Television
Christmas rave
Martyn Harris
People who are fundamentally con- tent,' according to Quentin Crisp (Camp Christmas, Channel Four, Friday, 10 p.m.) 'have no need of festivity.' I take this as my motto for birthdays, Christmas, and all other occasions of compulsory jollity, which is why the Harris family spends its Christ- mas at Newport Pagnell motorway service area, feasting on Jubilee turkey sandwiches and Irn Bru. Visit enough relatives at Christmas and you can avoid actually spending Christmas with any of them. You also miss most of the television pro- grammes; not that you'd notice. The Com- plete Story Of Tina Turner, the final episode of Stark, a special hour-long edition of Keeping Up Appearances, the annual celebrity edition of Telly Addicts. . . zzz. Missing Christmas is also one of the great advantages of being gay, I'd have thought. But no: apparently the dears have been feeling left out of things, resulting in this 'fresh and fun take on the traditional family Christmas' featuring the likes of Anthony Sher and Simon Callow (as the pantomime horse/cow), Quentin Crisp as Scrooge, Stephen Fry as Santa Claus and Julian Clary as Whitney the Reindeer who has been thrown out of Santa's team 'because the jingle of my nipple rings inter- fered with the sleigh bells'. The show set out `to turn on its head the conventional idea of Christmas as a purely heterosexual experience', though I must say I'd never thought of it as any kind of sexual experi- ence. Fiscal, culinary, alimentary, anthro- pological, and cloacal perhaps — but hardly sexual. And, in any case, is it possi- ble for anything to be 'camp' which actually labels itself as such? I haven't read my Susan Sontag recently, but I thought camp was to do with irony and ambiguity rather than in-your-face self-advertisement.
It boded badly but turned out rather fun, as a gentle parody of the old-style Pen), Como Christmas show, complete with log
cabin, blazing fire and choruses of 'Winter Wonderland' and 'Favourite Things'. The climax (000ps!) was Stephen Fry as Santa, entering the cabin with a booming 'Hello girls and. . . er. . . girls'. It was his busy
night, he explained, but he liked to take a 'fag break' at about this time. Usually he'd be in his grotto, 'drilling my young assis- tants' but tonight was his night for 'sliding down shafts all over the country'. Ho, ho ho. In Chef! on BBC1 (Friday, 10.10 p.m.), Lenny Henry as Gareth Blackstock, the irascible genius of the Manoir Anglais, was sizing up live turkeys for the Christmas lunch. 'I hate seeing ingredients walking around,' his wife Janice (Caroline Lee Johnson) complained. 'It's very unsettling to meet your supper when it still has the capacity to respond. They are free-range aren't they?'
'Free-range?' says Gareth, 'They have coops with en suite, they eat organic food, they sleep under non-allergenic duvets, they take oil of evening primrose and worry about their deltoids. This is turkey heaven.' He buys the lot, his guests cancel en masse, and he ends up 'with more turkeys to unload than Michael Winner'. The comedy of Chef! is unusual in that it is based not on situations or repartee, but almost entirely on the comic polemic of Gareth, with his baroque accretion of hyperbole. When Mrs Courtenay, his herb provider, sends in a stiff bill he explodes: 'This is the sort of money which rarely changes hands without the aid of a gun and a getaway car. There are names in Lloyd's sitting at home in darkened rooms with loaded revolvers who owe more than this! You are charging me so much money you could afford to eat in my restaurant!' It is good stuff but a nar- row base for a comedy, and I hope it is back in the New Year, when I will be too.
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