Our take
Strictly a New Year's Eve episode, but it lives in the BBC's Christmas collections and plays like one: a living room, a family who rub each other up the wrong way, and a trifle nobody is allowed to eat. Made in the shadow of 2020, it is old-school and a touch bittersweet, because it was the last festive special with Bobby Ball, who is as cheeky as ever as Frank.
What happens
It is New Year's Eve, the end of a hard year, and Lee and Lucy are hosting their first family get-together in months: Lee's father Frank, put-upon Toby, uptight Anna, Lucy's father Geoffrey, who is nostalgic for the solitude of lockdown, and her unusually high-spirited mother Wendy. By family tradition nobody may touch the trifle until midnight. A fraught game of Heads Up, with famous names on post-it notes, shows that several guests would rather be somewhere else: Anna laments missing a son et lumiere at Hampton Court, while Frank, with Hank Marvin stuck to his forehead, flirts with Wendy and keeps getting yes-or-no questions wrong. When Frank's jokes are criticised, the parlour games give way to a no-holds-barred round of resolutions for each other, and with forty minutes to go until midnight, friendly suggestions about everyone's behaviour go down badly. Lucy, desperate to see in 2021 without squabbling, threatens to throw trifle at the next person who speaks up.
Can the kids watch it?
No BBFC rating was found; it went out after the 9pm watershed with the show's usual innuendo, so it best suits teenagers and adults.
Cast and crew
Starring
- Lee Mack as Lee
- Sally Bretton as Lucy
- Hugh Dennis as Toby
- Abigail Cruttenden as Anna
- Geoffrey Whitehead as Geoffrey
- Deborah Grant as Wendy
- Bobby Ball as Frank
Writer
- Lee Mack
Director
- Nick Wood