From Blackadder to Mary Poppins, our writers on their favourite Christmas TV moments
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Version 0 of 1. A Charlie Brown Christmas (2004) - Stuart Heritage All but two of my Christmases have been spent in my parents’ house. The day is such a mess of noise – full of babbling and barking and eating and, inevitably, snoring – that only an idiot would attempt to watch television. Experience has taught me that, if there’s anything interesting on at Christmas, it’s better to just record it and watch it three days later. Which is why my choice of TV moment comes from one of two years away. A decade ago, I was a homesick English teacher in a tiny, freezing South Korean bedsit. I’d already had one impossibly lonely Christmas there and was bracing for a second, but then some of my American colleagues invited me to spend Christmas evening in their equally tiny bedsit. We mulled wine. We drank eggnog. And then we huddled around a laptop to watch an illegally downloaded torrent of A Charlie Brown Christmas. I’d never seen it before, but the Americans treated A Charlie Brown Christmas with a reverence that bordered on fanatical. To them, Christmas without it was unthinkable. I quickly understood why. It’s spare and hushed and nostalgic; a gently mournful dream of what Christmas should be. I missed home, I was overwhelmed by the generosity of my friends and I was drunk on hot booze. A Charlie Brown Christmas hit me like a kick in the chest. My parents’ house caught fire last week, and the insurance company has put them up in a hotel. This means that everyone’s piling around to mine for Christmas instead. Part of me wants to sit everyone down and make them watch A Charlie Brown Christmas, so they can see how special it is. The rest of me knows I wouldn’t stand a chance. The Dave Allen Christmas Special (1984) - Sarah Hughes When I was small, I thought my dad was Dave Allen. They shared a mop of greying hair, a taste for smart suits, an accent and a love of stories. Sitting at my father’s feet, half-asleep, my head would turn from the Irish comedian lounging in his chair on the TV, cigarette in hand, to my father and back again, knowing it couldn’t be the same man yet never entirely convinced. I grew out of such confusion but Allen remained at the centre of my comedy world. I’d listen to his shows, half-grasping the more risqué material and laughing nervously at the stream of Pope jokes. I knew he was funny but, at the same time, this was the Pope – as an impressionable 12-year-old I was pretty sure mocking him could send you to hell. Yet here was Allen openly laughing at him and, more strangely, my parents were roaring with laughter as well. In my memories, Boxing Day belongs to Allen, despite his show being on late. So late, in fact, that every year brought a constant battle whether my parents would let us stay up. If we made it, the rewards were great. Maybe it was because it was supposed to be such as holy time but the irreverent Allen always seemed more mischievous at Christmas. There were sketches featuring priests dancing the cancan and stories of desperate, gin-drinking nuns. There were sharp observations on Christmas consumerism and quietly furious political asides. And there in the still centre sat Allen, a smile on his face, sticking the knife in to everything from apartheid to the Catholic church without raising his voice or losing his cool. He looked like the men I grew up with, my father, his cousins, sharp-suited, gentle men with a ready wit and a love of life, but his voice was something new. Allen was a gently subversive guide to adult life, teaching me the power of stories, the importance of words. Underneath the jokes, his message was simple: question everyone, and all of the time. It was a lesson worth learning, so goodnight Dave, thank you, and may your God go with you. The Worst Christmas of My Life (2006) - Mark Lawson Although churches promote Christmas as a time of spiritual transcendence and commerce as an opportunity for domestic hedonism, it can be three days of dark and painful farce for many people. And this aspect of the festivities is perfectly caught in The Worst Christmas of My Life, the three-part seasonal special tied to a brilliant sitcom, The Worst Week of My Life, written and directed by Mark Bussell and Justin Sbresni. The shows implode around Ben Miller as a newlywed who, when staying with his wife’s family, suffers every possible social embarrassment: from killing pets and relatives to almost accidentally having sex with his mother in law. First screened on BBC1 in late December 2006, The Worst Christmas of My Life takes place on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day, during the first holly-and-ivy holiday that Miller and his wife, played by Sarah Alexander, have spent with her parents: Alison Steadman, a snob who intermittently becomes frisky and tipsy, and Geoffrey Whitehead, a stern retired judge who refuses to overturn his verdict that his daughter could have chosen a more suitable husband. Every ritual that could go wrong – whether office party, unsuitable gifts given and received, a shopping centre Santa, marital sex in the parental home or drinks for locals – does so horribly, in a programme that proves what The Worst Week of My Life suggested: that Bussell and Sbresni have made physical farce work on television as well as Michael Frayn and Alan Ayckbourn did on stage. Still widely available on DVD and via streaming (which your eyes will also do), this three-parter will cheer up any Christmas and is the perfect self-therapy present for anyone wishing that this month’s calendar could