This Christmas promises to be a distanced, unusual one. At least our expectations of family togetherness can’t be dashed in the usual episodes of arguments and hangovers, because there won’t be any family togetherness. What kind of Christmas story can match this socially dysfunctional year? We need to cast aside snowy rural idylls (Miss Read’s Village Christmas), hammy penance (A Christmas Carol) and the corpses (A Maigret Christmas) and turn to the refreshingly dysfunctional reprobates who provide the raw ingredients of Nancy Mitford’s 1932 novella Christmas Pudding.
Sixteen characters are thrown together in the Cotswolds for several farcical days over the Christmas period. As one would expect with any Christmas pudding, there are juicy bits, a dash of pure alcohol, one or two indigestible problems and a couple of nuts. Among the ingredients is Paul Fotheringay, a priggish writer who frequently wishes he were dead.
Then there is the wonderful creation of Amabelle Fortescue, the ageing doyenne of Chelsea’s demi-monde. She hires the unfortunately-named Mulberrie Farm for Christmas and invites an unappealing married couple, Walter and Sally Monteath, who freeload off everyone while neglecting their infant daughter. Nearby at the local stately home, Compton Bobbin, Lady Bobbin reigns. A riot of Wodehousian spinsterhood, she hunts foxes and hates socialists with equal passion. Her son, Sir Roderick Bobbin, enjoys his own account at Cartier and classes himself as a sexual sophisticate even though he is still an Eton schoolboy.
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