Of course, it goes without saying that Christmas is the time of year when we gather with our nearest and dearest, and wish they’d just shut up for one second and stop nattering on while watching the telly and avoiding the coffee-flavoured Roses in full bloom at the bottom of the tin.
True, the season finds its roots in the celebration of the birth of the messiah, but even the holy family would have liked something more interesting to look at than a donkey and a few shepherds while waiting for the epiphanous arrival of three guys bearing gifts.
Thankfully, TV schedulers are bound to spend Christmas with their families as well, and as such know that when you just want to sit in silence while digesting more calories than was really medically advisable, and have long been broadcasting festive episodes of our favourite shows, which get repeated Yule in, Yule out.
Here’s our take, in no particular order, of the 12 best Christmas specials to get you through the 12 days of Christmas 2015...
- The Vicar of Dibley – The Christmas Lunch Incident (1996)
Richard Curtis had already made an international name for himself with Blackadder and Four Weddings and a Funeral before turning his hand to this Dawn French-starring sitcom. Revolving around a rural village adapting to having a women lead its congregation, the show’s first Christmas Special remains its most likeable – and sees French’s Geraldine Granger invited to three separate Christmas lunches and dealing with a sprout-eating competition of Cool Hand Luke proportions.
- Eastenders – Christmas Day (1986)
Every soap tries to up the ante around Christmas, with timely births, untimely deaths, and plenty of comic relief to ease the viewers into the New Year. But almost 30 years ago, the BBC’s Eastenders reached the peak of soap operatic drama when Dirty Den Watts served Angie divorce papers in the Queen Vic.
Angie, who had been feigning a terminal illness, gets truly rumbled for telling a “big-black-one,” and Den serves up divorce proceedings with a side of vengeful relish.
- The Office – The Christmas Specials (2003)
Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s ground-breaking workplace sitcom completely revolutionised British comedy early in the 21st century, creating an antihero to cringe at in the shape of David Brent.
Often excruciatingly bleak in its depictions of workplace relationships and egos, that the show finally brought together its principal love interests Dawn and Tim for a Christmas party kiss really came as no major surprise. That David Brent finally stands up for himself and becomes something more than pitiable was, perhaps, the greatest moment of all.
- Father Ted – A Christmassy Ted (1996)
An example of the slyly brilliant and wonderfully Irish scenarios that writers Graham Linehan and Arthur Matthews conjured up in the sitcom about three priests on an island off the Irish coast. The stand-out sequence sees Ted, Dougal and a number of other priests get lost in the lingerie section of a department store, with their escape from notice played out like a bunch of US soldiers stalking their way through the Vietnamese jungle.
The only Christmas special in the Father Ted canon, it remains a hugely popular episode of the show, and is often repeated on Channel 4’s digital channels around this time of year.
- The Royle Family – The Queen of Sheba (2006)
In many ways a meta sitcom, with a Gogglebox-like watching of people watching TV in their living rooms, The Royle Family brilliantly skewered family life, and has proven itself an enduring hit with a number of Christmas Specials.
Many of them have a number of pantomime moments that feel off key when compared to the very low-key nature of the show to begin with, but 2006’s The Queen of Sheba is a beautifully sad and poignant look at loss.
Nanna (Liz Brown) is in fading health, and confined to a bed in the living room. The episode sees her quietly pass away, finding the laughs in the celebration of a life lived.
- Doctor Who – The Runaway Bride (2006)
The long-running sci-fi show has had an annual Christmas special since it relaunched on the BBC a decade ago, with Christmas festivities almost always playing a significant role in launching the new season while not technically being part of it.
On Christmas Day 2006, with David Tennant well established as the beloved Tenth Doctor, the show was at a crossroads, with Billie Piper’s companion Rose Tyler having just been separated from the Doctor after her departure from the show. Enter Catherine Tate as Donna, a women whose life is torn apart upon the discovery that her career is an alien front and that her fiancé has been manipulating her.
Tate revelled in the one-off role so much that she expressed an interest in returning to the show, and wound up becoming a series regular and the Doctor’s companion throughout the entire 2008 season.
