Our take
A Christmas special about memory and mortality that never becomes gloomy, thanks to a grand plan to give an elderly nun the Victorian Christmas of her childhood. Around it are an ambulance birth in the snow, an old airman's buried trauma and the space race on the television. The finale, a living nativity, is one of the loveliest images the show has produced.
What happens
It is December 1968: Apollo 8 is about to fly round the Moon, and Sister Monica Joan is convinced this will be her last Christmas and that she will not live to see a man walk there. Trixie has moved out to begin married life with Matthew, and the sisters give Nancy and her daughter Colette a flat at Nonnatus. A parcel from May's birth mother in Hong Kong unsettles the Turners. When Dr Turner diagnoses Monica Joan with depression, everyone sets out to recreate a Christmas from her Victorian childhood, down to a living nativity based on a Flemish painting, helped by Trixie's brother Geoffrey. Cyril, boarding up condemned basement flats for the council, befriends Mr Sharma, a wartime airman living in squalor who refuses all doctors; he turns out to be diabetic and still haunted by a crash and his discharge, and Cyril and Dr Turner find him help. Brenda Shelby, pregnant after fertility treatment, is expected to have twins; on the way to hospital through the snow her ambulance is hit and the babies keep coming, four in all. A new mother she once fell out with helps feed them. Monica Joan arrives by carriage to see the nativity she remembers.
Can the kids watch it?
Rated 12 by the BBFC for moderate injury detail, so best for 12 and over.
Cast and crew
Starring
- Judy Parfitt as Sister Monica Joan
- Laura Main as Nurse Shelagh Turner
- Stephen McGann as Dr Patrick Turner
- Megan Cusack as Nurse Nancy Corrigan
- Zephryn Taitte as Cyril Robinson
- Vanessa Redgrave as Voice of Mature Jennifer Worth
Writer
- Heidi Thomas
Director
- Syd Macartney