A Christmas TV special is as much a staple of the Big Day as The Queen’s – and, latterly, The King’s – Speech. This year, millions are expected to watch the hotly anticipated return of sitcom Gavin And Stacey, while the cast of Outnumbered reunite on Boxing Day.
Their creators will hope that the shows, often years in the making, their plots closely guarded secrets, will earn a place in the pantheon of festive TV greats alongside that Batman and Robin episode of Only Fools And Horses.
Now, the previously untold stories behind some of our most beloved festive specials can be revealed, as part of Channel 5 documentary Britain’s Favourite Christmas Comedy Moments. Airing tonight at 9pm, the show describes how Martin Clunes nearly set the Men Behaving Badly set alight, how Milton Keynes doubled as a Moroccan desert in Birds Of A Feather and how a real-life lord gatecrashed the filming of Keeping Up Appearances – much to the delight of character Hyacinth Bucket.
But first, to the 2003 Absolutely Fabulous special in which Dame Joanna Lumley‘s painfully thin Patsy chews a sliver of turkey as if it’s the only food to pass her lips that year.
Dame Joanna rehearsed the scene at home, such was the suspicion that the joke – so integral that the episode was called Cold Turkey – would be leaked before the show aired.
‘She’d gone home and rehearsed it in front of a mirror,’ reveals executive producer Jon Plowman in Britain’s Favourite Christmas Comedy Moments, on Channel 5 at 9pm tonight. Dame Joanna had to figure ‘how it would be if Patsy ate, and the expressions are the funniest thing of the show’. It was a feat she achieved ‘rather wonderfully’. But Plowman says the scene wasn’t revealed until the last minute, as Ab Fab creator Jennifer Saunders kept it fiercely under wraps. He said: ‘I would ring her up and say, ‘When are we likely to get the script?’
‘And she would say, ‘Well with any luck next week.’ And she knew she was lying and I knew she was lying. Twelve pages would arrive and it would say, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll put in some jokes later.’ ‘
Counting down the top 30 moments from Christmas specials, the Channel 5 show spills the beans on many unforgettable episodes, including a Birds Of A Feather set-piece in which snooty and highly sexed neighbour Dorien Green straddles a camel.
Having jetted off to Morocco with sisters Tracey Stubbs (Linda Robson) and Sharon Theodopolopodous (Pauline Quirke) for 2016’s There’s A Girl In My Souk, Dorien finds herself stranded in the desert with only a camel for company. But Chigwell’s finest didn’t, in fact, leave the UK. Instead, thanks to the production team’s artfully created sandscape, the scenes were filmed in Milton Keynes.
Lesley Joseph, who portrayed Dorien, said: ‘I did actually ride the camel, that wasn’t a double, it was me. A little secret I will share with you, you’ll look into the distance, there’s the desert, there she is coming along, and round the corner is Milton Keynes! We filmed that in Milton Keynes, there you go, that’s TV for you.’
In 1997, it was the puerile antics of Gary and Tony in Men Behaving Badly that had millions in hysterics on Christmas Day. In a typically laddish attempt at cooking the turkey dinner, Gary (Martin Clunes) hacks the bird to pieces to fit it in the oven. He rewards himself with a skinful of Baileys and falls asleep in a drunken stupor.
Leslie Ash, who played Deborah, explains: ‘He wakes up with smoke in the kitchen. He opens the oven and the amount of flames that shot out – no one was prepared for that at all. That was a big shock that, when the fire came out of that oven, that wasn’t meant to be like that.’ Actor John Thompson, who played a guest character, added: ‘It was a real fire! It would be CGI flames now probably.’
And few will forget the most revered of Christmas specials: the Heroes And Villains episode of Only Fools And Horses. In 1996, almost 20 million saw Del Boy and Rodney – David Jason and Nicholas Lyndhurst – unknowingly stop a street mugging while dressed as Batman and Robin. Like the rest of us, Jason couldn’t stop laughing upon seeing his co-star as Robin.
But actress Sheree Murphy, who played one of the muggers, didn’t see Lyndhurst in fancy dress, because the show’s producers were so fearful that their set-piece would become public knowledge beforehand, that they filmed Del Boy and Rodney running down the road separately from the mugging. She said: ‘We only got part of the script, so it kind of didn’t make sense. The reactions we gave [on camera] to seeing Batman and Robin, well, we had no Batman and Robin there, we had to react to nothing! It was that secret.’
Production designer Donal Woods added: ‘The streets where we filmed we blocked off. We had hundreds of security people. We wanted to make it a surprise for Christmas Day for the nation.’
Another festive favourite was Keeping Up Appearances, the beloved social satire following Hyacinth Bucket’s enduring quest to keep up with the suburban Joneses. Their 1993 special, Sea Fever, saw Hyacinth (Patricia Routledge) and her husband Richard (the late Clive Swift) take a cruise on the QE2.
Two of the hoi polloi onboard are revealed to be Hyacinth’s frightfully common sister Daisy (Judy Cornwell) and her slobbish husband Onslow (the late Geoffrey Hughes), yet the more rarefied passenger they encounter, Lord Lichfield, wasn’t in the original script – the real-life aristocratic photographer happened to be on board the ship during filming. Production assistant Susan Smith said: ‘Lord Patrick Lichfield was onboard, he was a guest lecturer on photography.
‘Harold [Snoad, the director who died in June aged 88] thought he was marvellous.’ She recalls him saying, ‘I will just ask him if he wants to be involved,’ which he did, and he ‘joined Harold and Patricia and Clive for dinner’.
One of the first specials was The Good Life back in 1977. It followed the story of Christmas dinner not being delivered to the Leadbetters, so Margo (Penelope Keith) and Jerry (Paul Eddington, who died in 1995) spend the day with Tom (the late Richard Briers) and Barbara Good (Felicity Kendal).
Keith says how they discussed whether, given the sexual tension between them, their characters would have ever swapped partners. ‘Margo wouldn’t, I mean she wouldn’t have nipped into bed with Tom Good at all. But I rather feel that Jerry would have done.’
Now that would have been a Christmas special to remember.
