Christmas TV review: Mincemeat laced with melancholia as Call the Midwife bids for top of the tree again

You could call it the nuns’ habit. Top of the tree at Christmas-time, Call the Midwife (BBC1) has often been the most-watched show on the big day.

James (Nicholas Ralph) and Helen (Rachel Shenton) in All Creatures Great and Small

But this juggernaut of kindness, talcum powder, homily, towelling nappies, propriety and gripe water can occasionally be halted. Two years running the late Queen’s TV message was what a Covid-battered nation needed more than anything. So, anticipating the novelty of the first-ever King’s broadcast, Sister Julienne and the gang upped their game as the saga reached 1967.

Four - count ’em - births! A little girl’s dreamed-of doll’s house ending up in a bin lorry! A drunk confronting his demons! A marriage proposal! A space hopper appearing two years before they were introduced in Britain but to hell with continuity! A recital charting the history of woodwind instruments, all of them played abominably! Oh yes, Call the Midwife meant business …

For ten years now the plucked violins of the signature tune have segued into storylines which have tugged at the nation’s heartstrings. And occasionally chimed with the here and now.

Billie Piper in I Hate Suzie Too.

Take last season’s train crash. Or, take the pandemic. “”It’s like we’ve lost a bit of heart, or who we are,” said Fred, ruminating on the aftershock down Poplar way. So what did the ever-resourceful handyman do? Organise a talent contest - Poplartunity Knocks.

Call the Midwife wasn’t done with the thalidomide scandal. “Susan’s not like everyone else,” this young victim’s mother was told, seemingly dashing the girl’s hopes of getting onto the stage. To which Mum replied: “You’ve no idea how much she wants to be!”

This drama administers social history like cod liver oil. A mere drop of Drambuie in the mince pies, however, was “throwing caution to the wind”. There’s no need for an “adult themes” warning here. We don’t watch for the actual making of babies and an erotic dancer’s routine - discreetly filmed - had impresario Fred sighing: “We’ll never get this past Lucille and Violet.” But millions of us clearly love the probity and primness. It must say something of who we are, or at least who we used to be and may want to be again.

As in Call the Midwife, everyone in Doc Martin (ITV1) was making determined efforts to come together for the festivities but the planned revival of Portwenn’s lantern parade was being blocked by Health & Safety with back-up from Martin Clunes’ grumpy GP. He declared Christmas trees “incendiary devices” and removed an itchy, scratchy Santa from the grotto, saddening the children including son James.

Doc Martin

But then we had confirmed the truth behind his aversion to Yule and joy of any kind: his dreadful mother whose death on Christmas Eve prompted bad dreams flashing back to childhood when his parents left him home alone with a stocking containing pencils and an orange.

It got worse. On a mercy dash after crashing his car in the snow he suffered hypothermia and was greeted by the ghost of the old witch asking: “How old were you when you realised we didn’t love you?”

This was the last-ever episode of the Cornwall-set show and the first I’d watched. Was he always like this? How did he get away with such an appalling bedside manner for 16 years? Did his patients ever try to get him struck off or threaten to lock him in an abandoned tin mine or pin him by the ears to the mast of a fishing boat and float him out to sea?

A Christmas death was averted in Doc Martin but not Motherland (BBC1) where Julia’s “ungrateful old cabbage” of a mum breathed her last on a virtual ascent of Kilimanjaro. This was a melancholic end to the competitive-parenting comedy which began with a great gag at the school gates where the mummies - and Kevin - blatantly ignored the sign on the bins: “Please don’t dump your children’s artwork here.”

As with your own kids it’s not good to have favourites, but Liz makes a strong claim with her sarky quips (“There’s a queue, Phillip Schofield!”). Amanda engendered rare sympathy for her mum (Joanna Lumley) being revealed as a spiteful old cabbage. An exceptional Christmas special closed with a group-hug.

“Are we huggers now?” wondered Tristan, extricating himself from Siegfried’s grasp on the railway platform to head off to war. All Creatures Great and Small (Channel 5) was also exceptional. For the dinner-table heart-to-heart between the brothers ending with Siegfried bellowing: “I bloody love you, you damned fool!” For Mrs Hall under the mistletoe planting a smacker on Gerald, though I’m worried she didn’t re-emerge from underneath the most fearsome moustache in all Yorkshire. And for Siegfried’s aghast reaction, thwarted in love yet again.

The selection box kept producing with Two Doors Down (BBC1). I’ve missed Cathy but loved this special which vacated Beth’s front room for a coffee shop amid Glasgow’s shopping frenzy, Christine treating everyone including that big lump Alan. His lost wallet was found by the Salvation Army so he popped something in their collection-box - “That Irish fiver I got in the bookies.”

There was more melancholia with Christine destined to spend Christmas on her lonesome but for those surprised by this comedy’s soft centre, I Hate Suzie Too (Sky Atlantic) had Billie Piper back as the sex scandal-hit tabloid catnip. As satires on celeb culture go, with fewer laughs than before, this was a hard toffee. Suzie was attempting to re-launch her career on the talent show Dance Crazee, but what she really needed was the chance to teleport back to 1967, simpler times and Poplartunity Knocks.