From last year’s devastatingly bleak Call the Midwife to the routine carnage of EastEnders, there’s a long tradition of dark telly over the festive seasonModern Toss on the
Christmas experience ...Blame Den and Angie. Until the devastating 1986 EastEnders episode in which the
Queen Vic’s landlord Den Watts chose Christmas Day to drop divorce papers on his wife, most TV Christmas specials were innocuous. Chas & Dave around the old Joanna. Ronnie Corbett in a Christmas sweater. Now, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without an aeroplane crashing into a pub and maiming half a dozen beloved soap stalwarts. From last year’s devastatingly bleak Call the Midwife to the routinely wanton carnage of Emmerdale, if it bleeds, it leads.
In truth, Christmas has always been darker than might be imagined. Originally, it dovetailed with the festival of Saturnalia, a wild bacchanalia in which criminals ran amok and gift-giving was simply a means of avoiding violent robbery. Meanwhile, mistletoe was prized by the Druids as an infertility cure – which gives a slightly queasy aspect to its modern status as the office flirt’s favourite vascular shrub. Over the years, we’ve filtered out most of this stuff; replaced it with chocolate and tinsel. But maybe some atavistic traces remain in our desire to see misery materialising on our TVs over the festive period.