Welcome to Europe’s biggest – and most demented – Christmas show
Thursford Christmas Spectacular Thursford, Nr Fakenham, Norfolk
It started in the Silver Jubilee year as a carol concert, helping raise awareness and cash for a collection of salvaged steam engines and vintage organs. Four decades on, the event that runs at the Thursford Collection (the name given to that anorakish, artefact-based attraction in the Norfolk village of Thursford), is billed as Europe’s biggest Christmas theatrical extravaganza.
As directed since its inception by John Cushing (son of George, who founded the Collection at his family farm), it surely must be the most bonkers. Searchlights criss-cross the night sky, visible miles away, colliding thoughts of Bethlehem and the Blitz as you approach. Some 130,000 people are expected to visit this remote spot between now and Christmas Eve.
Almost everything that could be wrapped in fairy lights has been thus attired. As part of the mood-setting, a large curio-stuffed shed resembling the London Transport Museum has been specially made-over to steer visitors into a realm of hallucinogenic cuteness. Entrants (ideally children here) amble past eerie animatronic polar bears, penguins, elves, teddy bears and the like towards a present-stocked Santa’s Grotto. It’s a mixture of unexpected restraint (the retail side discreetly tempts the captive audience) and all the demented fun of the fair. A carousel nestles within the dedicated 1400-seater auditorium, housed in a converted barn, with a stage as wide as a railway platform is long.
Dickens, I think, would have loved the big-hearted, kitsch excess of it all, and a knees-up rendition of Mr Fezziwig’s Ball (from the 1994 musical version of A Christmas Carol) duly forms a first-half climax. But that’s not before you’ve witnessed a chorus-line of scantily clad showgirls in tiaras and feather headdresses high-kicking to There’s No Business Like Show Business. Then there’s “antipodist” Vanessa Alvarez – equally exposed, and positioned upside-down – flipping a guitar with her feet in time to a violin rendition of Coldplay’s Viva La Vida. Oh, and a round of The Lonely Goatherd performed by lederhosenclad cartoonish figures.
Camp male a cappella singers? They got ’em. Kilted blokes playing bagpipes? Yup. Whooping cancan girls and military-precision Riverdance jigging? Tick. Expert organist Phil Kelsall goes bananas with his fingers across the tiered keyboard of a vintage Mighty Wurlitzer. There’s a variety compère from Essex (Paul Eastwood) who glides between cruise-ship pleasantries and Comedy Store snark. Just when you think it’s getting too tinselly, things are brought down to earth by candle-hugging carollers bearing beatific smiles. Little Britain’s Got Talent? Yes, but the singing is sublime, the choreography first class, the costume-switches indefatigable.
It won’t win awards for boosting diversity or combating gender-stereotyping, and killjoys might protest at the auditorium fly-by of startled-looking white doves that concludes the three-hour traffic. It’s altogether absolutely too much but I wouldn’t have missed this supersized helping of showbiz sugar for the world.