This comeback danced rings around Strictly!
Mrs Brown’s Boys Christmas Special RTÉ/BBC, Christmas Day
Gavin& St aceyB BC 1, Christmas Day
Call The Mid wife BBC 1, Christmas Day
Michael McIntyre’ s Big Christmas Show,BBC1, Christmas Day
Strictly Come Dancing Christmas Special,BBC1, Christmas Day
You didn’t have to watch, It’s A Wonderful Life, this Christmas. All you had to watch was the Mrs Brown’s
Boys Christmas Special, which just ripped off the entire plot and called it It’s A Wonderful Mammy.
After falling out with just about all her family and friends, Agnes met an angel in the pub (Kevin Kennedy, Corrie’s Curly Watts) who showed her what life would have been like had she never existed. It transpired that her arch enemy Hilary had married Mr Brown and Agnes’s daughter, Cathy, consequently was posh; Dermot was the gay son, not Rory; Fr Trevor, far from being a missionary priest, was a jailbird; and Winnie’s highly sexed daughter Sharon actually was a nun.
On paper, it sounds like fun, but the execution wasn’t great, and there were far too many plot holes. For starters, why was Cathy alone posh while her siblings still had their Northside accents? Why was Maria a cleaning woman called Consuela when she had an Eastern European accent? Given that the entire scenario was an elaborate hoax, would Cathy really have tasered her own mother? And, above all, why were some of the jokes so old you’d need a garden shears to shave the years off them?
In its heyday, Mrs Brown’s Boys, while often unashamedly lowbrow, still offered elegantly farcical situations, and as I’ve said here before, Brendan O’Carroll is a gifted physical actor.
Now, there’s the feeling that far from ripping off It’s A Wonderful Life, they’re really doing A Christmas Carol because this year’s special, sadly, felt like the ghost of Christmas past.
The lesson might be to rest it for a few years, because the biggest surprise on Christmas Day was just how brilliant Gavin & Stacey turned out, almost ten years after the original ended. The titular pair now have three children, and they and both their families were all together in Barry in Wales for Christmas. Also present was
Smithy (James Corden, less irritating than before, praise be) to see Neil, the 11-year-old son he shares with on-again, off-again flame Nessa (the brilliant Ruth Jones who, with Corden, also wrote all the episodes).
There were moments of beauty throughout – Gavin’s sixtysomething parents getting stoned, a hilarious chat about the best service stations on UK motorways, the almost-explanation of what really went on during Uncle Bryn and his nephew Jason’s ill-fated fishing trip, and the introduction of Smithy’s new girlfriend and all the awkwardness that ensued.
It ended quite spectacularly with Nessa asking Smithy to marry her instead. It was a moment of genuine tenderness as she let her toughgirl guard down, and it dissolved straight into the credits. We’re not done here yet, and no doubt next Christmas will see it resolved. That’s the way to do it – always leave them wanting more.
No Christmas Day in recent years has been complete without Call
The Midwife, which is as sweet and occasionally just as sickly as too much Baileys whipped cream on your mince pies. This time, the nuns, the nurses and the doctor made their way to the Outer Hebrides to cover a brief window when there would be no medical staff on an outlying island. It was the Christmas episode, so no one died, and the Nonnatus crew all arrived safely back to London to help Reggie, the young man with Down syndrome, try to claim the Guinness world record for the longest paper chain. It was as sweet and charming as you could hope for on Christmas Day, with a few serious messages about race and lone parenting thrown in. And, as always, it left me with a massive lump in my throat.
Sharon Osbourne popped up as the Send To All star on
It’s the segment in which he takes a celebrity’s mobile phone, types a fake message – this time offering a free facelift by Sharon’s cosmetic surgeon – and texts it to everyone in the contacts list. The laughs came not so much in the text itself, or even the replies, but in Osbourne’s reaction – it seemed like she had no clue what she had let herself in for, and that made it all the funnier.
McIntyre also surprised Craig Revel Horwood in the dead of night, barging into the Strictly judge’s bedroom. Amazingly, the victim came across really well, much jollier than his usual grumpy persona – it wasn’t just funny, it was fab-u-lous.
The same couldn’t be said for the
Strictly Christmas Special, which is well past its sell-by date. We all know it was filmed weeks ago, and I even knew the result in advance; with no chance for the home audience to vote, it all seems pretty pointless. It might be time for the BBC, which always wins Christmas, to nonetheless take a look at the schedule and shake it up.