Article

Christmas culture

Culture

18 December 2023

4 min read

TV’s search for the perfect Christmas special

Sitcoms rely on expectation and conventions. Here's the one rule that gets broken at Christmas time.

James Cary

James is a writer of sit coms for TV and radio.

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

Bluestone 42 Christmas Special, 2013.

BBC.

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

Nationalism

Politics

20 March 2025

4 min read

What Tom Paine really said about globalism and religion

We can’t live without homelands, but we need to be generous with them.

George Pitcher

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

A statue of a 18th century man holding a pen and a book.

Richard Croft, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

We live near Lewes in East Sussex, a town surrounded by genteel Conservatism but which inherits a certain edgy radicalism from Thomas Paine, whose utopian politics emerged there in the eighteenth century to inform both the French and American revolutions.

Paine haunts Lewes and his paraphernalia are everywhere. Walk the streets and it won’t be long before you spot posters quoting his most famous lines, among them “My country is the world and my religion is to do good”, from his seminal work Rights of Man.

He was a vicious critic of all organised religion, leading to the widespread assumption that he was an atheist. More accurately, he was a deist, a believer in a God who could and would deliver a global redemption of humankind, if we could and would only work towards that. The bit that’s most often left out of that famous quote is the phrase: “… all mankind are my brethren.”

Sometimes it takes a prophetic voice from outside mainstream religion to point us towards a world peace and a concord that seems beyond our faithful grasp. As ultra-nationalism is the go-to political ideology of our age, it’s such a voice that demonstrates that these populist creeds are the very antithesis of Paine’s globalist utopia.

There are tinpot nationalists throughout the world – Erdogan of Hungary, Meloni of Italy, Bolsonaro of Brazil, the list goes on – but it’s the superpowers that demonstrate most starkly the contrast between the narrow, inward and dark heart of ultra-nationalism and the generous, outward and illuminated vision of the globalist revolutionary.

It’s not just the contrast between what we currently have on the world stage and what we could have that’s remarkable, it’s the similarities between the psyches and prejudices of the ultra-nationalist super-powers, all of which sacrifice any worldview they might hold on the altar of their homeland self-interest. Take Russia, Israel and the United States. Don’t even start me on China.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia is embarked on an imperial expansionism that is positively tsarist. The attempted annexation of Ukraine is only the start, before reclaiming what are purported to be “Russian” state assets in the Baltics and beyond. Putin channels Peter the Great. This isn’t just demented desire for historical legacy, it speaks at home to the restoration of the motherland.

It’s the same incentive for Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel. Only continuing to oppress and purge the Palestinian state from its lands can the homeland of Israel be protected. It is precisely to satisfy the ultra-nationalists behind him that pushes him forward.

President Donald Trump in the US isn’t the peacemaker he fantasises about. To “make America great again” he has to put “America first”. This is about satisfying the baying boot boys that form the sump of Trump’s power base. Americans must live high on the hog at the expense of the rest of the world. Hence tariff wars, watch-the-lady trade deals and pan-arctic territorial aspirations.

This is not to say that peoples are to live without homelands. But it is precisely to tell us to be generous with them, to be good neighbours and to govern self-sacrificially.

What these three world leaders absolutely have in common is a worldview that predicates itself on satisfaction of nationalism at home that has to be paid for with suffering elsewhere. What they tell us is the exact opposite of Paine: “My borders are my country and my religion is to do harm.” They might add the sub-phrase: “… only my people are my brethren.”

The difference between patriotism and nationalism spawns many aphorisms. One such is that patriotism prioritises love of one’s own people and nationalism prioritises hate for other people other than one’s own. That’s not quite right, because both still hold the primacy of one’s own people over others, while Paine inferred the primacy of all people.

That’s what ultimately gives religious fervour to his voice. His declared detestation of religion seemingly ignores the tenets of the three Abrahamic faiths of the world, which have in common the welcome of the stranger, a duty to the poor and equality of all before God.

These commandments extend patriotism to love of all people. And, rigorously, they leave no room for nationalism at all. As for ultra-nationalism, we’re in the territory of abomination and sacrilege.

This is not to say that peoples are to live without homelands. But it is precisely to tell us to be generous with them, to be good neighbours and to govern self-sacrificially. That’s admittedly a tall order, but these are qualities that can either be identified in or imported into national identities as diverse as the American Constitution and Zionism.

The methodology for that is, admittedly, demanding. But it requires the ability to look outwards to the world, rather than inwards towards nation. And that becomes a religious vocation.

Our instincts, as nations, are inwards, but our callings our outwards. Sometimes it takes an outsider, like Paine, to point us in the right direction, outwards.

Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

Since March 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free. This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief

Give now