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Contributed to The Yorker's Christmas Advent Calendar by the TV section.
Review: My Big Fat Gypsy Christmas (Channel 4)
10pm on Christmas Day, my stomach growls at me menacingly. Drunk on a potent cocktail of festive spirit and freshly unwrapped alcohol, and fit to burst with turkey and trimmings, I’m staring woozily into the glittering abyss of a tin of Quality Street. Dear old Nanny Glad, shaking its contents encouragingly, makes the sweets dance nauseatingly in front of me. My Big Fat Gypsy Christmas is the televisual equivalent to this moment: despite everything about it telling you it’s too much, as it stands there sparkling before you, everything in its rainbow wrapping, you can’t help but be drawn in.
But then Christmas is a time of too much, a time of overs: over-eating, over-spending, over-indulging, overdrafts. If one programme is going to capture the excesses of the Festive season, it is probably going to be My Big Fat Gypsy Christmas. For just like its parent programme, My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding – surely Channel 4’s biggest success of the year – it showcased just how over-the-top the nuptials of the traveller community could be. Only at Christmas. A not so special Christmas special, if you will.
The first half of the programme focussed largely on seventeen-year-old bride Lavinia, who opted for the traditional mammoth-sized dress. Lavinia’s weighed fifteen stone and consisted of twenty underskirts. “She has two nappies on her hips to protect her,” dress-maker Thelma revealed – talk about pampering the bride. The protective aids might have been put to a different use later, when her husband-to-be Edward arrived bladdered from the pub an hour late. She will have been sad to find her efforts bested later in the programme by Charlene, whose dress used over a mile of material.
Later we met young Jacinta, who was seen travelling to her first Holy Communion by limousine. If anyone was concerned that the nine-year-old, in a huge dress covered in over a thousand white diamonds, with matching diamond-encrusted eyelashes to boot, would be over-dressed, they needn’t have worried. Jacinta’s young guests filed into the Church like a line of meringues, dressed in their over-sized Coco Chanel dresses, and bejewelled to within an inch of their lives. The traveller community may be a close-knit one, but they don’t shy away from a little competition.
Other scenes provided less to gawp at. Watching Josie and Swanley, a pair of newlyweds from earlier in the series, prepare for their first Christmas together wasn’t particularly exciting. Swanley didn’t want to be on their Christmas shopping trip and neither did I. Even when they later went to find out the sex of their first child, when asked how he was feeling, all Father-to-be Swanley could muster was a unconcerned ‘yeah, not too bad’. Well, he is a geezer after all.
As with the original series, it’s hard to know what to make of My Big Fat Gypsy Christmas. What is essentially an hour long ogle-fest offers odd moments of poignancy, such as when Paddy Doherty visits his relatives’ graves on Christmas day or when traveller mum Martina ponders whether she wants a different life for her daughter, but these are quickly lost amongst the tan and tiaras.
So as I sit there watching Paddy bumbling around offering a tin of sweets to the kids on his site, am I laughing with him or at him? “Take more,” he barks at some unsuspecting neighbours, full of overzealous Christmas cheer. The tin shakes expectantly. Maybe just one more.
For yesterday's Advent article, click here.
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