Our take
The Christmas episode that made this show a Christmas Day habit. It spends most of its forty minutes on post-dinner torpor, then turns on a sixpence into one of the tenderest scenes in British sitcom, and earns it completely. When Jim sits with Denise on the bathroom floor, the joke and the feeling are the same thing. Short, quiet and essential.
What happens
Christmas dinner is over at the Royles' house in Manchester and the family settle in front of the telly to sleep it off. Denise is heavily pregnant and, rather than come downstairs, rings her mum Barbara from upstairs on her new mobile phone. Snowballs stand in for the usual mugs of tea, while Jim grumbles that Christmas is a racket designed to take his money. Dave, Antony and Nana are there too, and for a long stretch nothing very much happens, which is the point. Then, as the family start to drift off to their own homes, Denise's waters break. Jim races upstairs and ends up sitting with his daughter on the bathroom floor beside the avocado bath, the gruff father suddenly gentle as she faces what is coming. The episode closes on a family whose world is about to change: the baby, David, arrives on Christmas Day, which is why the 2000 special marks his first birthday.
Can the kids watch it?
Rated 12 by the BBFC on DVD for frequent mild language; fine for most teenagers, and younger children will simply be bored by the talk.