Every generation gets the Christmas television specials it deserves.
So in this golden era for great telly everywhere we look, it’s only fair we get to banish memories of Only Fools and Horses jumping the shark yet again, or some other even more random act of brutality being revealed on Eastenders, or Vince Cable dancing, or anything involving David Walliams, or (insert your own personal nadir here).
No, this year we at least got to bask in the low-key perfection of last night’s Motherland Christmas Special (BBC Two), the second seasonal edition of this first-rate comedy following the one which aired in 2020.
As gentle or as scathing as you need
Masterfully written by Sharon Horgan and co, it was as gentle or as relentlessly scathing as you needed it to be, as it always is.
It followed the familiar format; meet-up at the school gates, where over-eager divorced dad Kevin (Paul Ready) has bought their kid’s teacher a bottle of Malibu.
Eternally stressed Julia (Anna Maxwell Martin) frets over what to get her mum and eternally cynical Liz (Diane Morgan) dismisses Kevin’s idea to send her zorbing.
Kevin and Liz end up at Julia’s with their collected kids for Christmas, with “mother and that pair of b***ends that birthed my husband” already visiting, and Julia’s hopeless cyclebro of a husband Paul (Oliver Chris) busy building a hot-tub in the back garden so he can soak in it all day.
Meanwhile over the road…
Across the road Meg (Tanya Moodie) and her husband Bill (Anthony Head) are getting drunk, and snooty Amanda (Lucy Punch) is spending Christmas with her ex-husband and his glamorous new wife, while her merciless mother Felicity (Joanna Lumley) mocks her endlessly.
“How did I get so drunk?” Meg demands to know of Liz. “I only had a bottle of Bailey’s.”
Liz mixes her an espresso martini, reassuring her she’ll “be fit to operate heavy machinery” after it.
Morgan, aka Philomena Cunk in another telly life, gets a bunch of the funniest lines. “I’d Instagram that,” she says when she sees the Christmas spread. “If I was a d***.”
This is always a very funny and subtly human show, but something about the seasonal nature of this episode heightened the effect of it.
Not least because one of the character’s elderly parents was killed by virtual reality headset midway through.
The awkward, fumbling consolation chat between Julia and Amanda, two characters who perform friendship but mostly despise each other, was a perfectly understated Christmas telly moment.
His Dark Materials
Meanwhile, the third series of the BBC and HBO’s Philip Pullman adaptation His Dark Materials (BBC One) began on Sunday.
In this first episode, Lyra Belacqua (Dafne Keen) is drugged and under the control of her sinister mother Mrs Coulter (Ruth Wilson) on a remote island.
Meanwhile her father Lord Asriel (James McAvoy) tries to recruit rebel leader Ogunwe (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) for his war on the Republic of Heaven.
It’s a story for the long-term devotee rather than the casual viewer, but the visuals, script and performances are all strong. I
t’s a sign of the times that a saga which failed as a planned big-budget seasonal franchise starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig in 2007 is now a successful seasonal franchise on television.
