No matter how they start off, all telly Christmas specials end up the same.
All follow the strict orthodoxy of tacky dining tables, turkey catastrophes,
fathers who just make it home, inappropriate mistletoe, paper hats, snow and
happy endings. There is a worldly, 1950s look to them; a memory of
Christmases we all never quite had, like the advertisements for custard
powder in Housekeeping magazine.
Christmas Day was invented by Charles Dickens, and all television festivities
are more or less variations on Bob Cratchit’s Christmas. The simple closing
scene, of a day’s holiday with an unexpected goose (which, incidentally,
Tiny Tim isn’t going to get to eat until well after Sports Quiz of the
Year), has jettisoned its finger-wagging, low-church moral against storing
up wealth on earth at the cost of eternal riches above, and floated off on
its own to become the centre of a Byzantine festival that incorporates bits
of Christianity, Nordic paganism and Coca-Cola advertisements. It has been
embroidered and embellished by everyone, from Dylan Thomas to Alf Garnett.
Its coming together of family, surprises and drunkenness is the perfect list
of ingredients for melodrama. I wish Nigella would do a series teaching
producers how to make one, because Christmas telly is as repetitive as a
church service.
The unbreakable rule of yuletide drama is that all “specials” — seasonal
comedies and dramas made specifically for this week — will be worse than
episodes of the same show at any other time of the year. Not just a little
bit worse. Not with a bit of added sugar and bland — but much, much
stupider, crasser, dumber and more predictable. They always have been and, I
suspect, they always will be, because I have a suspicion it’s the way you
like them. You want to watch the same movies over and over, hear the same
jokes, lie semi-mullered on the sofa, waiting for the same God Bless Us
Every One finale. It’s what makes Christmas reliably gemütlich — it either
makes Christmas heavenly or forces you to go to Barbados with Simon Cowell
and Michael Winner to get away from it.
The groundhog-day nature of the birth of Christ means that, as a critic, I
also have to write the same thing every year. You may find this comforting
and nostalgic, but after 15 years I feel a bit dog-in-the-manger. This is
the worst time of year to review anything remotely cultural. All the rules
of taste, aesthetics and honesty no longer apply, or, at best, they are
trumped by the demands of sticky, tipsy, mawkish sentiment and
wish-fulfilling lies. This is the season where you will forgive almost
anything as long as it whispers fraudulent happiness in your ear with
Baileys breath.
Television may discard every vestige of artistic and social integrity, but
that’s no reason why I should. So, taking Oliver Cromwell — the man who
banned drama, dancing and, indeed, Christmas — as my guide, let’s return to
the box with a renewed vigour. Lark Rise to Candleford is sub-Hardyesque —
if you can imagine any ambition to be as cringingly lowly as wanting to
pastiche the old peasant fiddler. When it first appeared, earlier this year,
Candleford represented the syrupy nostalgia for a sticky and patronising
rural world that existed only on Christmas cards and in the dribbling
imaginations of spinsters who run antique shops in the Cotswolds. The
Christmas-special version was worse: callously, gratuitously, unnecessarily
worse. It consisted of a handful of story lines, cobbled together for the
sole purpose of delivering a custard pie of sickly pathos at the end. They
were held together by the chorus of a Catherine Tateish chav ghost. The
emotional manipulation was so shameless and brazen, so rootless and
inappropriate, that you could only gasp at the callousness.
The one thing you should be able to ask of a seasonal costume drama is that it
makes you cry in a nice, soporific, yes-yes-yes way, not in a
hands-over-the-eyes, please-make-it-stop, no-no-no way. I’m very good at
crying. I can cry at the commercials. I can shed a tear over a festive
stamp. I can’t remain dry-eyed in the same room as a DVD of The Railway
Children, but I draw the line at Dawn French. The only way she’s going to
induce a whimper is by standing on my foot. Lark Rise was a hideous stain on
the reputations of everyone who took part in it and an ulcer on the memories
of all of us who watched it. The only thing I enjoyed was watching the vast
amounts of pulped paper they sprayed over swathes of wood and field, and
wondering who had to clear it all up. The trouble was, you could never see
anyone’s breath, and it plainly was nowhere near freezing.
