Cutting Edge: A Very British Christmas C4
Hamleys: a Real Toy Story C4
A Christmas Carol ITV
Mirrorball BBC1
Death of The Dome BBC2
Paul, a turkey farmer interviewed in Cutting Edge 's 'A Very Cynical Christmas' - no, sorry, make that British Christmas - gave us a tour of his premises, which looked like Sizewell B: 'Five to six hundred thousand eggs in the summer... incubated at a temperature of 37.3 degrees... humidity at 29.5 degrees... eggs rotated through 90 degrees every hour... then from the hatchery - the maternity ward! - to the despatch room, where they're sexed... we do 20-hour days in the three or four days before Christmas... eating turkey every day for a fortnight... tasting a bird from each flock.' Flock: that was a tender, even twitcherly touch, given that Paul's turkey chicks don't really have the chance to get in touch with their inner flock, just blink, bob and gobble in their trays like a strain of feathery Pokémon.
Paul gave us some tips for turkey roasting: 'Pre-heat oven to 200 degrees... bird in the tin breast-down... 10 minutes a pound... turn over to brown breast off half an hour before it's finished cooking... test with a fork deep into the thigh muscle... if the juices run clear, it's cooked.'
Now, like Paul, too much exposure to turkeys has made me keen on the idea of a Christmas goose, even though the last time I cooked one my husband left me shortly afterwards. How could I have known he was that fond of turkey?
In Hamleys: a Real Toy Story, maintenance men Roy and Pat sat with their flasks under the strip-lighting in the Regent Street sub-basement ('near the Underground') and bemoaned the fact that 'this used to be the finest toyshop in the world, but it's gone down a bit'. At the end of 1999, the venerable institution's annual profits had plummeted from £7 million to £27,000, so there was a new boss (cheerful Simon, fresh from Virgin) and his deputy (scary John, Mr Flipchart, the Management Moonie). John corralled the sales staff and bullied them a bit ('dirty, dirty, dirty') before building them up again. 'We have the chance to do something about it, yeah?' 'Yeah,' muttered Andrew from toy soldiers and Libby from teddy bears half-heartedly.
Elsewhere in Hamleys in 1999, Ian, a toy buyer like the Tom Hanks character in Big, went to New York to try to replicate his finest professional hour. In 1988, Ian had brought the dancing flower to Britain and was thus something of a legend in the business. 'It's one line in a lifetime,' he mused wistfully. 'I don't think I'll ever find another line like that.' Last Christmas, however, Ian surpassed himself, introducing the nation to both the microscooter and Big Mouth Billy Bass.
The shop refit turned out to be the nightmare before Christmas. At the Nuremberg toy fair (who would have thought Nuremberg could be so much fun ?), Simon spotted a big train set he wanted to install in the shop, but you knew it was all going to go a bit Willy Wonka when he came home and commissioned a British company to provide the track. Dismalness ensued and the result was indeed, as Simon said, 'embarrassing, pathetic, boring'. The film crew even captured a disturbing close-up of a miniature derailment.
Simon's CV does not, however, include Virgin trains, which is probably why he's become chairman and turned the company around. Though I do think he should give Fran ('I've been in showbusiness all my life') back her puppet show. And when, after 47 years of mole-like service, Pat retired his flask and handed over his keys to Roy, shouldn't he have been presented with an engraved Billy Bass?
The best, and worst, thing about Christmas television is its awesome predictability, a feeling reinforced by ITV's A Christmas Carol, the festive vehicle for Ross Kemp. Like Scrooge during one of his groundhog Christmas Eves, the sharp-eyed viewer may have recognised that we've been here before. In this modern adaptation, Kemp played a loan shark whose beat was a council estate and, funnily enough, this was the very same council estate that, just a few weeks ago, acted as the backdrop for John Simm's loan shark in the excellent Never Never, so I hope the residents are on a profit-share scheme from the rental of their location and will now have a very merry Christmas without the distraction of any more unpleasant murders taking place in the underground car-park.
Though Kemp's Scrooge all too predictably revisited the ghost of Grant Mitchell's past, this wasn't a bad Christmas Carol and there were some funny, panto-villainesque lines. When, for example, Bob Cratchit pleaded for time off work ('Tim's in hospital again, so I was thinking of the whole day'), Kemp, a thoroughly modern, Tropicana-orange- juice-drinking, Plasma-screen-watching Scrooge, added Loaded-style lairiness to the traditional litany of hisses and humbuggery: 'And I was thinking of inviting Britney Spears over for an eggnog.'
Déjà-viewing, too, in Mirrorball, in which Jennifer Saunders has reconvened the Ab Fab team as a bunch of variously unsuccessful and monumentally talentless luvvies. Saunders's Edina is now Vivienne Keill who spent six years in Hollywood wearing a small rubber trunk in Star Trek, but admits that the 'peak of my career might have been playing Twisted Labia, sidekick to Little Nell in the non-Derek Jarman sequel to Jubilee - and even in that I wandered around with "No Future" felt-penned on my forehead.'
Vivienne managed to beat off competition from Bonnie Langford (a multi-tasking enigma is Bonnie: she sent herself up beautifully here in the same week she appeared playing it straight on Barrymore and showing off her new baby in Hello! ) to win herself a role in the musical version of Angela's Ashes - her audition masterstroke a brogueish rendition of Send in the Clowns with a little light Riverdancing on the side. Meanwhile, Joanna Lumley's Patsy has been reconfigured as Jackie Riviera, star of Disco Follies '77 and a bottle blonde with black tips, exactly like an ageing Christina Aguilera.
Mirrorball lacks Ab Fab 's Zeitgeisty absurdity, but you couldn't not giggle and everybody got a good line or two (the resting actress who had just lost her role in 'Tony and Cherie: the Musical', for example. All together now: 'We live at Ten and Eleven/ but we're all sixes and sevens...') and there was a tour de force from Jane Horrocks as the miserablist Nordic Yitta Hilberstam, whose CV included 'skippings, spinnings, dancings and showings at the Millennium Dome'. While Yitta sang 'Show Me the Way to the Next Whisky Bar', Vivienne watched admiringly: 'I should have done Brecht.' 'It's Weill,' said Jackie. 'It's working,' countered Viv.
Though Mirrorball was billed as a pilot, I suspect Viv and Jackie might find themselves working in the longest run of their lives.
In Death of the Dome, the world's emptiest metaphor was described by a gleeful cartoonist as 'a gift from God'. A gift from God, too, for the makers of last year's riveting Trouble at the Big Top, whose final visit this was. It was good to catch up with the cast again: bow-tied, buffoonish Derek, creator of the Earth Zone; that nice couple with the baby who had created the Play Zone (and won an award for it. Presumably the only award the Dome has ever received that hasn't been subsidised by the tax payer), and John Hackney, the man who filled the Body Zone with Tommy Cooper and pubic hair.
The show was unadulterated joy: from the footage of the PR débcle that was last New Year's Eve (and from which the tent never recovered, as small children cried before they'd even set foot in the place and angry broadsheet editors bristled), right up to the final shots of piled-high mini Domes reduced from £10 to £4.99. 'There were problems with people not knowing how to turn it on in the morning,' said Hackney of his beleaguered body, though next week the Body Zone will finally be able to sigh and say: 'Not now, Monsieur Gerbeau, I've got a headache,' and get away with it.
Predictably but perversely, this knowledge made me want to rush straight to Greenwich, if only because, having sold so few of them, the souvenirs are bound to become very collectable.
