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

Blame coronavirus like everything else, but 2020 will be remembered as the year that Christmas Future replaced Christmas Past – and anyone who had access to Netflix gave up poor Aunt Beeb.

With new productions poleaxado by successive blockades, BBC1’s festive tariff was irregular, at best.

We got 75 minutes of Strictlylights, a remake of Blankety Blank presented by Bradley Walsh and by the end of the night he was back with reps from The Vicar of Dibley.

But the streaming giant Netflix showed us how to make Christmas properly, serving its biggest production of the year – eight-hour episodes of a romantic epic set 200 years ago, all with heaving breasts and bold dollars. It is richly imagined, at a colossal cost.

How that was possible when terrestrial TV struggled to fill its programming, nobody knows. Probably, deep in his lair at Netflix Castle, a thousand mad scientists worked all year. At midnight, lightning struck and his creation came to life: Franken-Austen!

Bolted from pieces of romantic Regency novels, Bridgerton (Netflix) is built with the Corsets of Pride and Prejudice, the petticoats of Reason and Sensitivity and the wigs of Northanger Abbey.

There are ribbons, bows, silks and satins for every scene that Saint Jane wrote. Each photo looks more sumptuous than the previous one.

And it is quite doolally. Although Bridgerton is a fantasy drama down to the edges of its lace parasols, to call it historic would be a gross violation of the Commercial Description Act.

In this version of Georgian England, aristocrats raped actresses in Hyde Park before rushing to the palace to see their sisters introduced to the monarch. If the queen likes the look of a girl, she comes down from the throne and kisses her forehead as a sign of royal favor.

This is the cue for battalions of qualified singles to knock on the young woman’s door every afternoon and take turns in marriage, until she gives in and agrees to marry one of them.

Queen Charlotte, by the way, is black – played by Golda Rosheuvel. The same is true of the sullen hero, the Duke of Hastings (Rege-Jean Page), as well as a sizable minority of the nobility, some with dreads.

Since all of this is a rampant fantasy, it makes no difference whether this is an inaccurate representation of England under George IV: the characters pay no attention to the race and neither do we need us.

Each plot fragment was stolen from Jane Austen. A girl (Phoebe Dynevor) with countless sisters and a bossy mother (Pride and Prejudice) finds that she is irritatingly attracted to a man she cannot stand (still Pride and Prejudice). Meanwhile, a poor cousin (Ruby Barker) comes to stay with her wealthy relatives and discovers that she is much more intelligent and beautiful than them (Mansfield Park).

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

It is a cartoon version of classic literature, where the heroine laments: ‘You have no idea what it is to be a woman. How does it feel to have a lifetime reduced to a single moment. That’s all I was created for. That’s all I am, I have no other value. If I cannot find a husband, I will be useless. ‘

Feminism does not exist in fantasy land, then.

Since there is not enough sex in the original Austen to cater to the Netflix audience, young Anthony Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey) spends every available moment helping his lover. We see your ass more than your face.

Julie Andrews, who was once a very different type of Christmas star, like singer nun Maria in The Sound Of Music, provides the narration.

She is a society gossip, Lady Whistledown, who sees every scandal and details it in her defamatory pamphlets. If you’re old-fashioned enough to yearn for a real nun at Christmas, then there was Sister Julienne (Jenny Agutter) still bravely working on Call the Midwife (BBC1).

However, this perennial post-turkey fare is looking as faded as an old paper chain, alongside Netflix’s shiny bullshit.

Trixie (Helen George) has not found love since the last time we saw her. Her godmother (a presence that seemed off-stage but never seen, like Arfur Daley’s wife) fears she will be “left on the shelf” and orders her to try a marriage agency – the 1965 equivalent of Internet dating.

This gave Trixie an excuse to sit in the hotel’s tea rooms with a mink coat around his shoulders while he smoked nervously.

She’s hard to please – without facial hair, without drinkers and definitely without Germans. The Munich beer festival must be your idea of ​​purgatory.

We heard that the doctor’s receptionist, Miss. Higgins (Georgie Glen), is a spiritualist and has fond memories of a Harvey Wallbanger cocktail he drank in 1926. Perhaps she was a flapper.

Nurse Crane (Linda Bassett) wanted to get away with the traveling circus and perform on the high trapeze, ‘with legs the size of ribbons’. Master of ceremonies Peter Davison allowed her to try, although her character had lung cancer and he was feeling bad himself.

Everything was a little pale. Call the Midwife used to deliver emotional barnstormers and now it achieves nothing more than a weak smile. If you decide to abandon tradition and spend Christmas having fun online, no one will be able to criticize you.