Snow is the constant theme of Christmas. It appears in every single drama, yet
nobody south of Inverness or below 2,000ft can remember a white Christmas.
Take a wild guess at the last time you could have woken up on Christmas Day
and seen London blanketed in snow. Not a flurry, not a scrim of grey slush,
but real snow. Was it 1981? Was it the famous winter of 1968? Was it 1938?
Was it the Christmas truce of 1914? No, it was 1895. White Christmases never
existed. It’s not global warming, it’s the Gulf Stream. It’s always wet.
Robson Green and that bloke in the bank ads are back for yet another bout of
mates falling out over Christmas goodwill. This show started out some time
back as a halfway decent play about competitive fairy lights, with a touch
of Ayckbourn about it. This time, as Clash of the Santas, it had more than a
touch of flogging a dead reindeer. The two lads are supposed to be competing
in an international Santa competition in Lithuania. Don’t ask. It didn’t
matter. It was desperate. Really, really crappy, stupid. You could feel the
embarrassed disgust of cast and crew. They could barely look at the camera.
They must have done every shot in one take. Both Green and the bank bloke
are perfectly competent comedy actors. This relentless dross must have been
a misery to get through. It was meritless, humourless, uncaring and
unbelievable, a chain of flabby moments. The drama department of ITV must be
haunted by the ghost of Ted Ray, Arthur Askey and Norman Wisdom. Every time
they try to make a big comedy, it looks like Ealing Studios before the war,
and here was that authentic strain of xenophobia, snobbery and stereotypical
racism, the default setting of English humour.
Christmas is the one moment when actors outnumber reality-show contestants on
the box. There is a diminishing amount of work for thespians. Drama is
expensive compared to cookery or gardening; quality drama has all but
vanished. Most of the stuff has all the subtlety and gravitas of a
provincial pantomime, and good actors will regularly humiliate and
prostitute their talents to get a paying gig on the telly. Which brings us
to the new Doctor Who.
I’ve never been a huge fan of the re-re-renaissance of the Doctor, but my
teenage children constantly tell me I’m not just wrong, but “like, totally
wrong”, and that the Doctor is the coolest thing available, David Tennant is
very bliss and Shakespeare was lucky to get him. For me, Doctor Who will
always be William Hartnell, and I know he’d be turning in his reincarnation
if he ever discovered he was David Tennant. But then Doctors are like Peter
Pan, and we’re all Wendys. We grow up; he doesn’t. Every generation gets its
own Doctor. And the moment when a new one pupates is iconic for television.
This Christmas special, where the handover was supposed to take place, was
low on extras and short on story. It was self-consciously overwrought, with
a good 1930s-style juggernaut robot that stamped on Victorian London. The
new Doctor looked like David Morrissey, but it might be a lesser actor who’s
transferred into David Morrissey. It would be depressing if he were going to
take over. It’s not exactly that the part’s too shallow for him, but
that he’s too big an actor for the part. I fear he will look ridiculous
paddling his talent around in it. My daughter didn’t fancy him much, either.
Wallace & Gromit — A Matter of Loaf and Death: same teeth, same mechanical
jokes, same strange undertones of Wodehousian misogyny — just not funny. Not
any more. The best thing all week was Gavin & Stacey: predictable
Christmas stuff, brilliantly written, perfectly timed, immaculately
performed.
As I write this, Richard Attenborough is in hospital after falling and hitting
his head. Christmas television wouldn’t be Christmassy without him. He once
told me that, every year, he cringed at the repeat of the grisly remake of
Miracle on 34th Street he appeared in, then added: “But you know, darling,
every year I’m still in the best Christmas movie.” And indeed he is. Let’s
hope he makes it through the tunnel and gets home this time.
Apologies to readers for the accidental publication of a previous Radio
Waves column in last week’s Culture. It was due to a production error
