Like a schmaltzy movie you’ve seen a thousand times, the familiar becomes acceptable, even desirable, at Christmas time. That’s lucky for Channel 4’s Christmas at Castle Howard because this was a type of documentary that’s become a genre in itself: to whit, a whopper of a stately home has to earn its keep in the modern world somehow or other. Usually it involves building an adventure playground and upgrading the café.
Christmas at Castle Howard was basically a sales brochure for the castle’s Christmas in Narnia experience. This, on enquiry, still has tickets available, which might be because once you’ve watched an hour-long documentary showing how the experience was put together, and then followed cameras along a quarter mile of corridors and in to the sumptuous great hall to see the tree, and Aslan, and the Wardrobe, you’ve basically had the experience.
The programme did, at least, try to give viewers something extra by utilising all of the best tricks from the factual TV playbook. Interest was piqued for young and old with some extracts reminding us that Castle Howard appeared both in Brideshead Revisited on ITV in 1981 as well as in Bridgerton, Netflix’s Regency romp. A clock was arbitrarily set ticking with an on-screen countdown to opening day.
An ensemble cast was thrown together including “Nick” aka the Hon Nicholas Howard (the second son of Lord Howard of Henderskelfe), who liked making ooh-er jokes about erecting his massive tree; and designer Adrian, who confessed several times that he loved a bauble. And whenever things flagged the voice-over would lob in a dazzling fact or two (all of which seemed curiously decimal, now I think about it – 100 years to build! 100 rooms! Running costs of £10 million a year! Ten minutes to throw all this stuff together!)
In short, there was plenty to dazzle and delight. The Narnia experience did open on time and it did look terrific, at least from my vantage point slumped on the sofa. The only problem was if you paused to ask what the point of all of this was. Because there wasn’t one. But at the most wonderful time of the year who would be so churlish?
