Advent Horizon: Time to Stay In and Watch TV
Christmas specials – are they actually special?
Hi everyone. It’s the season… Time to open advent calendars, surreptitiously buy presents and drink mulled wine. Ideally in that order, but whatever takes your fancy, really. Due to daddy purchasing the girls’ advent calendars on the way home from work, and him working next to a hipster stationers, one of them has glitter-bedecked pictures of an oldey-timey German toy shop, and the other one has – I’m not making this up – a “collection of pre-Space Age images of the heavens from various iconographic traditions” inspired by Jungian archetypes. I’m actually quite tempted to reach for the rioja mid-breakfast, while explaining renaissance woodcuts of comets to confused six-year-olds. I’ve resisted so far, but I fear my knowledge of both astrophysics and art history peaked at 18. Might just go for chocolate next year.
When I started this newsletter in spring, I thought I’d get bored and give up after six weeks, but we have made it to Christmas, so two things are happening to celebrate. Firstly, editor Tom and I will write a festive guide to Christmas classics for children and adults next week; if you have any suggestions do message us or share them below and we’ll get watching.
And secondly, I have turned on a special Christmas offer: all subscriptions are half price until December 31st. I will probably do more paid content next year so if you pony up now a) you can save money and b) present it to someone with small children as a little Xmas present. Go on, you know you want to: here is the link.
Ahead of our thoughts on festive viewing more generally, I thought I’d talk about some of the many children’s Xmas specials that lurk on iPlayer and beyond at this festive time. Back in the eighties, Christmas specials weren’t such a big deal – and especially with American series, UK programme schedulers didn’t really care, so you’d end up watching them in March or something.
Now, every kids’ TV show seems to have a raft of seasonal specials (including Halloween episodes, WTF) and they actually line them up to go out at the right time. On top of this – and possibly this is middle age talking – there is… more Christmas season. People put their trees up earlier and earlier, Christmas jumper days are a thing, there are Elves on the Shelves (this creepy little surveillance state/additional emotional labour mofo is not coming anywhere near my house, thanks). There is just a lot of Xmas real estate that simply wasn’t here last century.
Luckily, there is also more TV for little people to watch while you attend to all this.
Octonauts Xmas specials
Octonauts has been going for over a decade and they have literally covered every creature that dwells in the briny depths (hence why they’ve had to come up with Octonauts: Above and Beyond and start on land-based life forms) but in that time they’ve come up with two banging Christmas specials. Octonauts: A Very Vegimal Christmas centres on the vegimals, the animal-vegetable hybrids in the crew which talk in meep morp spork language (you know what I mean).
There has been much speculation about their origin story. Created in a lab? The result of some Octolab gene editing experiment? Oompa-loompa-esque slaves of a colonial system? Yeah, turns out I’m not the only weirdo who overthinks children’s television. Anyway, the vegimals have their own, perfectly benign, origin story, told in this episode, which should extinguish any weird theories.
…my theory is that the octonauts exist in a timeline where the human race has wiped itself out through nuclear war so animals have evolved to take our place, there must be enough latent radiation remaining to cause genetic aberrations like the Vegimals to mutate though, this kind of backs that theory up!
Oh, right. Thanks, Albertjweasel on Reddit.
It also contains tropes galore. Instruction videos! It was all a dream! A giant blob of snot which is really relatable to any parents surviving winter flu season! There’s also Octonauts and the Great Christmas Rescue, in which they travel to the childhood home of Professor Inkling (the M/Gandalf/Picard of the Octoverse). At this undersea mountain they need to rescue a rare species of golden coral, and Inkling's little octopus nephew, Squirt.
Loads of Julia Donaldsons
Everyone loves Julia Donaldson… I think they’re fine. They rattle along nicely if you read them aloud, the Axel Scheffler illustrations are great, but I don’t quite get the level of hype they receive. Still, all the canonical biggies (The Gruffalo, Snail and the Whale, Stickman, Highway Rat, Superworm, etc.) have been made into animated epics by the BBC. Gruffalo and Snail have a sort-of reverse Die Hard* problem: although Christmas is never mentioned or depicted, they were made and marketed as seasonal event TV.
Big names come as standard (Helena Bonham Carter, Rob Brydon, Olivia Colman, David Tennant, and so on) and the animation is lush. I find them a bit… bland. I like a bit more cheeky subversion, a bit of Aardman, a bit of Ant and Dec on SM:BC, but I appreciate that isn’t for everyone and at Christmas you want something three generations of family can sit down and watch in Peace. The peacefulness is a big part of it: these books take five minutes to read! The programmes last half an hour! So even with
Rob Brydon
Speaking
Really
Really
Slowly
While an insect nibbles a leaf with a beautiful orchestral soundtrack
They
Still
Have lots of long gaps in the narrative
Which
Seems a bit boring to me.
Sorry.
CBeebies Christmas Pantos
Now these, my friends, are the absolute business. If you like panto, obviously. (Oh yes, I do!) All of the CBeebies stars get their kit on, tread the boards, and ham it up to the max. Andy, Justin, Evie, George… There’s something for everyone (including readers who might like to see Maddie Moate dressed as a mouse) This year’s edition is Beauty and the Beast, which includes the dad from Molly and Mack as “Snow Raven” so there’s a little treat for the mums as well. All the old ones are on iPlayer. I’m afraid they’ve all blurred into one, but I enjoyed Andy cast against type as a baddie (he’s good, and I’m from York so my panto standards are sky high) and Justin is living in that dame outfit.
We’ll be back before Christmas with our thoughts on everything from Richard Curtis to cute baby dragons… in the meantime, try not to plough through too many days of your chocolate calendar.
*For less terminally online readers, there’s an endless debate on the internet about “is Die Hard a Christmas film?” because it's an action film, but set at Christmas time. We may end up discussing this further in the next issue. Or we might not, because it’s kind of done at this point.
But, but, when you're six years old you need a sliver of moulded Cadburys chocolate every day of December. It's the law. It's what the baby Jesus wants.