TV’s search for the perfect Christmas special

Sitcoms rely on expectation and conventions. James Cary shares the one rule that gets broken at Christmas time.

James Cary

James Cary is a writer of situation comedy for BBC TV (Miranda, Bluestone 42) and Radio (Think the Unthinkable, Hut 33).

Dressed in camouflage uniforms and makeshift costumes, soldiers create a nativity scene

Bluestone 42 Christmas Special, 2013.

There are rules to sitcoms. I should know. I’ve been writing sitcom scripts for over twenty years. This includes two Christmas specials (Miranda and Bluestone 42). When you start writing a Christmas episode of a sitcom, you look back to Christmas specials you saw as a child. Soon, you are aware that there are certain expectations for a Christmas special. You also realise you can break one of the rules of sitcom.

Before I explain what that is, let me give you the basic rules of a TV sitcom. Essentially you need three things: Characters; conflict; and a confined space. Each episode has a beginning and a middle and end, but the characters must end up back where they started.

The characters in a sitcom are in conflict. They have contrasting viewpoints, seeing the world very differently. And they are confined, unable to walk away from each other because they are family (Think Del and Rodney in Only Fools and Horses), or they have to work together (Think Sir Humphrey and Hacker in Yes, Prime Minister) or they all live in the same suffocatingly small village (Think Geraldine and Alice in The Vicar of Dibley).

Each week, the characters have quests. They conflict. The story plays out in the same reliably predictable but surprising way. Del Boy has another get-rich-quick scheme; Sir Humphrey tries to stop Hacker from changing anything; and the Vicar of Dibley keeps trying to help Alice and the idiots who surround her. That can’t change, even in a Christmas special.

At Christmas, however, you can have your characters go on a journey. That’s quite a popular option. But the journey has to be arduous – like the journey to Bethlehem – and might involve a pregnant woman (think The Royle Family) – like the journey to Bethlehem. But your characters could go on a road trip in any episode. That’s not the rule you have to break.

Your Christmas special might be centred around your character’s own version of what constitutes ‘the perfect Christmas’. These expectations must be met, but the lesson is normally that it’s all about who you’re with, not what you do. In the Bluestone 42 Christmas special, the bomb disposal team in Afghanistan are away from home so trying to have a ‘normal’ Christmas with turkey and a nativity play in which yonder star turns out to be a mortar attack by the Taliban. But they’re in it together.

Family is always important in a sitcom, but doubly so in a Christmas episode. In Miranda Series 2, our comedy heroine wants to do Christmas her own way with her friends, and not spend the day with her embarrassing and eccentric parents. But she learns a common Christmas lesson that family comes first, home is best, and no-one does Christmas better than your own family. Again, this is not a deviation from the normal rules.

So, what rule does the Christmas episode break? It is cast iron law across all genres of television. It’s the Deus Ex Machina. That’s not normally allowed. Deus Ex Machina literally means ‘God from the machinery’. It’s a Latin term for what happens in Greek theatre. Actors representing gods would be suspended above the stage and at the denouement of the play, they would come down and intervene, so that everything is sorted out.

It’s not for a twenty-first century sitcom writer to say that the Greeks didn’t know anything about theatre, but wow. Modern audiences would not stand for this totally unjustified divine intervention. If a character was about to be exposed by the annual Church fete and at the last minute, a thunderstorm out of nowhere rained off the whole event, you would start throwing things at the TV. If a character declared undying love to another and it was not reciprocated, the sudden discovery of a foolproof love potion in the third act would have the producer, director, the cast and even the make-up lady asking for rewrites.

But at Christmas, God comes down from on high. So, in your seasonal sitcom special, you’re allowed a miracle. In fact, the audience are almost demanding a ‘Christmas miracle’. This is the time of year when magic happens.

This miracle normally happens overnight because that’s when miracles happen. The Wise Men followed the star to the witness the child born of a virgin. Given stars were involved, we presume it was night time (although the text doesn’t say so). Marley and three Christmas ghosts visit Ebeneezer Scrooge at night. He is miraculously transformed by the experience.

