WITH just three days until Christmas dinner, Britons are starting to crack under the pressure of being expected to make perfect crispy roast potatoes.

Thanks to celebrity chefs, every potato must meet precise standards of crispness, goldenness and fluffiness, and anyone whose potatoes fall short should consider themselves worthless scum who have ruined Christmas for everyone.

Mum Donna Sheridan said: “I can’t take this level of pressure. What if the potatoes come out brown instead of the exact shade of golden on Nigella’s website? It doesn’t bear thinking about.

“Or what if I parboil them too much and they fall apart when I try to shake them in a pan like Delia says? There won’t be any lovely crunchy bits and I’ll have failed as a wife, a mother and a human being. 

“I’m sure my own mum used to just chuck the potatoes in the oven and spoon a bit of meat juice on them, but some things just aren’t acceptable anymore, like casual racism and not heating up the goose fat until it’s smoking.”

Sheridan’s husband Ian said: “I’d like to tell Donna it doesn’t matter. But it does. It matters more than she will ever realise. If those potatoes aren’t perfect we’ll be the laughing stock of our street. If people put dogshit through our letterbox, we’ll deserve it.

“Our only hope of restoring our family’s honour and status will be for me to commit hara-kiri in the front garden. I’ve already ordered the traditional samurai disembowelling swords from Amazon.

“It sounds extreme, but if the potatoes aren’t perfect, what is there to live for?”