Christmas Day TV reviews: Doctor Who, Call the Midwife, Mrs Brown's Boys

A star in the east has shone over Doctor Who at Christmas. Ncuti Gatwa – from East Africa via the east coast of Scotland – sparkled in last night’s debut, brilliant teeth and all.

What a smile. What a swing of the kilt. And what a debut adventure on BBC1, rescuing not just abandoned babies from horrible goblins but Davina McCall as well.

Doctor Who had lost its way. Unforgivably, recent episodes were dull. Now can Gatwa go on and preserve the TV institution, whoosh it through the space-time continuum and pensionable age? Best of luck to him.

Born in Rwanda, raised in Edinburgh and Fife and a show-stealer on Sex Education, Gatwa has saved his Scottish accent for the 15th incarnation of the Time Lord. And – Whovians can confirm – was this the first time the plaid had been glimpsed since 1966 when the Tardis crash-landed at the Battle of Culloden?

Millie Gibson as Ruby and Ncuti Gatwa as Doctor Who.

This story began in present-day London with the genealogy quest of Millie Gibson’s Ruby Sunday – blonde, nearly 19, plays in a band, adopted – who by the end of the episode would become the new Doctor’s companion.

McCall, playing herself on a variation of Long Lost Family, was trying to help find Ruby's real mum; trolls with pointy ears and pointy teeth were doing their utmost to hinder. Gatwa’s first monsters, created by Disney CGI, seemed pretty scary for tea-time transmission but maybe small children were tucked up early, exhausted by the day’s excitements.

Grown-ups could enjoy references to telly and movies past, possibly unintentional. The chief goblin, when opening its gob, resembled the mechanical shark in Jaws, just after it had eaten Robert Shaw and just before Roy Scheider blew it up.

The conveyor belt rigged up to that gob – babe in peril trundling – looked to have been inherited from The Generation Game, set in reverse. The Christmas song “Gaudete” was namechecked for, I reckon, the first time since Alan Partridge. And once on board the goblins’ flying ship – seemingly of Monty Python construction – Gatwa had swapped his kilt for Richard “Shaft” Roundtree’s long leather coat.

The greatest and most gruesome of the goblins.

Something for everyone, then, though I'm not sure Gatwa's song-and-dance routine – fun as it was – will be appreciated by the true believers every time he's in a tight spot.

Then came TV’s Milk of Magnesia. If you were bloated with the excesses of the day, the gormandising and the credit card abuse, Call the Midwife (BBC1) must have cleaned out the system and the soul. Simple stories, heartwarming homilies, a caring Christmas. “The greatest gift we can receive is to be loved and be with others,” said Jenny Agutter’s Sister Julienne in a voice always on the edge of cracking. “Hand in hand, heart to heart, year by year.”

How many years has this vastly underrated drama been around? We’ve reached 1968 – Apollo 8 is thrilling the children who crave telescopes from Santa – so it can continue for a bit longer. And judging by the nation’s moral decay we’ll need it.

Vastly underrated, but only by dolts like me. I used to tease my wife for blubbing along. She’d hit back: “You just pretend to like those trendy, edgy shows with endings which leave everything hanging in a highly unsatisfactory manner.” I do like them, but… was that a bit of tinsel in my eye as an almighty effort went into lifting the spirits of poor Sister Monica Joan?

Jenny Agutter as Sister Julienne.

The grande dame of the Poplar mercy station had decided: “I am at the end.” Suffering from depression, she needed to remember happier times. Best-ever Christmas? “A knitted stocking on the bedstead and inside a rag doll, an orange and a book of common prayer… plum duff as spherical as the Earth itself… a tableau in the village church with a living ox and a living ass.” Everything was still vivid, as if “painted on glass and set with jewels”. Could Nonnatus House shoot for the moon and recreate the entire scene?

Meanwhile, normal, tumultuous life was happening all around. A forgotten Indian airman hero from the Battle of Britain languished in a beetle-infested basement. Two expectant mums who hated each other as schoolgirls – the only survivor from her family of the Bethnal Green Tube Disaster and a fertility drug guinea pig – found themselves in opposite beds. The latter, thinking she was having twins, ended up with quads when her ambulance crashed in a snowstorm.

Always in Call the Midwife there are trigger words: pilchards, pogo stick, Biafra, The Kinks, “Treacle” as a term of endearment. It is a drama that’s unashamedly nostalgic, unapologetically sentimental and, as the soundtrack strings gently weep, relentless in its search for the good in people.

For Sister Monica Joan’s rag doll, read Agnes Brown’s rocking-horse tree decoration. This was the single small thing which whooshed the latter back to Christmases of fond childhood memory as Mrs Brown’s Boys (BBC1) fulfilled its usual festive function of hanging around at the end of the night like brussels sprout-fuelled wind.

I like how the show irritates TV snobs but that’s as far as it goes. My Christmases of fond childhood memory are of Ronnie Barker’s fantastic wordplay. There is no comparison between fork handles/four candles and the confusion among Brendan O’Carroll’s Irish mammy and her clan caused by “goose fat” being misread as “fat goose”. Or a Christmas tree ordered from Australia instead of Austria meaning that – stop, everyone, you’re absolutely killing me – it was upside down.

The big, ahem, set-piece was when the tree fell on Mrs B. Unfortunately her injuries aren’t serious and she’s back on New Year’s Day.