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

Attention

Culture

Digital

Easter

5 March 2025

4 min read

Let your mind wander if you want to make the most of Lent

How to escape the cold and bitter tunnels of digital distraction.

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

A montage image places a woman, with eyes shut and hands on hip, at the centre of blurred circle of ground and tree branches.

Jr Korpa on Unsplash.

According to Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth century French polymath: all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

And now, four hundred years later, we have proof of how hard we find this.

Researchers carried out an experiment, putting several people in a room on their own with nothing else to do but sit there for fifteen minutes. A majority admitted feeling uncomfortable with little but their thoughts to console them. The experiment was repeated, only this time an instrument was placed in the room that could administer an unpleasant electric shock. In the fifteen-minute period, one in four women self-administered the shock to relieve the boredom. Two in three men did.

There is a chance we draw the wrong conclusions from social experiments because it is hard to get into the minds of others, but we can make a good guess here. Our lives are over-stimulated. To be alone in a room with our thoughts for any length of time is unusual to the point of weird. We don’t need to live like this. Our smartphones are the ‘rod and staff which comfort us’. Any spare moment can be spent using TikTok, Instagram or Spotify.

As people age, they tend to think the world is losing its attention span without realising that focus declines as we grow older. But something seems to have changed in the last two decades. A whole new digital architecture has been designed that wasn’t there. It creates the buzz of the city but has gone up around us like skyscrapers, creating cold shadows and bitter wind tunnels of anger and distraction that block out the warmth.

This new online city is intentionally designed to keep our attention; to prevent us from doing anything offline. And it is working. Between 2010 and 2020, globally, we consumed twenty times more information. This is a colossal increase for our brains to cope with in the blink of an evolutionary eye. Our minds have become less like the cool, white minimalist interior design people aspire to in life and more like the junk garage where broken and pointless stuff is tipped.

According to Johann Hari in Stolen Focus, we tend to blame ourselves for this state of affairs. After all, if we tell others our smartphone is distracting us, the answer we get back is to turn it off. While we can take steps like this, Hari says it lets tech companies off the hook. As with shopaholics, there is individual responsibility, but there is also the edifice of consumer capitalism designed to make us buy more stuff or absorb more information.

Mind wandering is, paradoxically, a form of attention. It is the space where we solve the puzzles of our lives, joining dots we had missed, colouring in a picture to bring it alive.

When we consider what it means to follow Jesus today, we often do not appreciate what tech is doing to us. The gains are obvious – having the world at our fingertips, being able to talk to family and friends in an instant – but the losses remain obscure. How does digital distraction affect reading of the Bible and a commitment to prayer? There is little research on this, but we may be giving God less devoted attention than before. In flitting from one source to another, like a fly on a hot summer’s day, we do not stay long enough in one place to discover if God is waiting for us there.

Prompts from God frequently emerge outside the thinking of the Church. A cohort of Silicon Valley tech wizards has come up with the idea of the digital Sabbath, where people spend one day a week unplugged. Though describing themselves as not especially religious, their manifesto practically drowns in religious tradition. They advise people to:

Avoid technology
Connect with loved ones
Nurture your health
Get outside
Avoid commerce
Light candles
Drink wine
Eat bread
Find silence
Give back

It is sabbath re-imagined for the digital era.

Johann Hari also lists some practical actions that can be taken, like staying on task and limiting exposure to social media in particular as it is shown to be bad for mental health in large doses. We should also allow our minds to wander. This does not contradict the argument about not losing focus. Mind wandering is, paradoxically, a form of attention. It is the space where we solve the puzzles of our lives, joining dots we had missed, colouring in a picture to bring it alive.

When the prophet Elijah meets with God at Mount Horeb, there is first a strong wind, then a powerful earthquake and lastly a raging fire. But God does not reveal himself in these gripping phenomena. He is to be found in the sheer silence which follows; in the whisper of a voice.

The sheer silence today is broken by the familiar buzz of a news feed or social media update – or the shock of an electric current. The moment we move out of earshot of the faint audio of the divine.

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