Mary Berry’s Highland Christmas review: Now even Mary adds a dash of political correctness to her dishes, writes CHRISTOPHER STEVENS
Mary Berry’s Highland Christmas
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Bad Education: A Christmas Carol
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When even Mary Berry is striking a blow against the patriarchy, you know it’s going to be a very woke Christmas.
Remembering childhoods spent playing outdoors in the Scottish wintertime, on her Highland Christmas (BBC1), she demanded, ‘Why should it always be snowMEN that are made?’
That’s a very good question. One simple answer is: you’d need two extra bits of coal for a snowlady.
Instead, Mary used to make snow tortoises, which were probably very slow to melt.
Teaching comedian Iain Stirling how to dip leftovers in a fondue of melted Gruyere and Emmental, she warned: ‘The rule is, if you lose your bit, you have to buy the drinks. And the girls had to give a kiss to everybody, but I’m not quite sure about that.’
‘Yeah, not nowadays,’ Iain agreed. ‘That was of its time, the old fondue rules.’
Instead of snowmen, Mary used to make snow tortoises during childhoods spent playing outdoors in the Scottish wintertime
Iain is the voice of Love Island, for heaven’s sake. He can’t really believe that a peck on the cheek constitutes a #MeToo assault. But these days, mistletoe is probably a criminal offence.
When she wasn’t adding ladles of political correctness to the recipe, Dame Mary was showing us how to use a sherry glass to cut medallions of fried bread, as the base for her canapes, or rolling stollen dough around a core of marzipan — ‘Perfect with a cup of coffee in the morning.’
She took pity on Sir Andy Murray, who claimed the only meal he’s able to cook is fried egg on bagel. Her technique for baking smoked salmon kedgeree involved nothing more complicated than slicing a lemon and wrapping the fish in tin foil.
But she was less forgiving to singer Emeli Sande, who tackled a full-blown showstopper despite pleading that she’d never even piped icing before. The result, a roulade or chocolate Swiss roll soaked in whisky and topped with ganache, looked like a treat to be sampled sparingly.
Showing us snapshots of long-ago family holidays, Mary revealed that her mother was a Scot. That explains why, by the time she went for a reindeer sleighride, there was more than a touch of the Lorraine Kellys about her accent. ‘Is this a firrest fur ye?’ she asked Iain.
When she wasn’t adding ladles of political correctness to the recipe, Dame Mary was showing us how to use a sherry glass to cut medallions of fried bread
Mary took pity on Sir Andy Murray, who claimed the only meal he’s able to cook is fried egg on bagel
Jack Whitehall’s accent became theatrically fruity in a remake of the Scrooge story in Bad Education: A Christmas Carol (BBC3). Clanking his chains at an unimpressed teacher, Stephen (Strictly’s Layton Williams), he sounded like Ian McKellen performing Shakespeare.
‘Are you dead?’ sneered Stephen. ‘Only, you’ve always been a little pasty.’
Scrooge remakes are a lazy choice for any Christmas special, though the truth is that even Charles Dickens himself wasn’t immune. His first version of the story appeared in The Pickwick Papers, seven years earlier. Its central character was a gravedigger called Gabriel Grub, shown the error of his curmudgeonly ways by time-travelling goblins on Christmas Eve. Didn’t know that, did you?
Jack Whitehall’s accent became theatrically fruity in a remake of the Scrooge story in Bad Education: A Christmas Carol (BBC3)
Set in a school, this Scrooge featured a series of song-and-dance routines, like Grange Hill putting on A Chorus Line.
Vicki Pepperdine, dressed as a Christmas tree, played the Ghost of Christmas FOMO (that’s Fear Of Missing Out, a Generation Z preoccupation). Charlie Wernham was Mitchell the gym teacher, pouring a litre of vodka into the eggnog.
The script was crammed with one-liners, some of them polished and some of them in need of work. But the writers deserve credit for a lyric that managed to rhyme all the various names of Girls Aloud star Cheryl: ‘You may call me Cole, or you may call me Tweedy, You may call me Cheryl or Miss Fernandez-Versini.’ Bravo!
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