A touch of the Bah! Humbugs
I’m not ‘doing’ Nigella this year. Her Christmas Kitchen series started on BBC 2 last week with more than 3m viewers but is in fact only three new films and two old ones, repeated from “the hit 2006 series of the same name”. Not for me to accuse the BBC and Ms Lawson of milking the same material to death. You, the viewer, will decide.
I lost faith with the beautiful but nevertheless big-eared chef when she suggested immersing an uncooked turkey in a bucket of water and sticking it outside the back door overnight. Does Charles Saatchi shoot all the foxes and rats in their neighbourhood? Around these parts there would simply be an orange-tinged carcass and a puddle of cloves left in the morning.
Nigella has become a parody of what she once was: the delectably yummy mummy, capable of anything including guilt-ridden raiding of the fridge in the middle of the night. She may be curvy but she loves her food, shares it with her family and friends and we loved her for it. Now it’s all close up sucking on a chocolate-covered digit and moueing at the camera before swirling off to a glamorous party and then knocking up the ingredients for Italian bonbons or chilli jam before she hits the sack. But she doesn’t even go out, if we’re to believe the interview she gave to the Guardian Weekend magazine recently.
It was the same in her summer series, in which she merrily trotted off to the park with her Cath Kidston-esque 1950s flask (an original, of course) having assembled a feast of sticky chicken wings and god knows what else for her presumably grateful children who would shudder at the mere mention of the words ‘Asda’, ‘precooked’ and ’sausages’.
Lawson comes out of the Guardian interview far better than she does from these programmes, sounding like an honest, compromised but getting-on-with-it human being. The reality is that she’s a very bright Oxford graduate from a well-connected family who must realise this sort of TV is beneath her. But it’s her current niche and she’s mining it.
I am, in truth, suffering from a touch of the bah! Humbugs and I’m sure it will pass by the weekend when I’ll be knocking out the homemade mince pies with the best of them. But, people, NOBODY LIVES LIKE THIS! At least, not all of the time. Of course lifestyle programming is aspirational and we all aim in our own ways to be the best, blah, blah, blah. But in promising to “help viewers cook up the perfect Christmas”, the BBC and their ilk are just feeding our modern neurosis about unattainable perfection. Where’s the programme that shows us how to have a ‘good enough’ Christmas? Good enough for us adults, good enough for the kids and good enough for the world at large.
