Stars reveal how to avoid making a dog's dinner of festive lunch

Whether Christmas dinner is the highlight of your culinary year or just another rigmarole to tick off in the festive season, there's one thing for sure.

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The telly is full of celebrity chefs showing you how it's done.

Or to be more precise, smothering everything in lard and butter, adding dollop upon dollop of cream and ruining the roast potatoes for vegetarians everywhere by cooking them in goose fat.

Don't expect to see a stick of celery on any cooking show for the next month - unless it's sticking out of a bloody Mary.

Channel hopping the other night, Jamie Oliver was in full flow, flinging together a festive starter with the kind of enthusiasm usually reserved for the moment someone cracks open another bottle of Baileys.

It might have been an episode of Jamie's Easy Christmas Countdown, or maybe it was Jamie Cooks Christmas, or Jamie's Christmas Shortcuts... that man's made more festive cooking shows than I've had hot (Christmas) dinners.

But it doesn't matter as they're all essentially the same. And as the arch enemy of the turkey twizzler, he needs to put a bit of effort in to show how the bird of the season should be dealt with.