Devilled eggs and stabbed duck’s flesh: Nigella goes feral
We are told that there’s no English equivalent of hygge, the Danish concept of cosiness. This is a lie. It is, in fact, Nigella Lawson. And the TV cook will stop at nothing to achieve it. The Nigella: At My Table – Christmas Special (BBC Two) opened with Lawson arriving somewhere quaint, swinging a yellow suitcase like Paddington as she approached the humble pile. In a kitchen lagged with fairy lights, she mixed a Christmas martini and reclined on a sofa decked in a blanket so white and fluffy it could have been a freshly skinned pelt.
“At this time of year, I like to have something sweet in a tin,” Lawson explained as she baked “merookies”, her meringue-cookie hybrid. Herein lies the problem: when does she not? When you cook like every day is Christmas, how do you push the gravy boat out come December? Liberated from the half-hour format and the city, Lawson went feral, and revelled in her favourite kitchen obsessions: tactile squelching, and stabbing things.
She pretended to wield a knife like Norman Bates in Psycho. But her true peccadillos proved subtler. Eggs were furiously devilled, providing a little of the horror suggested by her woodland cabin dining room. She relentlessly stabbed duck flesh with a toothpick to produce “delicate shards of quackling.” She had to force herself to stop; the pleasure was too great.
Sprinkles of edible glitter aside, her Christmas menu looked genuinely convenient. Roast duck and the trimmings could be prepared a day early, and an easy Moroccan stew turned boring veg and spices into an aromatic, carb-rich delight. And because it’s Christmas, At My Table offered a classic but now-rare Lawson treat: the midnight fridge raid. Clad in red silk dressing gown, she combined a whole tub of her salted caramel ice cream, treacle sauce and a crushed merookie. It would be very un-hygge – or un-nigella – to show a bottle of Gaviscon. Laura Snapes
Bancroft (ITV) has had a lucky reprieve. It was originally scheduled to be on ITV Encore, the bespoke channel that has played host to a dribble of original dramas (The Frankenstein Chronicles, Harlots) and an avalanche of re-runs. But the bank heist drama Hatton Garden has been postponed, earning this crime drama a sudden promotion.
Bancroft has all the trappings of a mainstream drama. It opened at the start of the Nineties with a young blonde woman walking breezily down a street to the thuddingly ironic beat of Killer by Seal and Adamski. You could bet your house on her not getting to the first ad break (actually, she was in a pool of her own blood a minute on from the opening credits).
Spooling forward 27 years, there was another young blonde woman, detective Katherine Stevens (Faye Marsay), struggling to be taken seriously at work while fending off the advances of a pushy married colleague. Throw in a cold case and police cover-up, and Bancroft felt scripted in the key of so far so what.
The canvas was blessedly complicated by the fact that Stevens’s immediate superior is also a woman. Detective Superintendent Elizabeth Bancroft, played by Sarah Parish at her most commanding, was tracking down a British-asian drug lord while getting worried about the unsolved murder she worked on. Worked on or committed? Depends what you made of her flashback in which she pictured herself frenziedly stabbing the victim.
Meanwhile, the reckless drug lord blew up the front of Bancroft’s house, which felt implausible, as did Bancroft’s decision to keep calm and carry on as if nothing had happened. “As I’m living in the middle of a crime scene,” she said breezily, “I thought I might as well run it.”
There are some gnarled cameos from Adrian Edmondson, Kenneth Cranham and Art Malik as old-school coppers. And the script, which may yet turn into a conspiracy thriller about the deep state and the miners’ strike, could do with taking a few deep calming breaths. It’s written by Kate Brooke (Mr Selfridge) but its gender politics felt trapped in a time warp. “You have to be better than them every time,” Bancroft counselled Stevens. “When you know you are, that’s when you stick your head above the parapet.” It’s as if Jane Tennison never happened. Nigella: At My Table Christmas Special ★★★★★
Bancroft ★★★