Christmas is a time when lots of people going to church who normally would not, but the vast majority of people in the UK do not go to church or worship God at Christmas. But the incarnation, that is story of God made flesh in Christ, keeps poking through and turning up whether we like it or not. If we won’t go to church to hear that story, God will send it through waves and wires and onto our screens in TV specials so that we all remember that Christmas isn’t just a time for family and traditions; it is a time of miracles. At Christmas, we allow ourselves the luxury of belief.

Column

Culture

Royalty

14 February 2024

4 min read

Death focuses our minds on what really matters

From ballet tales to royal soap opera, stories shed light on Lent's dark mortality.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

In the style of a Rembrandt painting Prince Harry embraces his father King Charles.

Midjourney.ai

The season of Lent – the 40 days of penitential fasting preceding the great feast of Easter – is unavoidably about death and dying. Christians try to die to sin; the season culminates with the brutal, if salvific, death of the Christ on the cross on Good Friday and it’s said that if we, as disciples, can’t die with him at Calvary, then we can’t truly know what it is to rise with him at Easter dawn.

Those of us who attend an “ashing” service at church this Ash Wednesday, will have a cross traced on our foreheads by a priest, made from the ashes of the palm crosses from last year’s Palm Sunday, with the words: “Remember that dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return.”

Reprising folk goddess Joni Mitchell, we’re thus reminded that we are but stardust and these bodies that we lug about are all bound towards that destination. In short, we’re all going to die.

So as signs of new spring life are appearing all around, the Christian Church starts to wallow in existential misery. To paraphrase the lugubrious Mona Lott (geddit?) from the wartime BBC comedy It’s that Man Again, it’s being so cheerful that keeps we Christians going.

Against this, I’d like to mount a case that there really are reasons to be cheerful in Lent; that, if the words of the ancient Gregorian chant that “in the midst of life we are in death” are true, then the reverse is also true, that in the midst of death we’re living life.

Dead, but alive again. Lost, but found. These are the qualities that ameliorate the dark mortality of Lent.

This thought comes to me partly because of the extraordinary reconciliation and peace that families often experience as they lose one of their loved number. And it comes partly having just watched a livestream of the Royal Ballet’s latest production of Manon. Our heroine dies in a New Orleans penal colony, having been exiled as a prostitute from bourgeois Paris, sustained at the end not by worldly wealth but only by the devotion of her lover.

It’s quite a story – catch it if you can. It contains the key tenet of faith during Lent, that love conquers death. Having embraced our Lenten mortality, that’s the truth we endeavour to embrace at Easter. And that, for me, begins to put the love back into Lent, which is otherwise bleak and bitter, like the sour wine offered to the dying Christ.

My case is that it takes our mortality to clock what’s really important. And we witness that human realisation all the time. I believe we’ve just seen it in Prince Harry’s transatlantic flight to visit the King on his cancer diagnosis. King Charles becomes simply a dad again when his son is presented with the reality and realisation of his mortality, that sooner or later he is going to die.

As it turns out, that reality turns out to be infinitely more important than whether he got a smaller bedroom than his big brother when they were boys (copyright Spare, Bantam Press).

It’s stories like these – from Manon to the soap opera of the modern royals – that put human mortality into bas relief, so that we can see it properly. But it’s particularly Harry’s mercy mission to his father that chimes, for me, with a gospel story, or parable as we call them.

It’s not one that’s about kings or weddings – or even principally about death and dying. I’m thinking of the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Plot synopsis: A landowner has two sons. The younger one asks to cash in his inheritance and travels away to a foreign land, where he spends all he has on a debauched lifestyle (cf. the Paris from which Manon “escapes”) and is reduced to tending pigs and coveting their swill. He returns humbled to the family estate, where his father welcomes him with a feast, much to the consternation of his brother.

Sound familiar? Sure, Charles isn’t God, as we assume the forgiving father to be in the parable. Nor is Harry asking to return, humbled and repentant (though we don’t know that, do we?). Nor has he been reduced to a diet of pigswill, unless California and Netflix contracts count as that.

Possibly more accurately cast is Prince William as the elder brother, who in the parable objects to his sibling’s welcome back, pointing out that he’s done all his father’s work without such reward.

Here, for our Lenten purposes, the father’s reply is key: “My son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.”

Dead, but alive again. Lost, but found. These are the qualities that ameliorate the dark mortality of Lent. For royals, commoners, the trafficked, the desperate and alone, it delivers the one thing that death can’t extinguish: Hope.