- Mrs Brown’s Boys – Mammy’s Tickled Pink (2014)
Brendan O’Carroll’s comedy is something akin to the Marmite of mirth, with people either loving the foul-mouth antics of Dublin granny Agnes Brown or watching on in a state of confusion wondering just how O’Carroll went from occasional appearances on The Late Late Show to being a BAFTA winner attracting the biggest audience of the season.
It probably stems from the fact that O’Carroll took Mrs Brown on the road and built up a loyal and loving audience over decades of touring and video and DVD releases, and arguably no writer on TV today has a better idea of what his audience wants than him.
Crass, crude, and always guaranteed to make you chuckle – even in spite of yourself – last year’s Christmas Day special is worth it alone for the slapstick comedy derived from the misadventures experienced with a new Christmas tree.
- Morecambe & Wise – Christmas Special (1971)
The beloved British comedy duo’s name are almost as much a part of the Christmas canon as stuffed turkey, and their slew of end-of-year specials utterly dominated the airwaves for years, with repeats these days providing a nice meeting point for the comedic sensibilities of different generations.
The 1971 special is a stand-out amongst a number of brilliantly funny ones, if only for the genius sketch involving world-renowned conductor André Previn, who gamely attempts to direct Eric Morecambe during a performance of Grieg’s A Minor Piano Concerto. Still incredibly funny all these years later.
French and Saunders – The Making of: The Filming of: The Making of: Titanic (1998)
Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders had long had a history of skewering pop culture in their sketch comedy shows, but the 1998 Christmas Special, shown on December 26th, was a monster hit with more than 10m viewers tuning in.
A full year after James Cameron’s Titanic had made him the king of the world, the duo recreate a number of key sequences from the film, along with taking a look behind the scenes at how the practical and technical special effects were achieved, in increasingly silly and wickedly funny ways. Genius.
- Wallace & Gromit – The Wrong Trousers (1993)
While this stop-motion masterpiece wasn’t the first outing for Aardman Animations wacky inventor and his long-suffering dog, this is arguably the story that launched Wallace and Gromit into the public consciousness – and bagged writer-director Nick Park an Oscar for ‘Best Animated Short Film’.
Shown on St Stephen’s Day, the short isn’t a traditional Christmas Special, and has almost now allusions to the festivities taking places in houses around the world. Instead, it sees inscrutable baddie Feathers McGrath rewire Wallace’s automatic trousers to turn him into an unwitting jewel thief.
With only veteran actor Peter Sallis as the sole voice in the entire 30 minutes, the short showcases the wonderful character design and knowing winks that have come to exemplify Aardman’s comedy in the years since.
- Alan Partridge – Knowing Me, Knowing Yule (1995)
The spoof TV chat-show host was at the peak of his popularity when the BBC broadcast Steve Coogan’s Christmas Special in the 90s, with the Norwich personality experiencing a blackly comic fall from grace.
Offering a reminder of Partridge’s uniquely cringeworthy interviewing style with a number of ‘celebrity’ guests, the show revolves around the increasingly desperate Alan trying his best to worm a second series out of BBC commissioning editor Tony Hayers. “My show is your bell. Please peal it. Peal my bell.”
With segments exploring his personal life, dodgy product placement, and a blundering big-scale number crashing and burning around him, there are plenty of Ha’s to be had from the Aha-shouting Partridge.
- Only Fools and Horses – Time on our Hands (1996)
A whopping 24.3m viewers tuned in to see what was supposed to be the send-off to Peckham wheeler-dealer Derek ‘Del Boy’ Trotter and his younger brother Rodney.
The 15th Christmas Special of the eternally popular BBC sitcom saw the brothers finally doing what they’d been threatening to do for decades, becoming millionaires. Discovering a valuable timepiece amongst some random objects they’d acquired years before, the auction scene and subsequent explosion of joy inside the canary yellow Reliant Robin was a joy for viewers to behold, having taken the show’s characters to their hearts.
The final scene, played out over the song Our House, sees Del Boy and Rodney enjoying their newfound wealth, before returning to Nelson Mandela House for a final look around. And while things finally seem to have settled down, a chance offer of a deal leads Del to contemplating one last shot at business.
“This time next year, we could be billionaires!”
