TV & Radio
December BBC Two
All the must-see/hear programmes
Even by Lucy Worsley’s standards, it’s quite an audacious exercise in dressing-up as she dons royal garb to moonlight as Henry VIII. It’s the prelude to tucking into a Christmas feast that includes a stuffed boar’s head, served by a choir singing the praises of the dish – which may not have come as much consolation to the boar.
More seriously, this is all a way to show how our forebears celebrated Christmas 500 years ago, and in turn to discover which customs we’ve forgotten and which, albeit often in altered forms, have endured to the present day. Trick-or-treating at Halloween, it turns out, has its roots in a spooky Christmas custom.
The kitchens at Hampton Court Palace are central to the show as, with food historian Annie Gray on hand to ensure authenticity, Lucy helps prepare two royal feasts, meals that include Tudor versions of mince pies and Christmas cake. Away from the table, she casts her eyes over a scroll from 1532, from which we learn that Henry’s gift list that year included a spear, given to him by Anne Boleyn, and a pair of greyhounds. Lucy also witnesses a forerunner of the Royal Variety Show, featuring swordplay and dancing stags, and joins carol singers to warble through a song that the king wrote himself.
As to how ordinary people spent the yuletide season, the pub would have featured, an excuse for her to quaff some historically authentic booze at a 900-year-old inn. And of course no Tudor Christmas would have been complete without the Lord of Misrule temporarily inverting the usual social order.
Over on BBC Four, there’s more from the joint chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces in Lucy Worsley’s Christmas Carol Odyssey, in which she traces the stories behind some of the nation’s most popular seasonal singalongs. It’s a history that encompasses the pagan fertility ritual of the wassail, the Puritans trying to ban Christmas entirely, and the subversive undercurrents to some carols, evident in the way that there’s a coded message of support for the Jacobite cause in O Come, All Ye Faithful.
Closer to our own time, Lucy considers how Silent Night, first performed in Austria in 1818, came to be associated with the unofficial Christmas truce of 1914.