If there was anything tying together this year’s Christmas night TV, it was the volume. There was an awful lot of shouting on Downton Abbey, quite a bit of shouting on Doctor Who, standard soap shouting on EastEnders, Coronation Street and Emmerdale and, in case you haven’t had your fill of the earworm of the decade yet, a whole hour dedicated to the Disney phenomenon Frozen and its song Let It Go. It was enough to drive anyone back to the brandy.
There was the obligatory howl of a woman in labour, too, on the resolutely grim Call the Midwife, which offered up a second fix of Miranda Hart in one night, following the penultimate episode of her eponymous sitcom.
Funny Miranda deliberated over choosing between Gary and Mike; dramatic Miranda, as Chummy in Call the Midwife, did manage a pratfall into the snow, but really, her storyline was all about rehabilitating a bleak and failing home for unmarried mothers. If ever there was a modern-day fairytale to be found, it was here. Though we finally got to see narrator Vanessa Redgrave on screen, its main message, via a harrowing plot about an enforced lobotomy, was that failing, under-resourced public services are letting vulnerable people down, and leaving them to fend for themselves where there should be support and care. It’s set in 1959, not that you’d know it from that description.
More period drama from Downton Abbey, which at least got over last year’s refusal to acknowledge Christmas during its Christmas special, and gave us some snow, carols and a truly gorgeous tree. It didn’t, however, give viewers much to work with in terms of moving any of its glacial stories along, given that more time was dedicated to watching men in breeches shoot birds than to actually answering any of the series’ long-running questions.
So, though Anna was freed from prison after Bates confessed to murdering Green, Bates was then exonerated, and we ended up none the wiser as to who actually bumped him off. Murder aside, this was as gentle as Downton gets, with the big stories ultimately turning out to be that Lord Grantham did not have angina as suspected but an ulcer, that Denker couldn’t make soup, unless she really had to, and that the Dowager Countess still has the best one-liners of any character on television.
Mind you, one development warmed this cold cynic’s heart, as Mr Carson and Mrs Hughes finally made good on last Christmas’s beach-front hand-holding. Who knew that the line “Of course I’ll marry you, you old booby. I thought you’d never ask” could be so moving?
Similarly emotional was a masterful episode of Doctor Who, which managed to be both utterly terrifying, very funny and a rather beautiful tribute to platonic love. The Doctor, Clara and several scientists in a North Pole scientific research station were attacked by “dream crabs” – not as cute as they sound – that fix themselves to sleepers’ faces and slowly dissolve their brains while trapping their victims in a dream. They looked like the monsters from Ridley Scott’s Alien, which, in a number of fun touches, was referenced several times (as was Game of Thrones, right at the end, for any keen viewers looking over Shona’s to-do list).
The Inception-esque dream-within-a-dream structure was clever and frightening; the Doctor’s sniping with Santa (Nick Frost, clearly born for the role) was genuinely amusing and the mystery over whether Jenna Coleman would be leaving the show made the ending a treat of a surprise. Of course she wasn’t giving up on the Tardis – but that vision of her as an older woman made it seem like she was, right until the very end. Surely this was one of the best Christmas episodes in a very long time.
Outside of the usual 25 December blockbuster telly, there was Frozen at Christmas, a whole hour dedicated to a blockbuster film instead (though to actually watch Frozen itself, you had to be a Sky Movies subscriber or be one of the many millions who coughed up for the DVD). It was as budget as TV gets, essentially packaging up the DVD extras with a couple of extra Brit-focused talking-heads like Mel C, Jo Whiley and Alex James, who all loved it, and popped up intermittently to tell us this. Surely the kindest Christmas gift would have been a method for removing Let It Go from our brains once and for all, rather than ensuring it was stuck firmly in there for the rest of the night. Bah humbug, Channel 4.
