps red-booted and red-coated out of the car. Oi, Nige, you left your lights on! But, of course, she meant to, they’re two more bright stars to add to the twinkling firmament.
There are lights everywhere, in the sky, twisted around the gate, hanging in strings from a tree, catkins of luminescence. Nothing coloured, or tacky, no sleighs or Santas, just white and pure and perfect.
Inside, there are more, millions more, lights and candles. No wonder it took a long time to get here: Nigella has arrived in the Milky Way, or in heaven itself. Oh, and she’s only just started decorating, she says.
Right now, though, she is going to wind down with a little Christmas martini – ice, vodka from a sparkly bottle, raspberry liqueur and creme de cacao blanc. “There is” – and she pauses momentarily as she composes the perfect utterance to go with the perfect everything else – “a warming hint of puddinginess about this, and more than a soupcon of camp.”
Yes, the humiliation isn’t over, I’m afraid. Having just made us mortals feel utterly inadequate about our kitchens/utensils/friends/life, now she’s doing the same with our Christmases. Nigella’s Christmas Table (BBC2), it’s called. Well, I’m going to do it this year, I’m going to be more Nigella.
I’m going to bake forgotten cookies, to give as gifts and for when friends drop by (I may have to make the friends as well). Squidgy in the middle, always desirable – the cookies, maybe me as well … I will devil eggs and mix sparkling negronis for impromptu effervescence. A confetti of chives here, a heavy snowfall of salt there, it’s good to do everything generously; this is not the time of year for restraint.
I will find a wonderful dark undertow (or possible undertone) to the treacle in my pudding. Look at it gleaming darkly at me; it has such a sombre majesty. I will have no time for the vociferous anti-sprouts brigade or their brussels-bashing bigotry; I will have time for rich, generous, syrupy language and alliteration.
And I will find time to grab a moment of calm before the feast, to walk in the woods, in dappled light, which will be both soothing and uplifting at the same time. (Are there even woods in suburban Bromley, which is where we’re going this year? Still, I’m adding dog to the now-enormous shopping list.)
I will be attractively and coquettishly modest: I’m not good at this or that, knife skills, piping, art. You know what, if you try to be perfect in life, you’re going to have a pretty miserable existence. (And you know what else, saying so makes me even more perfect.)
I will be, and it will be, perfect. Everyone will come and feast and laugh. The skin on the ducks and the logs on the fire will crackle. The negronis, the conversation, the pomegranate jewels in the sprouts, will sparkle. Amid a billion twinkling stars, including those two bright ones out there on the drive. And the next day I will call the AA (no, not the too-many-negronis one). My name is Sam and I’ve got a flat car battery.
Bancroft (ITV) – replacing the Hatton Garden drama, which has been postponed without explanation – is like a cocktail of a lot of other police dramas. Almost as if they looked at what had done well recently and said, we’ll have a bit of that, that and that.
Sarah Parish plays the title character, a tough detective superintendent with, guess what, a murky past, hunting down a criminal gang in an unspecific northern city. Faye Marsay is a younger, ambitious DS, as yet unjaded but frustrated by being put on cold cases, specifically the unsolved murder of a young woman 27 years ago. I’m thinking there might just be a connection, that Bancroft might have been involved in it. I’m right!
There’s a lot of Scott & Bailey going on here. Add a good glug of cold case from Waking the Dead (New Tricks will do), a dash of Ashes to Ashes for retro cool and vintage cars, the forensics from Silent Witness, plus a slice of Line of Duty for a bit of institutional corruption. Shake, mix up those metaphors and serve (over four consecutive nights).
It’s not going to surprise, or keep you awake at night worrying, or suck you in like Line of Duty, or one of Nigella’s treacly, dark undertows. I’m not getting much sombre majesty here. But it’s fizzy and crisp and slips down without having to think too much. Cheers, to murder!
