Our take
The show's most purely Christmassy episode, and the one to put on if you only watch one. A village nativity going wrong is a gift of a premise, and the writers milk every audition and missed cue before landing a real birth in the middle of it. Alice's final question to Geraldine is the show at its sweetest and silliest.
What happens
It is Christmas 1999, with a new millennium about to begin, and Geraldine wants the village to put on a festive show worth remembering. A plain nativity play feels too obvious, so she seizes on Alice's idea of a live nativity that moves around the village outdoors, with Alice, who really is pregnant, as Mary and Hugo as Joseph. The auditions are chaos: Frank tries out as a wise man in a computer voice, Owen dresses as Elvis to play the King, and Jim turns up as Martin Luther King for the same part. Geraldine casts David as Herod, and he insists on showing the gentler side of the character. Rehearsals go badly and the performance goes worse. Animals run off, Geraldine ends up narrating from the back of a tractor, nobody can remember where the story has got to, and then Alice goes into labour mid-show. The baby, a girl, arrives at exactly the right moment in the story, leaving Alice to check with Geraldine whether she has just given birth to the Son of God.
Can the kids watch it?
Rated PG on DVD, so good for most families with children from about eight.
Cast and crew
Starring
- Dawn French as Geraldine Granger
- Emma Chambers as Alice Tinker
- Gary Waldhorn as David Horton
- James Fleet as Hugo Horton
- John Bluthal as Frank Pickle
- Roger Lloyd-Pack as Owen Newitt
Writers
- Richard Curtis
- Paul Mayhew-Archer