dunno. I dunno. You have to be able to read the room, don’t you? Of course, that is hard to do when you are commissioning and filming months, or even a year and more in advance, in the case of, say, a documentary about the extravagant Christmas festivities laid on at one of the most famously extravagant hotels in the world. And when the post-lockdown cupboard is remarkably bare, I understand that you have not much choice but to show whatever remains therein. Still, it must be noted that Christmas in New York: Inside the Plaza (Channel 4) sits oddly with the national mood. In an average year, you could get away with an hour of fluffy puffery that narrowly escapes being an actual advertisement for whatever luxurious institution has graciously allowed a highly curated look behind the scenes. In a normal year, we would doubtless have been able to settle down on the sofa with a bucket of Baileys, turn off our minds and enjoy the sights on display at Manhattan’s famous hotel, built in 1907 in the hope of crapping all over the Waldorf-Astoria, which it duly did, becoming a favourite haunt of the Vanderbilts, presidents and Frank Lloyd Wright. We would boggle as the 600-plus staff at the hotel – which has also played host to film stars, the Beatles and Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball – prepare to pamper 21 floors of guests, each paying between £800 and £23,000 a night over the holiday season. There is much to boggle at. The enduring beauty of the interiors. The volume of food and amount of effort required to prepare it (“Lobsters’ll be tight”) for the traditional buffet for 400 in the Palm Court on Christmas Day. The bespoke dessert for a regular guest who lives nearby: a recreation of her neighbourhood in gingerbread and peppermint candy. The tale of an entire suite reconfigured to accommodate a Middle Eastern visitor’s wish to enjoy “the desert experience”, with a fire in the middle of the room. As the Plaza’s chef said when presented with an off-menu request for vegan pancakes: “It’s never ‘No’.” What might once have induced an enjoyable mixture of wistful sighs (Why is my life so bare of mezzanines, mosaic floors and stained-glass ceilings? To say nothing of its dearth of Flemish oak panelling), screams of delighted disbelief and expressive eye-rolling, has a slightly different effect at the end of a year that has meant privation and pain for so many. In a year that has brought clarity in so many ways to the profound and growing gulf that exists between the haves and the have-nots; it is impossible now to ignore the screaming entitlement of guests, for example, in contrast to the lives of the 600 people serving them. “They create this magical experience you see in movies!” says Myka, beaming. “They” include Jean, working his 30th Christmas Day as the hotel’s in-house engineer, kept busy in part by the need to keep replacing the crystals that are taken by guests, as souvenirs of their stay, from the 1,650 chandeliers with which their rooms and suites are hung. Taylor, whose pet dog enjoys its stay at the Plaza as much as she does, has “borrowed a crystal at home” herself. “They” also include Edith, the hotel’s first female butler, who was recently widowed. Coming into work, waiting for the call that her husband had died, in between appointments with guests who require a female chaperone, and delivering a Christmas present to another guest’s dog, Sassy Bean, “was a challenge. The guests could not see what I was suffering … Life is hard. It is not easy. But we are strong.” Fellow butler Benny, who, decades ago, escaped his native Poland via Denmark, then Germany, before making his way to the US and being granted political asylum there, is devoted to the Plaza and everything it represents. “There are times I think if I hadn’t left my country, what would have happened? You don’t have to feel enslaved or unappreciated, or degraded, because the world has so much to offer anywhere you go … The US gave me everything.” It is these scattered moments of depth and insight that pull Christmas in New York back from the brink of mere advertising. Whether they are enough to save the whole genre as we move, newly raw, through the wake of this scourging year, only time and the speed with which capitalism can reform the necessary callouses will tell.