I’m fascinated with festivals and traditions — it’s something that has always interested me, to the point that I wrote my Honours thesis about religious festivals in Ancient Rome. The history of Christmas, with its hodge-podge of different cultural traditions layered in over so many assumptions and so much storytelling has become something of an obsession of mine in recent years.
I was delighted to find some new TV Christmas Specials to love this year — my favourite genre of holiday media, still competing strongly with Fakey Better-Than-Hallmark Romances on Netflix and Festive Teen Wolf Fanfic.
Old favourites include Miranda, The Vicar of Dibley, AbFab, Community, Parks and Rec, Brooklyn 99, Gavin and Stacey and of course the ultimate retro classics, Blackadder’s Christmas Carol and Bernard & the Genie (the latter is a TV movie, it counts). Plus, you know. Thirteen years of Doctor Who taking on Santa robots and flying sharks.
Upstart Crow, the not-exactly-new-anymore Shakespeare sitcom by Ben Elton, is both educational and entertaining — but its 2017 Christmas Special which I discovered on Australian iView this year is an instant classic! I love how many of the jokes come out of real historical detail, building in so many bits of Elizabethan Yuletide tradition with a bunch of modern smirks to camera. They talk about the Advent fast, the Lord of Misrule, wassailing and of course the twelve nights themselves, which we mostly hear about these days via pre-Christmas sales advertising.
I particularly adored the way that one of the Love, Actually plotlines was woven in, building up to a truly extraordinary scene with Emma Thompson guest starring as a brittle, savage and deeply complex Queen Elizabeth I. More than a sitcom! Those are some of the best lines I’ve ever seen her deliver as an actor.
Another recent discovery for me, as I’ve been mining the comedy trove in iView, is a sitcom I’ve been meaning to track down for years — Plebs! This laddish, “boys behaving badly” comedy happens to have a killer cast and sets so beautiful I couldn’t believe it — how does it look that good? Sitcoms can’t afford that level of historical accuracy and scope, let alone the CGI to fake it! (turns out they film in a replica Rome somewhere in Spain)
Anyway the first season of Plebs ends with a Saturnalia episode that beautifully summed up so many traditions of Ancient Rome with an irreverence that I really enjoyed. Io Saturnalia!
You will find me reading a Saturnalia poem here on the latest episode of Cabaret of Monsters on the Sheep Might Fly podcast.
Those of you who are pining after a Doctor Who Christmas Special this year, hopefully the next Verity episode will be some comfort to you — it is a festive game (not saying what kind) devised by Our Liz, and you have to hear it to believe it. It’s going up on Christmas Day in the US which means, in true Christmas fashion, Australians get to hear it on the 26th.
Also check out this splendid post by Paul Cornell in which he responds to a challenge I gave him, to invent Classic Who Christmas Specials that never were. I’m now a bit heartbroken that they don’t exist (or, if they do, it’s in an attic somewhere with the long lost Feast of Steven).
Happy holidays if you celebrate, and happy Blissfully Quiet 25th if you do not. What are your favourite TV holiday specials or Christmas episodes???
I have two festive novellas out this year! Check out Merry Happy Valkyrie, a cozy Christmas tale of Norse magic, snow and Tasmanian weather, and also Cabaret of Monsters, a dark fantasy celebration of Saturnalia, shape-changers and holiday theatre.