Del - Why don’t you do what I do? Don’t look at the dinner, just put it in your mouth and think of England!
The First Christmas special sees the Trotters faced with eating Grandad’s Christmas dinner, which truly lives up to the hype that they set out for it during the opening scene. The giblets being kept in the bag whilst being cooked along with stuffing and onions is both a laugh and cringe moment. We don’t see many more pure Christmas scenes like this in the remaining episodes, only a couple spring to mind and none as disastrous on the food front as this.
There are a couple of heartfelt moments before and after the meal showing that Del’s main priority is Grandad, ensuring that he feels he has a role to play in the family still (cooking the Christmas dinner) and ensuring that they stay in keeping him company.
When Grandad flips the table and goes off to the old folks Christmas do at the community centre, it allows the brothers licence to hit the Monte Carlo Club.
Here we are back in familiar territory as seen in Go West Young Man as we see Del and Rodney trying to chat up women in a bar. It’s Rodney steps up to take the lead this time however (with the help of a borrowed body language book) which goes disastrously. This reinforces the roles that we saw in that previous episode of Del naturally taking the lead on chatting to the women - and the brothers revert to type at the end, but it is too late.
Overall this episode has a few good laughs in it - mostly at each other’s expense, but John Sullivan explains the script was last minute, and this shows with the lack of action in the episode. It’s not the last Christmas special we see by any stretch but others detract from the Christmas theme more and we the audience are often better off for it.
Tomorrow’s episode: The Long Legs of the Law
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