CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV: Professor Lucy dresses up for ding dong merrily on high

Lucy Worsley’s Christmas Carol Odyssey

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The Case Of Sally Channen

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Good Queen Worsley once looked out, on a lowly channel. Wearing gown and feathered cap, corsets made of flannel.

Twinkling went her toes that night, as she danced through hist’ry. What she loves is dressing up, on the Bee Bee Cee-ee-eeee!

Lucy Worsley’s Christmas Carol Odyssey (BBC4) might have been tailored for the royal historian by the Beeb’s costume department, so perfectly did it fit her.

This combination of quirky facts, sentimental tales, courtly grandeur and light flirtation played to all her strengths. She was plainly having a lovely time and, when Professor Lucy is happy, entertaining telly follows naturally.

She went riding through country lanes on a cart drawn by a shire horse, and sighed while a long-haired Austrian balladeer who looked like Jesus strummed Silent Night on his guitar.

With a band of mummers, she went wassailing through an orchard and stuck pieces of toast onto the branches of an apple tree for good luck. ‘There you are, Mr Tree,’ she said, with the innocent solemnity of a little girl who grew up on The Famous Five and Pippi Longstocking books.

Her aim was to trace the stories behind favourite carols, an idea that worked because each one was so different. While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night, we learned, was a Bible verse set to a melody written for King Edward VI, because the young Protestant monarch mistrusted all the old Catholic tunes.

O Come All Ye Faithful was a Jacobite rallying cry in the 18th century, apparently. The ‘king of angels’ whose birth the carol heralds was Bonny Prince Charlie. Who would have guessed?

I had no idea that In The Bleak Midwinter was a collaboration between Gustav ‘The Planets’ Holst and poet Christina Rossetti. Nor did I realise that ‘carol’ was originally a French word meaning ‘song and dance’.

Ding Dong Merrily On High was a 16th-century French renaissance dance, which naturally required Prof Lucy to don yards of velvet and brocade with pearl trimmings. Scholar Stephane Queant, was not impressed with her attempts to pronounce the song’s original name, Branle de l’Official.

‘I can’t say the letter R,’ she lamented. But she was more than willing to attempt the hop-skip-and-jumping steps, which ended with the dashing Monsieur Queant seizing her by the waist and thrusting her aloft. ‘Ooh la la!’ she gasped.

Practically every documentary this week has a festive theme, whether it’s Gregg Wallace discovering how baubles are made Inside The Christmas Factory or George Clarke venturing beyond the Arctic Circle on Amazing Spaces. The exception was The Case Of Sally Channen (BBC2), a brutal account of a hate-filled marriage and a long legal battle to overturn a murder verdict.

Director Rowan Deacon made no attempt to massage the facts. Car dealer Richard Channen was a rapist and a sadist, who took the girl he met at 16 and subjected her to 40 years of cruelty.

But his wife Sally was scarcely more likeable, confessing to the police after she bludgeoned him to death at the kitchen table in 2011: ‘I don’t want anybody else to have him if I can’t.’

She claimed she killed him on the spur of the moment, but the couple had been separated for two years and she went to his house that day with a ball-peen hammer in her handbag.

The only people who emerged from this sordid story with any dignity were their sons, James and David. This case may represent a legal landmark, but there was nothing to celebrate.