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

Blame it like everything else on coronavirus but 2020 will be remembered as the year when Christmas Future took over from Christmas Past – and let anyone who had access to Netflix pass on poor old Auntie Beeb .

With new productions surrounded by successive locks, the BBC1 festival fare was inconsistent at best.

We had 75 minutes of Strictly highlights, a remake of Blankety Blank hosted by Bradley Walsh and by the end of the evening it was back to a rerun of The Vicar of Dibley.

But the streaming giant of Netflix showed us how to make Christmas right, catering to the biggest production of the year – eight-hour events of a big romantic set 200 years ago, all heaving boxes and dash bucks . It is heavily symbolized, at a great cost.

How this was possible when terrestrial TV was struggling to fill its schedule, no one knows. Perhaps, deep within their realm of Netflix Castle, a thousand mad scientists have been working all year. At midnight lightning struck, and the creation came to life: Franken-Austen!

Linked together from pieces of Regency romantic novels, Bridgerton (Netflix) is built from the Pride and Prejudice corsets, the petticoats of Sense and Sensibility and the wigs of Northanger Abbey.

Ribbons, bows, silk and satins are from every scene that Jane has ever written famous. Every scene looks more interesting than the last one.

And it’s totally doolally. While Bridgerton is a costume drama according to the recommendations of his lace paraphernalia, it would historically be a true violation of the Trade Description Act.

In this version of English George, nobles attack actresses in Hyde Park before heading out to the palace to see their sisters taken to the monarch. If the Queen likes the appearance of a girl, she descends from her throne and gives a kiss in front of her as a token of royal favor.

That ‘s the scene for groups of appropriate babysitters to knock on the young woman’ s door every evening and take turns to suggest a turn, until she comes in and agrees to marry one of them.

Queen Charlotte is, at least, black – played by Golda Rosheuvel. So is the scowling hero, Duke of Hastings (Rege-Jean Page) as well as a large minority of nobles, some with dreadlocks.

Given that this is a fascinating entertainment, it does not matter whether this is a mistaken picture of England under George IV: the characters pay no attention to race and we do not have to.

Every piece of the plot has been turned over by Jane Austen. A girl (Phoebe Dynevor) with countless sisters and a treacherous mother (Pride and Prejudice) discovers that she is attracted to a man who cannot stand (Pride and Prejudice yet). Meanwhile, a poor cousin (Ruby Barker) comes to live with her wealthy relatives and discovers that she is much smarter and better than they are (Mansfield Park) .

The entrances deepen when all the characters visit Vauxhall Gardens of Pleasure (depending, that’s from William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair).

It’s a cartoon version of classic literature, in which the heroine laments: ‘You never know what it’s like to be a woman. What would it be like to have a person’s whole life reduced to one minute? This is all that was taken for me. This is all I am, I have no other value. If I can’t find a spouse, I will be worthless. ‘

There is no feminism in the country of the festival, therefore.

With not enough sex in the original Austen to fit the Netflix audience, young Anthony Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey) spends every available minute throwing his mistress. We can see more of his bottom than his face.

Julie Andrews, once a very different kind of Christmas star like Maria’s nuns in The Sound Of Music, will give a narration.

She is a society whistleblower, Lady Whistledown, who sees all scandals and details in her prestigious leaflets. If you’re old-fashioned enough to crave nuns right at Christmas, Sister Julienne (Jenny Agutter) was still plowing through the Call of Midwife (BBC1).

However, this permanent fare after the turkey looks as late as an old paper chain, next to the shiny daisies of Netflix.

Trixie (Helen George) has not found love since we last saw her. Her mother-in-law (presence feels off the stairs but she has never been seen, as Arfur Daley misses) worries that she will be ‘left on the shelf’ and orders her try a marriage bureau – the 1965 equivalent of going online.

That gave Trixie an excuse to sit in a hotel tea room with a mink circling around her shoulders while smoking quietly.

It’s hard to please, though – no facial hair, no drinkers and certainly no Germans. The Munich beer festival must be an idea for Purgatory.

We learned that Dr. Receptionist Miss Higgins (Georgie Glen) is a spiritualist and has fond memories of the Harvey Wallbanger cocktail she drank in 1926. She may have been a flapper.

Nurse Crane (Linda Bassett) wanted to run away with the traveling circus and play on the high trapeze, ‘with legs as long as ribbons’. Ring master Peter Davison let her try, even though his character had lung cancer and was on his last legs himself.

It was all a little weak. Call the midwife who used to deliver emotional barnstormers and now can’t control much more than the faint smile. If you decided to abandon tradition and spend Christmas online instead, no one could criticize you.