Aidan Smith's TV week: All Creatures Great and Small, The Winter King, Simple Minds: Everything is Possible, The 1970s Supermarket at Christmas

Is this the year Siegfried gets Mrs Hall under the mistletoe?

Samuel West as and James Anthony-Rose in All Creatures Great and Small

As those Hallmark movies get more gooey and the gluhwein in the street markets gets more gluey, it can seem like the over-commercialisation of Christmas will never end, with the true message being tossed away with the cracker jokes and the Nadine Dorries novels offered as gifts.

Well, unto Channel 5’s All Creatures Great and Small a child is born. Unto The Winter King on ITVX, too. Both babes arrive with war raging, one in Dark Ages Britain of the fifth century so its entrance into the world is unceremonious and really quite brutal. The tot of 1,500 years later should have it easier, no?“I’ve delivered hundreds of animals,” Siegfried (Samuel West) tells the heavily pregnant Helen when the midwife gets stuck in the snow. “How different from a sow can this be?”In this Christmas special James (Nicholas Ralph) tries for compassionate leave from the RAF. “I want to be there for the birth, I want to support my wife,” he tells his commanding officer, who barks back: “Where you need to be is in the air dropping bombs on the enemy.” So our Scottish vet goes AWOL, jumping on the backs of trucks, up hill and down dale and desperate to be the first New Man in Yorkshire, or indeed anywhere else, some 40 years before the caring, sharing concept became a thing.

Tristan has gone to fight, too, and while he still gets a mention, Skeldale House is a much quieter place. Conscious of this, Siegfried has cranked up his roaring, all the way to 11. “Just bloody get on with it!” he instructs new vet Carmody who is possibly on the spectrum although that is still four decades away as well.

Best pals since childhood, Charlie Burchill and Jim Kerr reflect on their pop lives.

So where is the show’s intrigue now? Ah, where it’s always been. Austin Sevens and Armstrong Siddeleys chug pluckily along drystone dyke roads. The Drover’s Arms with comely serving wench Maggie - don’t cancel me, this was how they spoke in the 1940s - is always warm and welcoming. And creatures’ bottoms great and small continue to be examined both day and night. But when, oh when, is Siegfried going to realise that his housekeeper, the “most remarkable” Mrs Hall, can be the woman to rid him of his melancholy? Just bloody get on with it!

As historical drama, The Winter King is meaty, peaty and meady but perhaps not gory or sexy enough to satisfy the cravings of the Game of Thrones crowd. In the opening episode there’s about to be a beheading but it’s stopped, while an attempted bonk in the woods is interrupted by a wolf. (I know, I know: in Game of Thrones the randy couple would have invited the wolf to stay and watch).

This is a revisionist take on the Arthurian legend, adapted from Bernard Cornwell’s The Warlord Chronicles. Eddie Marsan is the High King struggling to unite the Pagan and Christian tribes against the Saxons. Bellshill-born Stuart Campbell plays a warrior resembling Kurt Cobain. Iain de Cestaker is Arthur, the bastard son of Marsan’s character who’s banished for failing to protect the legitimate heir.

Can the High King sire another boy? Yes, but to say Merlin is unsure about the lad’s prospects is an understatement. “There is evil in him. I saw fire, slaughter, ruin … I saw the death of Britain.” The High King doesn’t ask for a second opinion - “The poison is in the jar, Hermione” - so what now?

Iain De Caestecker and Nathaniel Martello-White in The Winter King

Only one man, according to Merlin, is “the true authority to unite the tribes”. Hang on, does he mean Boris Johnson, the Tories’ would-be Blue Adair, rushing around capping blowouts in the party’s numerous factions? Nearly but not quite. This saviour is found on a beach, all hunky after a swim. “Come home, Arthur, only you can save the isle.”

Confession time: I once wrote a review of a Simple Minds concert teasing them about their do-goodery. The show was at Edinburgh’s Meadowbank Stadium so I wondered if Jim Kerr might, in breathless tones, dedicate songs to each and every one of the capital’s neglected housing schemes (“ … And this is for the oppressed and brave peoples of the Wester Hailes maisonettes, still waiting on repairs to their storm porches.”).

Their manager Bruce Findlay complained and maybe these were cheap shots. Conscience rockers were certainly easy targets and meeting the band later - after as Kerr would put it, they’d scaled the mountain and tumbled down the other side - I had accept that no one could send up the Minds better than the singer himself.

He’s at it again in the superb documentary Simple Minds: Everything is Possible (Paramount+). Is it possible that occasionally they were bombastic? Oh yes, he agrees. There was the era of big themes (Nelson Mandela, Northern Ireland, etc) and at the same time big trousers, with the billowing breeks Kerr chose for Live Aid causing him to spend the performance “not thinking about starving children but: how did I get it so wrong?”

They’d got it so right previously with songs like “I Travel”, the floor-filler every Friday night at my college disco and eulogised here by famous fans including Irvine Welsh, Mariella Frostrup (early on the Minds’ tape operator, lusted after by all) and Molly Ringwald. The latter starred in The Breakfast Club, the teen movie which produced their breakthrough American hit, “Don’t You Forget About Me”, with Ringwald describing Kerr’s singing as “gritty, sexy, like an obscene phonecall but in a good way”.

At the heart of both band and doc is the “bromance”, as Findlay puts it, between Kerr and guitarist Charlie Burchill, who met as boys on a mound of sand as new tower blocks at Glasgow’s Toryglen were under construction and have continued to be neighbours across the world, currently in Sicily.

There are touching moments as Burchill, back in Glasgow, revisits the guitar shop, Southside Music, where as a young strummer and dreamer he’d have just enough money for “a string”. Meanwhile Kerr looks in on the local public library where his father urged: “You’ve got to read. Educate yourself and you won’t be a slave.”

Most touching of all is the story of school-chum Joe Donnelly living next door to Kerr who’d wake him in the mornings after his parents had split up. Then Joe started having his tea at the home of the future rock idol before a week-long stay turned into 14 years and a friendship which stretched into the musical beginnings. Says Kerr: “That was a great thing for my mum and dad to do, and great for me to get a new brother.”

A Minds drinks bill flashes up: 61 bottles of Liebfraumilch consumed during one recording session. And Liebfraumilch turns up again in The 1970s Supermarket at Christmas (Channel 5) celebrating an era when we defied the three-day week and shopping by candlelight to attempt sophistication with vol-au-vents and battled France in the courts over the credibility of Babycham. By the way, chocolate advent calendars - doing away with those simple, charming images of Christmas - were introduced in 1978. That’s probably when everything started to go wrong.