None of the major broadcasters know quite what to do over Christmas. Channel 5 settles in and out of the festive spirit, flipping at one point between the low-budget Christmas film Snowy With a Chance of Christmas and the Christmas murder documentary Who Killed JonBenet Ramsay? A Christmas Nightmare. Channel 4, more straightforwardly, wants you to have A Very British Christmas. It’s an intriguing title for a programme you intend to broadcast in Britain over Christmas – it could mean literally anything. British minds teem with thoughts of nativity plays and boozy nights, the Queen’s Speech and the Argos catalogue. Are we about to watch A Very British Christmas, an under-the-radar film from 2019 in which an American finds herself stranded in the Yorkshire snow with a handsome hotelier?
None of the above. A Very British Christmas is a documentary series in which professionals decorate stately homes. Channel 4 has got something right – nothing is more British than a stately home. They pop up in our national literature at regular intervals, from Waugh to Wuthering Heights; they are inextricable from the very British inequity of our unscalable class system, and exist today as romantic reminders of our very British decline. Nowadays, the most British thing about a stately home is the fact that almost nobody can afford to live in one, least of all the people who own them.
I tune in when they do Bamburgh Castle, a Norman behemoth with Victorian bits added on later. We see it from a drone’s eye view as it perches on the bleak coast of Northumberland. There are actual suits of armour lining the corridors. The presenter, who delights in telling us when it is October and November, says the castle once housed “kings, knights, legends and ghosts.” Owner Francis Watson-Armstrong inherited Bamburgh Castle on the sudden death of his adopted father, the third Baron Armstrong. The family descends from 19th-century engineer William Armstrong, whose Wikipedia page contains an image of something called an Armstrong hydraulic jigger winch. Cue shot of family photographs on Victorian side-table; cue tweed-clad group portrait on windswept cliff. The late Baron stares into the middle distance. A picture like it must exist at the glossy middle of every biography of a 20th-century aristocrat. Francis’ wife Claire expresses her sympathies. He isn’t having it.
“You’ve got to pick yourself up off the floor, haven’t you,” he says, very Britishly.
We break into a tale centuries in the making. Goodbye Hallmark – hello Walpole, Mitford, and Dickens. Bamburgh Castle is crumbling. “At a thousand years old,” the presenter tells us, “it’s a bit of a moneypit.” Francis and Claire despair. Viewers tuning in to forget about the cost-of-living crisis find no respite. It’ll take “seven figures” to redo the roof of the wood-panelled Great Hall; “well into the six figures” for scaffolding. They get no public funding. The only saving grace are their paying visitors, who we see in drone-vision descending in droves onto the cliffs of Northumberland. A few years ago the couple realised they could up their revenue by turning the castle into a themed Christmas trail. Every October they slip into a frenzy of light-up pageantry that barely seems British at all.
Their head decorator is Charlotte Lloyd Webber, who was once in the theatre but now runs her own event design business from an Essex site we come to refer to as “Christmas HQ.” Her team decorates six historic properties a year.
“THAT’S –a lot of baubles!” the presenter tells us in Presenterial English.
There are pigeons living in the outbuildings of Christmas HQ, and dolls writhing about on the bare earth; the season gets so busy that there is no time to arrange all the accoutrements. “It was only a matter of time,” says the presenter, “before there was an accident.” A selection of Alice in Wonderland baubles crack on the floor.
The decorators need a theme, and “Christmas” is insufficient. Bamburgh has already seen A Christmas Through Time, Myths and Legends, and the Twelve Days of Christmas. This year it’s fairy tales, and the team set off to Amsterdam to place a special order at “one of Europe’s biggest Christmas suppliers.” (“Seven thousand metres,” says a representative, “of pure Christmas.”) You can imagine LED bulbs flashing red and green and blue in the producer’s head. Think of the misadventures. We marvel at high ceilings, descend claustrophobic flights of stairs, listen to the quirkiest string arrangements in the stock library. The decorations arrive from the Netherlands on a wheeled pallet and promptly slip off onto the driveway. How will the team fit a welded beanstalk through a side door designed for a horse?
We go to Hartlepool to look at a 200-year-old warship so the team can mould a foam replica. Two of the castle guides have a conversation that sounds like something from Lewis Carroll. Baubles, says one, must hang in odd numbers – threes, fives or sevens. In a scene vaguely reminiscent of Rembrandt’s Night Watch, the team hoists a glittery skull-and-crossbones to the ceiling of the Great Hall. The castle parrot coos softly at the camera; his owners come downstairs and gape at the big reveal. The music changes. It is as if we have abandoned the lighthearted movements of a John Williams Harry Potter soundtrack for the high-suspense finale of a John Williams Harry Potter soundtrack. Jack on the Beanstalk is really an Action Man. There are foil poinsettias on the banisters; luxuriating against one wall of the castle’s Victorian sitting-room is a heinous painted mermaid who looks like something from Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. Visitors shuffle their way around and proclaim their admiration to the camera.
Maybe Bambergh won’t crumble after all. The thought of it is nearly sad; Channel 4 has wrested the castle and its family from its rightful seat in the Gothic tradition. When you look at it post-makeover you begin to understand why there are very few event designers, fairy lights, and plaster mermaids employed in the novels of Walpole. Pageantry and decline do not mix. For about 15 minutes we had novelistic continuity on primetime television; you could stay on the sofa just after the news and feel asset-rich and cash-poor, like someone in a novel. That, in the end, was the only very British thing about A Very British Christmas.
[Further reading: Christmas trees aren’t anti-Christian]
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