magically jump from the 23rd to the 27th. Blackadder’s Christmas Carol (1988) - Julia Raeside Before Ben Elton and Richard Curtis went on to write, respectively, The Wright Way and Love, Actually, they came up with one of the best long-running British comedies of all time. The Christmas special I can watch again and again without it ever losing its lustre is Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, first shown in 1988. Rowan Atkinson plays Ebenezer Blackadder, a Victorian incarnation of the pan-generational anti-hero, who is, in this era, the kindest man in England. All the usual Adder cast assemble with the addition of a roaring Robbie Coltrane as the spirit of Christmas, a superbly German Jim Broadbent as Prince Albert and Miriam Margolyes as a goggle-eyed Queen Victoria. In a reversal of Dickens’ tale, the nice Mr Blackadder breaks bad when he sees how much more fun he could be having if he stopped giving all his worldly goods to con artists and charitable causes. Any chance to witness Broadbent in full comic German mode (see also the new Paddington movie in which he plays the delightful Mr Gruber – “You are pulling my legs off!”) must be grabbed and treasured. When visiting Blackadder’s shop in disguise to reward the virtuous, he is asked where his unusual accent is from. “I am from Glaaaaas-gow,” he over-enunciates, adding, “Ah yes, the Gorbals I love them too. A lovely couple, lots of fun.” The viewer is also treated to Blackadder Christmases past, including a burst of Miranda Richardson as Queenie, sentencing courtiers to death on a festive whim, and Hugh Laurie’s fat-headed Prince George losing all his Christmas presents to a sweet old lady collecting for charity. The less said about the “Christmas future” and its matching leather posing pouches, the better. In the thoroughly un-festive ending, a newly evil Blackadder insults the queen and Prince Albert, then sends his retainer on an errand to the butcher’s shop. “Baldrick, take this [money] and buy a turkey so large you’d think its mother had been rogered by an omnibus.” It makes me both hungry and entirely happy. Mary Poppins (every year) - Vicky Frost How did Julie Andrews worm her way into my Christmas traditions? It seems so completely unlikely that this ridiculously wholesome woman would prove essential to my festive cheer and yet, whether it was Mary Poppins or Maria, my sisters and I spent our childhood Christmases watching her gather up various naughty children, and boss and cajole them into behaving properly. The Sound of Music would do at a pinch but Mary Poppins (and those amazing animated penguins) was the ultimate in Christmas telly. It still is. As an adult, I find Disney’s Mary Poppins somewhat less jolly than I remember it as a child – although not as dark as the books that spawned it. It’s not actually about Christmas either. But Mary and Bert’s spirited rendition of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is still three minutes of total joy: an animated band, ridiculous (and easily mimicked) dance and of course, Dick Van Dyke’s wandering accent that is as much a part of Mary Poppins as Andrews’ clipped and perfect tones. For a film made in 1964, the animations really hold up – I still love them. And, of course, there are plenty of other treats for wishful children: rooms that tidy themselves at a mere click of the fingers, the dancing chimneysweeps, the arrival by umbrella … Mary Poppins is pure magic. Perhaps it was the whole idea of a nanny I found so appealing as a child – they weren’t exactly in abundance in 1980s Manchester – or maybe it was the magic of Andrews’ performance. Either way, Mary Poppins has stayed with me. Not only will I still happily break into a rendition of Chim Chim Cher-ee given half a chance, I’m already practising for the New Year’s Day broadcast. Return of the Jedi (1989) - Graeme Virtue A big movie premiering on TV used to be a big deal. When Star Wars first screened on CBS in 1984, it was momentous enough to merit a five-minute introduction hosted by Mark Hamill in a tuxedo. That might seem quaint compared with the current zippy turnaround, where even if you missed Guardians of the Galaxy at the multiplex this August you could reasonably expect to find the Blu-ray in your stocking. But things weren’t so advanced in 1989, when ITV was heavily trailing the UK premiere of Return of the Jedi on Boxing Day afternoon. A long time ago in a Galashiels far, far away, I was a kid growing up in the Scottish Borders who was losing his mind over this information. While galactically jazzed at the opportunity to see Jedi, a film I’d only experienced second-hand through action figures and a Panini sticker album, I was acutely aware that family tradition dictated a far-flung woodland walk on Boxing Day. Lacking agency, I couldn’t reconcile these opposing forces. But thanks to a recently acquired video recorder, I was able to watch Return of the Jedi that same evening, still muddy and presumably ruddy-faced from my own Endor-esque ramble. That VHS copy, replete with festive network idents and region-specific adverts, means I relived Boxing Day 1989 a hundred times over in the weeks, months and years that followed. Unlike most Star Wars fans, the sight of an Ewok doesn’t make me furious. It makes me think of Christmas – and not even the stressful, list-making, panic-buying version I’ve come to actively resent as an adult, but the safe, warm, frictionless one of early childhood, where, like Wicket on that speeder bike, I wasn’t required to do anything except look adorable and enjoy the ride. What are your favourite Christmas TV show moments? Let us know in the comments below |