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.

Article

America

Culture

Politics

20 January 2025

3 min read

God goes public: the inauguration and the return of faith-talk

This Inauguration Day, Jack Chisnall explains why the 'Church and State' separation just can't hold.

Jack Chisnall

Jack Chisnall is a former gag teller and Oxford Theology graduate, combining the two at Holy Fooling.

The 47th President of the United States of America

Inauguration Day. Donald Trump again makes an oath to defend and uphold, as best he can, the Constitution of the United States. It has always been a fairly swift-moving bit of public pomp - swift compared to coronations at any rate, which typically take hours just to put a crown on a royal head. The Presidential inauguration can take as little as six minutes, and viewers get more bang for their buck: the President is confirmed not only as the head of the ruling government, but the representational head of state too.

It’s all a good lesson in the ‘separation of Church and State’ some will opine. Forget the medieval-sounding solemnities and pageantry, and Archbishops intoning things over altars. Here, a man in a suit enters a civic covenant with the people who have democratically elected him. Before President Jackson’s escort was swamped by 20,000 spectators in 1829 and security protocol had to cordon off spectators, the first inaugurations had a humble, almost mundane aspect: the new president would go about to shake hands with citizens who had popped along to see the ceremony, and to wish the new guy “good luck”. Sources show that Abraham Lincoln shook over 5,000 hands when he was inaugurated for a second time in 1865.

But such well-worn narratives - of humankind progressing from strange, religious druidry to sane, reasonable democracy - are looking creakier than ever, in 2025. Such views were all the rage in the 20th century. But the West is having a fundamental rethink about what exactly it would mean for humans to ‘de-anchor’ themselves from a religious way of being. We have learnt by now - the hard way - that we merely swap one form of worship for another in supposedly ‘irreligious’ societies.

In the first place, the ‘separation of church and state’ history is not as simple as all that. While it’s true that the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution did not establish a church on the national level, as in England, there were plenty established at the state level just fine. Connecticut was Congregationalist until as late as 1818 - residents paid taxes to, and were educated by, the church. There was nothing in the law to prevent it.

But it is the inauguration itself which reveals that religious instincts cannot be extracted so easily from human affairs. For George Washington, the first President to be inaugurated back in New York City in 1779, the rather last-minute idea was that he should swear on a Bible. None being found to hand, they borrowed one - from a nearby Masonic Lodge. It was fitting. The Founding Fathers certainly tweaked and trimmed the traditional religions they were raised in - but they could not dispense with them. Even the word, ‘inaugurate’, is snagged on a religious root. ‘Augury’ was the practice of discerning the will of the Gods in Ancient Roman political cult.

Christian imagery and sentiment has, over time, returned to irrigate the dry, rationalistic plains of U.S. civic ceremonial. Certainly the likes of Washington and Jefferson saw their country under the auspices of a Supreme Being, just not necessarily aligned with one of the world’s faiths. But for the George Bush inauguration of 1989, the evangelical tone was explicit. Billy Graham began things with an invocation, and the new President ordered a national day of prayer to follow, in thanksgiving for a successful transfer of power. There will be quite an obvious development of this during Trump’s 2025 inauguration, when Franklin Graham, the son of the famed evangelist, will lead the invocation prayer alongside Catholic Cardinal Timothy Dolan.

There is, perhaps, no getting around the human need to call on something larger than ourselves in our most meaningful moments - when we pledge to love someone for the rest of our lives, or swear our commitment to rule justly. The inauguration has been a good indicator of this, in the way that it has increasingly reached for an older, outright Christian language in which to express the profoundest longings and ambitions of a nation. God, it turns out, never quite leaves the frame.