Festive costume drama
IDON’T know if you’ve spotted this, but TV historian LucyWorsley likes to dress up. Whatever era she happens to be covering in that living-history style of hers, give her half a chance to don some period clobber and she’s in there like a shot.
I’m hoping one day she’ll make a show about a 70s Christmas.
I can just see her prancing around on Top Of The Pops in a Womble suit.
But for now we must settle for
A MERRY TUDOR CHRISTMAS WITH LUCYWORSLEY (BBC2,
9pm), taking us back to the Yuletide festivities of HenryVIII’s time. It’s splendid stuff, mind you – typically colourful, frequently fascinating and sure to be as annoying as ever to history buffs of a more earnest persuasion.
Some of it reveals the roots of Christmas customs that remain to this day – most notably, the one that involves consuming three times one’s own body weight at a single sitting, albeit in this case by pigging out on a boar – while other bits suggest that the Tudors were awfully strange.
Take their idea of a Christmas party, for example, overseen by a chap called the Lord of Misrule.
Jesters, stilt walkers, revellers in animal heads. Looks dreadful.
Elsewhere, for anyone who’s never watched even a single episode of Coronation Street,
I can highly recommend CORONATION STREET AT CHRISTMAS (ITV, 8.30pm).
With contributions from cast members past and present, it looks back over Corrie’s 59-year history and recalls its biggest Yuletide storylines.Which means it’s a handy way to familiarise yourself with six decades of brawls, bust-ups and betrayals, of murders, maimings and some other word starting with an M that I can’t think of right now, in less than an hour.
By the end you’ll be an expert. And if ever you need to brush up again, just tune in to the follow-up. By my calculations, that’ll be in December 2079 – and I bet Ken Barlow will still be there.
Finally, CELEBRITY FLIRTY DANCING FOR STAND UP TO CANCER finds Ashley Banjo choreographing routines for
Loose Women’s Coleen Nolan and Made In Chelsea’s Miles Someone-or-Other.
Each will perform with a person of a non-celeb persuasion, in Miles’s case a glamorous fitness vlogger called Steph.
Total strangers, meeting for the first time just seconds before the music kicks in, Miles and Steph launch into what’s by far the steamiest dance of the series.
And once it’s over, what does Miles make of it all?
“Her lips caught my eye straight away!” he exclaims.
Oh dear, Miles.Well, I’m sure the bruising will heal in a day or two.