Mary Berry’s Country House Secrets review: like a subpar Victoria Wood sketch
School nativity plays contain more natural dialogue than this ill-judged look around ‘the real Downt..
School nativity plays contain more natural dialogue than this ill-judged look around ‘the real Downton Abbey’. Plus: Michelle Dockery trades Downton for dusty prairies in the bleak new western Godless
Much as I imagine vicars stand immobile in the shadow of the cloister all week until it is time to glide noiselessly up to the pulpit to deliver the Sunday sermon, I have always envisioned Mary Berry being laid gently away in a velvet case – or possibly popped on a plinth under a small glass dome – between programmes. And now, after a nice long rest since the end of her Bake Off time, she has been taken out, primped, buffed with a little lavender-scented polish and set before us again. This time it is in a four-part series called Mary Berry’s Country House Secrets(BBC One). It is technically a documentary, I suppose, but what it much more closely resembles is a sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub par Victoria Wood sketch.
Last night she spent a week being shown round Highclere Castle – or, to give it its formal title, the Real Downton Abbey – by the eighth Earl and Countess of Carnarvon and seven spaniels. “A breed,” Mary intoned gravely in voiceover, “which originally came from Spain. Hence the name ‘spaniels’.” Up and down the land, there are nativity plays being prepared that will contain more natural dialogue.
