Have we lost the true meaning of Christmas?
One thing in life is certain: if a new food series tickles the nation’s tastebuds it will soon turn up on the menu again. So it was with Back in Time for Christmas, a festive follow-up to BBC Two’s Back
in Time for Dinner – which earlier this year saw the very amenable and telegenic Robshaw family from London endure all sorts of temporal and culinary shifts while exploring the evolution of Britain’s diverse food culture.
Here the focus was on the changing fare and fads of the festive season, with parents Brandon and Rochelle, teenagers Miranda and Rosalind, and 11-year-old Fred dressing up and playing house across six very different decades of Christmas past.
It was not all Jingle Bells and party poppers. As mum Rochelle was quick to point out: “Christmas makes me feel stressed. The best bit is when it’s all over.” Because whichever era the family landed in, she was always stuck in the kitchen while the rest of the household got on with the party. And it wasn’t just the food preparation that unnerved her, but the ever-greater excess, too.
As the family progressed through the austerity of the Forties, the cosiness of the Fifties and the erupting materialism of the Sixties (tonight’s closing part brings us up to the millennium) we got a palpable sense of those times. In particular of the optimism and prosperity that grew after the end of the war, when living conditions improved as rapidly as the food.
Retrospect brought some interesting moments. Fake snow made from powdered asbestos – a popular decoration in the Forties, it seems – drew understandably horrified gasps. As did the gender stereotyping presents, and the insidiousness of gifts such as candy cigarettes and chocolate smoking sets for children to ape parents’ bad habits. Indeed, for all that stuffed ox heart might have been a rare festive meat treat in wartime Britain, or spam, olive and anchovy might once have been considered fashionable bedfellows on a cocktail stick, Back in Time for Christmas was not really about food at all.
Rather it revealed very clearly how, in the three decades following the war, the emphasis of Christmas shifted fundamentally, from a quiet day of family rest and recreation to the beginnings of the full-on consumerist extravaganza we know today. Not the most original of findings, perhaps, but telescoped and time-capsuled entertainingly, it was a point well made.
Petrolhead Guy Martin, meanwhile, was on a journey of discovery. Or that was the
idea. In Our Guy in Latvia (Channel 4) he went in search of the story of his late grandfather, Walter Kidals, a Latvian who fought on the German side in the Second World War yet ended up moving to Lincolnshire and putting down roots.
I have always liked Martin’s gritty, playful style of presentation and enjoy watching anything he makes about machines, whether it’s to do with his ongoing obsession with speed and motorbikes, or, as in the
recent Guy Martin: Last Flight of the
Vulcan, planes. But here the magic was missing.
It didn’t help that the makers of this film clearly had the BBC’s Who
Do You Think You Are? in mind, but possessed neither the resources nor the production skills to match it. The result was confused at best, the camera too much on Martin buzzing around the Latvian countryside in a vintage Lada, or wittering on over wartime archive footage about a period of history of which he seemed to know very little.
The material not only lacked depth but the film’s scattered focus meant that grandpa Walter, the man, got lost along the way. A reconstructed skirmish between the Latvian Legion he served in and a Red Army platoon added nothing but smoke and bangs. A lengthy digression at a hotel where guests could experience the horrors of the postwar Russian occupation was still more gratuitous, as Walter never returned to Latvia after the war and was settled in Grimsby by 1947. How he got there, other than as one of thousands of displaced persons taken into Britain, was never clear.
All of which was a shame as there seemed to be a genuinely fascinating tale buried in the muddle. It just never made it out. Maybe one day
Who Do You Think You Are? will take up the baton and we might get the full story.