After yesterday’s culinary excesses, my mother and I make our way over to my sister’s for a suitably late lunch. As is traditional, we have spinach and celeriac bake, which also features lots of artery-hardening and delicious Gruyere, to go with yesterday’s turkey, gammon and stuffing, along with the spiced onions I’d prepared earlier. There are also a few leftovers from last night, as well as the pigs in blankets that my nephew didn’t eat for breakfast. It’s a curious paradox that the left overs and meals assembled from bits and pieces in the fridge are so often what taste best. It is glorious food, and I find it impossible to resist seconds.
I haven’t needed to make any sticky toffee pudding – which I am usually required to produce on Boxing Day – as there is still plenty of Christmas Pudding and rum sauce left over. It’s too rainy for a walk, and, after lunch, we all have a nice time reading our presents, which provides me with a wonderful opportunity to get better acquainted with my collection of new gastroporn. I also manage to make some necessary notes for the blog that I can write up later. For supper, we have cheese and biscuits – I’ve only room for a very small amount – followed by the Christmas cake, which is finally broken into and which I must admit to being rather pleased with.
After supper, the rest of the family settle down with the Downton Abbey Christmas Special. How this predictably-plotted, sloppily-written, stereotypically-characterised, ineptly-constructed, historically-inaccurate, poorly-paced, clunkily-directed, clumsily-acted, abjectly deferential, substandard soap has managed to deceive otherwise sensible people into accepting it as high quality television is one of the more unfathomable mysteries of our time. It’s even got hard-headed, ardently republican antipodeans, with otherwise well-functioning bullshit-detectors, fawningly tugging their forelocks in admiration.
I suppose this shows how stately-house porn is bad for the judgement, and how, even today, Etonian self-assurance is still an effective conjuring trick. Alas, self-confidence always overtakes talent – at least in the short-term – whether you are a prime minister making it up as you go along, with lots of Bullingdon club banker chums to look after, or an ambitious right-wing hack with delusions of literary and aristocratic grandeur churning out feel-good tat for the American market that can double up as crude and easy Tory party propaganda. Truly, the upper classes really are all in it together: shafting the rest of us.
I heroically remain in the kitchen washing up, in order to reduce my exposure to this sycophantic drivel. It is something of a disappointment that even my niece has succumbed to this brain-numbing tosh, although she has the decency to come up with the excuse that she finds it restful when surrounded by vegan anarchists at university. I’m unable to drag out doing the dishes for a whole two hours – my sister has a dishwasher, after all – and, when I’ve finished, I go in to join the rest of the family. I make notes for the blog, and, from time to time, glance at the screen. There is always the fear that it might not be as awful as I’ve insisted it is. Pleasingly, here Downton delivers: every bit as reassuringly banal, tacky, tedious, poorly-crafted and irritating as I remembered. There is something simultaneously consolatory and disappointing about this.
It’s enough to make you think that good television is dead. But, the following evening, I am utterly captivated on I-player by Victoria Wood’s marvellous musical That Day we Sang, which is both hilarious and hugely touching, simultaneously raucous, filthy, witty and very moving and tender. I am suddenly back in love with the BBC.