Watching Steve McQueen leaping over barbed-wire fences on his motorbike in The Great Escape the other day — every time I see it I think he’s going to make it — I realised why the film has become embedded in the festive schedules. This archetypal movie about a PoW breakout serves as the perfect metaphor for the family Christmas, when half the male participants plot how they can escape to the pub without anyone noticing.

Indeed, the schedulers this year seemed determined to re-create the rounds-of-relatives experience, including giving us the ultimate grumpy gran in EastEnders (Pauline Fowler, RIP) and exhausting over-excitable teenagers in High School Musical. Even This Life + 10 left the bittersweet feeling of a new-year reunion with people you thought you were inseparable from but now rather wished you had left alone.

The Westminster satire The Thick of It (BBC Four) gave us the bad-tempered uncle who swears too much in the form of the Labour spin-doctor Malcolm Tucker (the splendidly splenetic Peter Capaldi). His expletives flew like a swarm of bees around the inexperienced substitute (Jeremy Edwards) for the social affairs minister Hugh Abbott (away in Australia to explain the absence of the legally beleaguered Chris Langham), who was made mince-pie filling by Jeremy Paxman, while speculation ran rife about the PM’s departure date.

This one-off special continued the series’ portrayal of politics as an extended, ulcer-inducing anxiety attack with spooked ministers, on-the-hoof policy-making and trying to second-guess or outflank the media. Indeed the whole process seemed entirely circular and one wondered how Armando Iannucci and his writers could take his sitcom anywhere else. Last night they showed how. Just as the last series of The West Wing cut between the Democratic and Republican camps, Iannucci shifted focus between Abbott’s team and that of his Tory Shadow spokesman (Roger Allam).

Each party was trying to wrongfoot the other about immigration before — brilliantly — everything was thrown into disarray with the resignation of the PM and the seemingly invulnerable bruiser Tucker squirming with shock. You almost felt sorry for him.

The Thick of It has been criticised for lampooning the hardly fresh target of Labour spin (actors who’ve played Alastair Campbell figures in dramas and comedies could now form a football team). But it’s less about the corridors of power and more about office politics and that laddish, amoral combination of team spirit and back-stabbing one finds in any large organisation.

Such a toxic atmosphere was captured wonderfully by the cast’s naturalistic, horribly convincing acting. Allam was superb as an old-school politician, wondering if he could still refer to “yobbos” rather than “young men with issues around stabbing” and at the mercy of a pushy PR guru (“Lose the tie!”) who lobbed such questions as “Are you an Ameri-can or an Ameri-can’t?” And Edwards turned being stuffed by Paxo on Newsnight into a squirm-inducing delight. The new series later this year looks very promising.

The kind of quip-filled cynicism one associates with Ian Hislop on Have I Got News for You? was absent in Not Forgotten (Channel 4). In the wake of the Government’s recent pardon of the 306 men executed for cowardice, desertion and other offences during the First World War, Hislop questioned whether it was right to impose our moral sensibilities on the past. Most people thought they were fighting a just and inescapable war so, Hislop argued, we must try to appreciate why army chiefs wanted to discourage cowardice and desertion with methods that were widely judged to be right at the time.

Delving into the stories behind certain executions and old military documents — capital offences for serving soldiers also included burglary, striking an officer, persistent disobedience and falling asleep at one’s post — Hislop was visibly moved. He was a sensitive, thoughtful guide throughout. He showed that not every executed soldier was an innocent, shell-shocked victim let down by an uncaring military — one soldier had deserted 16 times — while Field Marshal Haig had actually commuted nine out of ten cases.

Ultimately for Hislop, the Government’s group pardon should not be seen as a sentimental attempt to rewrite history but as an expression of humane regret that lives were engulfed by the tragedy of war. His perspective made for poignant, sobering viewing and showed once again that the past is never as clear-cut as, say, Steve McQueen succeeding or failing to jump to freedom on his bike.

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