A giant cake and the conga: a wedding fit for the Queen
This year’s sudden spate of royal documentaries has arrived on a tide of copycat marketing. If you liked The Crown (back on Netflix in December), you’ll also like this, and this, and this. A bit like the nine-foot cake cooked up for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth, these programmes contain a precise set of ingredients: sugar, spice, some rum. But the binding agent is a tub of the oiliest oil. In the case of
A Very Royal Wedding (ITV), this was supplied by Alexander Armstrong, who glued together the story of our monarch’s nuptials 70 years ago with lashings of deference.
“The wedding of the century”, as he billed it, was a shaft of sunshine in knackered post-war Britain. The splendid colour footage of the Household Cavalry half-cantering in the November gloaming had glamorous charm. But colour here mainly bloomed in the poignant memories of those who made the day possible: a cavalryman, a seamstress, a silk weaver from Dunfermline.
“It’s the only special thing that ever happened in my life really,” said Barbara Unwin, who sewed the button holes on the wedding dress and was invited to the Abbey, before remembering to mention her own special wedding day.
The particulars of cake-making and flower-arranging were diverting, and some of the royal gossip was fun. Who knew that the newlyweds had to come back halfway through their honeymoon to reshoot their official wedding photograph, the bride having mislaid her bouquet on the big day?
The programme worked best as oral history. Prince Michael of Kent stiffly watched his carefree five-year-old self perform as pageboy. Sheila Hancock recalled that the groom was “such a dish”. Jilly Cooper agreed, in triplicate: “gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous.”
Joan Collins framed the wedding as one more Hollywood romance for her scrapbook and imagined the bride as another star called Betty. “We all loved our Beddy Grables and Beddy Huttons,” she explained in that mid-atlantic accent of hers. More cut-glass recollections came courtesy of the gloriously named Lady Myra Butter, who two nights before the wedding attended a party at the palace. “I think,” she said, “it must have been the king who led the cornga line.” How we’ll miss those voices when they’re gorn.
Her shows have had different names over the years. Nigella Bites, Nigella Feasts, the superlatively titled Nigellissima. But they’re all basically Carry On Nigella. Mumsiness in perfect slap and a silk dressing gown. Double entendres served in dollops and firm peaks. You always expect Kenneth Williams to leap out of the fridge and pull an “ooh matron” face.
The new one’s Nigella: At My Table (BBC Two). Note that important colon. Nigella’s not at your table. She’s possibly not at hers either. When she opened a cupboard door to inspect her collection of favourite baking utensils, one of them fell out and clattered to the floor. The set dresser probably got a bonus for adding authenticity, while I always wonder if the people she cooks for aren’t booked via a casting agency. All we know is that it’s filmed in London, near Chelsea, by the look of the nocturnal cityscape filler shots. (Picture, if you can, Nigella getting out and about like other TV chefs, and going to Nuneaton or Redcar or Barnstaple. It’s literally unimaginable.)
The recipes, however, all looked breezily doable if sometimes requiring ingredients that don’t, as it were, grow on trees. Best of luck tracking down black-skinned purple-flesh vitelotte potatoes. And where, aside from raiding Nigella’s groaning chili shelf, do you source Aleppo pepper? Not, nowadays, Aleppo.
This was the star ingredient of a breakfast known, thanks to some sort of geopolitical mix-up, as Turkish eggs. Maybe Syrian eggs would have looked insensitive? Nigella helpfully demonstrated how to achieve a trim poached egg that doesn’t colonise the pot like an albino octopus. You’ll need a tea strainer, a lemon, and a pleased-as-punch smirk.
I’d be wary following her measurements too faithfully. If that’s “a little oil”, Nigella, how much is a lot? A splosh of white vermouth, to put vim in her chicken thighs, looked like half a quart. Does she do these things on autopilot now? Like her recipe for emergency brownies, she’s trotted out half this script before. Perhaps that’s why she keeps breaking into Italian, as if searching for new things to say. Nice dishes, but more is less.
A Very Royal Wedding ★★★ Nigella: At My Table ★★