Bridgerton leaves the BBC’s Call The Midwife looking rather weak, writes CHRISTOPHER STEVENS

He blames the coronavirus like anything else, but 2020 will be remembered as the year the next Christmas took over last Christmas – and anyone who had access to Netflix gave up their old Aunt Beeb.

With the new poleaxed productions of successive blockades, BBC1’s festive fare was at least uneven.

We got 75 minutes of Strictly highlights, a remake of Blankety Blank hosted by Bradley Walsh and until late in the evening he returned to rehearsals in The Vicar of Dibley.

But streaming giant Netflix showed us how to make Christmas properly, serving the biggest production of the year – eight one-hour episodes of a romantic epic set 200 years ago, all breasts rising and dollars . It’s imagined brilliantly, at a colossal expense.

No one knows how this was possible when terrestrial television struggled to fill its program. Probably deep in their lair in Netflix Castle, a thousand crazy scientists have worked hard all year. At midnight lightning struck, and their creation came to life: Franken-Austen!

Bridgerton (Netflix) is built from Pride and Prejudice corsets, Sense and Sensibility petticoats and Northanger Abbey wigs.

There are ribbons, bows, silk and satin from every scene that Saint Jane ever wrote. Each shot looks more sumptuous than the last.

And it’s completely painful. Although Bridgerton is a costume drama down to the top of her lace umbrellas, her historic appointment would be a serious violation of the Commercial Descriptions Act.

In this version of Georgian England, the aristocrats kidnap the actresses from Hyde Park before heading to the palace to see their sisters presented to the monarch. If the queen likes the appearance of a girl, he descends from her throne and gives a kiss on the forehead as a sign of royal favor.

This is the clue for the eligible bachelor battalions to knock on the young lady’s door every afternoon and propose to them one by one, until they give in and agree to marry one of them.

Queen Charlotte, by the way, is black – played by Golda Rosheuvel. So is the frowning hero, the Duke of Hastings (King-Jean Page), as well as a sizable minority of the nobility, some with dreadlocks.

Since this is a galloping fantasy, it makes no difference if it is an inaccurate description of England under George IV: the characters do not pay any attention to the race and do not need us.

Every piece of the plot is taken from Jane Austen. A girl (Phoebe Dynevor) with countless sisters and a mother (Pride and Prejudice) discovers that she is annoyingly attracted to a man she can’t stand (still Pride and Prejudice). Meanwhile, a poor cousin (Ruby Barker) comes to stay with her rich relatives and finds that she is much smarter and more handsome than they are (Mansfield Park).

The plots deepen when all the characters visit Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens (hang, this is from the Vanity Fair by William Thackeray).

It is a cartoon version of classical literature, in which the heroine complains: “You have no idea what it means to be a woman. How would you feel if your whole life was reduced to a single moment. That’s why I was raised. That’s all I am, I have no other value. If I can’t find a husband, I won’t have value.

Feminism does not exist then in the land of fantasy.

Because there is not enough sex in the original Austen to suit the Netflix audience, the young Anthony Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey) spends every available moment beating his mistress. We see his ass more than his face.

Julie Andrews, once a very different kind of Christmas star as singing nun Maria in The Sound Of Music, provides the narrative.

It is a gossip of society, Lady Whistledown, who sees every scandal and details it in her slanderous pamphlets. If you’re old-fashioned enough to crave a suitable nun for Christmas, then Sister Julienne (Jenny Agutter) still looked brave in Call the Midwife (BBC1).

However, this perennial post-turkey fare looks as blurred as an old paper chain, along with the brilliant Netflix nonsense.

Trixie (Helen George) hasn’t found love since I last saw her. Her godmother (a presence felt on stage, but never seen, like Arfur Daley’s wife) worries that she will be “left on the shelf” and orders her to try a marriage office – the 1965 equivalent of internet dating.

That gave Trixie an excuse to sit in the hotel’s tea rooms with a mink wrapped around his shoulders as he smoked nervously.

However, it is difficult to ask – no facial hair, no drinkers and certainly no Germans. The Munich Beer Festival must be her idea of ​​purgatory.

I found out that the doctor’s receptionist, Miss Higgins (Georgie Glen), is a spiritualist and that she has fond memories of a Harvey Wallbanger cocktail she drank in 1926. Maybe she was a flapper.

Nurse Crane (Linda Bassett) wanted to run away with the traveling circus and sing on the high trapeze, “with legs as long as ribbons.” Ringmaster Peter Davison let her go, even though his character had lung cancer and was on his own.

Everything was a little weak. Call the usual midwife to deliver excited farmers and now she can handle no more than a faint smile. If you decided to abandon the tradition and spend Christmas while enjoying yourself online, no one could criticize you.