The Sweet Makers
BBC Two★★☆☆☆
The Windsors
Channel 4★★★★☆
One cannot accuse The Sweet Makers of artificially sweetening the story of confectionery. At one startling moment, two of the professional confectioners — done up in Tudor servant dress to make more authentic their preparation of a sugar banquet — are instructed to create candied roses “as a cure for gonorrhoea”; and before the 9pm watershed as well. Not even Mel and Sue on Bake Off could have got away with that line, and their highbrow equivalents, the food historian Annie Gray and the social historian Emma Dabiri, were not asked to deliver the instruction. We just saw poor Paul and Diana toiling away in the clap clinic — I mean medieval kitchen.
The producers, in any case, had not quite nailed their format, which was Tudor Monastery Farm (Ruth Goodman was thanked on the credits) mixed with, as I suggested, a non-competitive strain of The Great British Bake Off. Would the roof on the sugar house built for their guests stay on? It did! The banquet was a triumph! High fives! But whereas Bake Off lets you get to know the participants, there was no time to become familiar with Paul, Cynthia, Diana and Andy. The little jokes about Paul’s sexuality, for instance, as he worked on a marzipan bosom mould, seemed somehow unearned.
Other sequences were horribly stagey. Cynthia was “spotted” by Gray in the courtyard feeling a bit “lightheaded”. Ah yes, Gray said, carbon monoxide poisoning was a common risk of medieval kitchens, and so began a lecture.
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These are minor matters, however. What was not was a decent sequence in which Dabiri reported from Barbados on 17th-century sugar production and slavery. Dabiri, who announced that she was part-Irish and part-Nigerian, was understandably affected. It did not, however, prevent her on her return from reducing Cynthia, who is also black, to tears on a stairwell as she read an account of conditions from a contemporary historian.
Paul, who was also there for the horror story, said it made him feel uncomfortable about the origins of his trade. It made me feel uncomfortable, but about the programme, its disconnect between form and content. The fascist leader Oswald Mosley’s widow, Diana, was on Desert Island Discs nearly 30 years ago. Understandably some objected to such an honour being bestowed on this Holocaust quibbler. As one objector said, if Hitler turned up you would want the BBC to interview him, but not on Down Your Way.
How sweet it is, however, to watch the shamelessly nonsensical sitcom The Windsors. This episode took us to Sandringham, where Kate confessed to Wills (Hugh Skinner is brilliant as the prince who cannot even command his vowels) that she disapproved of shooting, although “as a young gypsy” she loved nothing better than trapping hedgehogs.
In a garret, it turned out, Vicki Pepperdine’s Mrs Danvers-like Anne had been keeping Charles’s secret twin, as stupid as his brother, but, unlike him, a “super-empath”. He had to die, of course. His last words were that he loved Charles, to which the heir to the throne responded: “And best wishes to you in all your endeavours.” The show is genius.
andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk