A very Dolly Christmas, you say?
Dolly Parton. She’s like Marmite, that one. You either love her, or you spread her on a piece of toast. Christmas? Same. Love it, or spread it over the purple one from a Quality Street tin. Yet, if you put the two together, throw in a fake town that’s in somewhere like Maine or New England or P’Town or the lot at Paramount Studios in LA and the snow’s just the froth off a fluffed-up Costa and and every shop looks like it’s straight from Barbra Streisand’s weird subterranean Victorian shopping mall under her gaff in Malibu and the story – if you can call it that – is a tinselly rip-off of A Christmas Carol and Dolly plays the… you know, the jolly one who teaches the grumpy one how not to wear her knickers in a twist and there’s a moral pay-off that we can all learn from and everyone lives happily ever after, even the annoying kids. There are even dogs in festive bows for Baby Jesus’s sake.
Oh, and did we mention it’s a musical, with 14 original songs from Dolly (someone’s been busy over lockdown. Or at least someone on her payroll has)? Knew you’d be interested.
Anyway, it’s on Netflix, it also stars Christine Baranski as *checks notes * the Scrooge-y one and if there’s anyone who is always second billing but should be first it’s Christine Baranski, and one of the lines from it goes, ‘You find that light, and it will lead you to the part of you that you lost.’ Someone got paid good money to come up with that.
Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square, Netflix, from 22 November.
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