Photo by Channel 4
I am just about old enough to remember the magic of the Christmas Radio Times: each of us taking it in turns to pore over the listings. Biro in hand, scratching little stars next to our must-watches; arguing when there were clashes, or over which Laurel and Hardy we hoped they would show (I always wanted The Music Box; my brother, County Hospital). In recent years, we have abandoned this analogue part of our festive anticipation, much to my sadness. This year, however, there is little to scribble over.
Let’s start with the good news. Amandaland – that miracle almost as rare as the virgin birth, a successful spin-off – is back with a half-hour special that’s as excruciating and hilarious as ever. Lucy Punch’s Amanda, looking like a babyccino in snowy white, her Champagne curls frothing, carts her phone-glued teenage children, her cold-blooded mother, Felicity (Joanna Lumley), and a couple of hangers-on – neighbour Mal and long-suffering bestie Anne – to her aunt’s for Christmas. The Amandaland special also doubles as an Ab Fab reunion, because said aunt, Joan, is played by Jennifer Saunders – the first time she’s acted opposite Lumley in nearly a decade. Where Felicity is prim and repressed, Joan is chaotic and generous; she opens the door covered in dried blood and announces, “You’ve caught me mid-giblets!” Her house is a huge, double-fronted manor (“It’s only 11 acres and a ha-ha,” Felicity drawls), the sort of house the moneyed classes might own but can’t afford to maintain: keep your coats on, kids, and don’t eat anything from the larder – it all went off in 1975. Not that it’ll stop the dog eating it. As ever, there are lines that will have you spluttering into your port, but there’s a gentle melancholy too, a neediness behind Amanda’s glossy bravado. She might be insufferable, but you love her really.
There’s also a new instalment of A Ghost Story for Christmas, the annual series that first ran in the Seventies and has been periodically resuscitated since 2005. “The Room in the Tower”, an adaptation of an EF Benson story and the eighth Ghost Story written and directed by cosy crime connoisseur Mark Gatiss, features a moustachioed Tobias Menzies as Roger Winstanley. Sheltering in a London Underground station during the Blitz, Roger settles in for the night to tell a new acquaintance about a recurring dream he’s had his whole life – about (you’ve guessed it) a room in a tower – and the moment it came to pass in real life. It’s all a bit hammy and camp, which I suppose is the point, but largely it’s a reminder that ghost stories are often scarier in the imagination than played out on screen.
Elsewhere on the BBC, it’s festive specials of all the usual favourites: Call the Midwife, Death in Paradise (really, how many deaths do there have to be before it stops being paradise?), Strictly…, The Repair Shop, Gladiators. I suppose it matches the generally soporific mood of the nation post-Christmas lunch, but I can’t help thinking the Beeb went too hard last year. Perhaps it might have been wise to hold back either the Gavin & Stacey Christmas special or Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. You’ll have to wait until the New Year for the best bits: the long-awaited second season of The Night Manager and the latest civilian series of The Traitors.
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I wish I could tell you the good folks at ITV have better news, but they don’t – unless you like the sound of Loose Women, Emmerdale, Corrie, The Masked Singer and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Christmas specials (I don’t). There are minor glad tidings from Channel 4: two Taskmaster specials (“Champion of Champions” and the “New Year’s Treat”), and a TV film starring Lenny Rush, James Buckley, Greg Davies and the Fries: Stephen and Hannah. It’s called Finding Father Christmas; I haven’t seen a preview of it but I expect it will be about as schmaltzy as that sounds. And then there’s The Great Peep Show Christmas Bake Off, the crossover no one asked for but which I begrudgingly admit might be the best of the bunch.
I can’t help but feel we have reached the point in late-stage television where the medium is beginning to eat itself. Still, I suppose this is the season for carrying on stuffing yourself, long after you know you really should have stopped.
[Further reading: Re-reading the utterly original Rachel Cooke]
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