A touching Christmas cartoon classic is born
The Girl Before
BBC One, Sunday-Wednesday
Mrs Brown’s Boys
RTÉ One/BBC1, Christmas Day
Strictly Come Dancing Christmas Special
BBC1, Christmas Day
Adam Saves Christmas RTÉ One, Christmas Eve
It was an odd choice for Christmas week, a deeply dark and often disturbing psychological thriller that kept most people guessing to the end. I say ‘most’ because I read The Girl Before when the book came out five years ago, but the TV adaptation still proved one of the best dramas of the year. Edward Monkford is a controlling architect who builds a dream home in London, a Zen-like temple of calm, all minimalist concrete and marble. In return for paying a nominal rent, tenants must follow some 200 rules to be accepted as temporary custodians – no art on the walls, no clothes thrown on the floor, no children, no pets, no knick-knacks, no clutter – and also consent to how data is collected on their every move while at home.
Emma and Simon (former EastEnders Jessica Plummer, who played Chantelle Atkins, and Ben Hardy, who was Peter Beale) make the grade, but soon their relationship is on the rocks. Emma is looking for security after being savagely sexually assaulted by a burglar in their previous flat, but the house can’t mend that trauma, and she and Simon split up.
Instead, she takes up with Edward, who soon proves as controlling in relationships as he is with architectural details and house rules, but her life quickly unravels as it emerges that while she indeed was raped, it was not by the burglar, but by a work colleague. She is found dead at the foot of the stairs, but was it an accident or was she killed?
That’s the preoccupation of Jane (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), who three years later is the next tenant. So, she too is in a relationship with Edward. Cleverly, Emma and Jane’s stories unfold side by side. Chillingly, Edward takes both to the same restaurants, offers them the same no-strings relationship, buys each similar dresses, and the same string of pearls. More eerily, not only do they look alike, they also look like his late wife, who died in an accident with their son on the site of the house, with both now buried beneath its courtyard.
Clearly, Edward has profound issues with coercive control, but does that make him a killer? In case you have it recorded, I won’t let the cat out of the bag, but The Girl Before proved to be as intriguing as the book, and conjured up an admirable sense of menace. In large part, this was down to David Oyelowo, who played Edward with just the right blend of charisma, suppressed rage, and ambiguity.
The question at the heart of it all was just as compelling, though. Does stripping life back to basic needs make it more serene, or are we better off when our lives and our homes alike are untidy and messy? Personally, I’m going with the latter.
This year’s Mrs Brown’s Boys special was the flimsiest yet. The plot, what little there was of it, concerned a murder mystery night being held at Foley’s pub to raise money for a Finglas refuge for alcoholic greyhounds. Even allowing for the fact that this was a scam dreamed up by Buster Brady and Dermot Brown, for comedy to work, there has to be some credibility, and surely no one is stupid enough to believe that was a legitimate charity. Along the way, writer and star Brendan O’Carroll dusted off jokes I first heard when I was at school, and that’s not yesterday.
Unlike many critics who like to burnish their own credentials by snootily looking down on Mrs Brown’s Boys solely because it is popular, I’ve always taken it at face value and enjoyed it. Part of its charm is that despite all her meddling, Agnes actually can be wise, so her little homilies can be taken in good part. Sentimentality is hugely under-rated but you have to be careful it doesn’t descend into bathos, and the Finglas matriarch’s final sermon about Covid, and the message of hope that accompanied it, didn’t just cross that line, it did so like Usain Bolt.
It’s hard to understand the point of the BBC’s annual Strictly Come Dancing Christmas Special. Six celebrities compete in the one-off show, but we learn nothing about them as people. There’s no public vote, just a choice by a studio audience (and how big could that audience have been under Covid restrictions?) and ludicrously indulgent marking by the judges.
This year’s effort saw singer Anne-Marie and her partner Graziano di Prima finally live up to his surname and come first, but the entire programme was as flat as yesterday’s breakfast champagne by lunchtime.
Finally, the most enjoyable programme of the weekend was just 10 minutes long. Adam Saves Christmas, an animated short commissioned by RTÉ from Kavaleer Productions and shown on Christmas Eve with a repeat yesterday, saw Late Late Show favourite Adam King help Santa (voiced by Ryan Tubridy!) deliver his presents. Evil aliens have stolen the Northern Lights, which means Santa can’t find his reindeer. Adam and his space companions, including rabbit Bubby, beat the aliens not with weapons but with kindness, a message we all could take on board.
Voicing himself, Adam proved the star of the show, and there must be many other children out there who are wheelchair users who were delighted to see themselves represented by our little hero, when so often they are invisible.
Destined to become a perennial classic, Adam saved not only Christmas, but Christmas television too.