Must Watch Christmas TV Special

Every week, the Must Watch podcasters review the biggest TV and streaming shows.

However, this week Hayley Campbell and Scott Bryan share their top recommendations for what's on this Christmas.

What will you be watching? Leave your comments below...

Scott recommends: The Snowman: The Film That Changed Christmas (17 December, Channel 4, 5pm)

It is a documentary exploring how they put The Snowman together. Of course, the animation itself hardly needs an introduction. The Raymond Briggs cartoon is a classic. He originally illustrated it based on the nature around his cottage in Sussex. And this documentary looks at the team who turned a three-minute picture book into an iconic thirty-minute film.

There are lovely stories, such as that the music score by Howard Blake was thought up a decade before the film came about as he was walking on a beach in Cornwall. The amount of effort that went into The Snowman animation is also seriously impressive. There are 12 drawings a second, so that’s 720 a minute. So, over the course of the 30-minute film, there are more than 18,000 drawings in all.

Hayley recommends: I Hate Suzie Too (20 December, Sky Now, 9pm)

This is a kind of anti-Christmas special because while it’s got Christmas trees in it, and it’s set in the lead-up to Christmas, it’s definitely not one of those get-your-grandparents-and-extended-family-to-all-sit-around-the-telly-and-watch-this Christmas shows. If you did that you would instantly regret your life.

This is the second series of the show that came out in 2020. If you haven’t seen the first series, you can find all eight episodes on Now TV. It’s about a former child star called Suzie Pickles, played by Billie Piper, whose life is turned upside-down when her phone is hacked and some life-ruining pictures make their way into the newspapers. This series is set about six months after the first series: Suzie has a new agent, and a new job dancing in this sort of Saturday night, Strictly-type dance competition called ‘Dance Crazee’. Her personal life is completely falling apart so she’s trying very desperately to win back the love of the public.

I love this show because it is brutal. There is brutal truth about everything in this. Nothing is sugar-coated, even the lighting is harsh and unflattering. I love that there is truth about what going through IVF is like, what abortions are like, and what it’s like to be pushed to the brink. It’s proper acting from Billie Piper – I’ve never seen anything like this from her before, not even in the first season. We even get to see her dancing again, which I haven’t seen in years. And Lucy Prebble, who wrote the show and also co-created it with Piper, is so funny and sharp.

I was disappointed that this season is only three episodes. But then I watched them, and they such perfectly formed balls of stress and nightmare that I really don’t think my heart could have handled more. I love it. And as someone who really can’t stand all the kind of twee nonsense that turns up around Christmas time, I think this is the perfect antidote to all that.

Hayley recommends: Vardy v Rooney: A Courtroom Drama (21 December, Channel 4, 9pm)

This is a two-part drama that tells the story of the Colleen Rooney/Rebecca Vardy trial, which was dubbed the Wagatha Christie case. If you somehow missed this story (I don’t know how that would be possible, because it was enormous: it took over social media for weeks) the basic gist is Rooney kept finding that private stories about her had been leaked to the papers. So she did her own detective work by posting fake stories on Instagram that only Vardy could see to prove that she was the leak. It was an ingenius move.

This drama is set entirely in the court room, and it was made using actual transcripts from the trial. I know that kind of thing can turn some people off because TV shows set entirely in court rooms can feel a little stiff and claustrophobic, but I really liked this, and I think what I liked about it is Michael Sheen, who plays Coleen Rooney’s barrister David Sherborne. Sheen performs my actual nightmare which is: having my WhatsApps read out in court. If this happened to me I would simply pass out in the dock. It is absolutely mortifying. And the fact that this happened is delicious.

Hayley recommends: A Ghost Story For Christmas: Count Magnus (23 December, BBC Two, 10pm)

I have always been a huge fan of ghost stories at Christmas. I love the M.R. James adaptations, like Whistle and I’ll Come to You, like the BBC did in the 60s, which remains one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen. And Lost Hearts. Mark Gatiss loves them too. He did a documentary about M.R. James about 10 years ago, and last year he did an adaptation of M.R. James’ story The Mezzotint, which was brilliant. It’s still on BBC iPlayer if you missed it.

This year he’d adapted a story called Count Magnus, which is about an English scholar who travels to Sweden to look into the family history of this old Swedish dynasty, and he finds out that the long-dead founder of this dynasty might not be as dead as we think.

It’s great. These ghost stories feel like they’re from another time, especially the way Gatiss does them. I think it’s very deliberate. Even the colouring and how its shot feels aged, in a good way, like they’re from the Jeremy Brett era of Sherlock Holmes or something. It’s also kind of camp, and it has a touch of English folk horror to it.

Even though I’m not a fan of Christmas, I always look forward to these Christmas ghost stories. I love that Gatiss has made this a tradition, and I hope it continues.

Scott recommends: The Boy, The Mole, The Fox, and The Horse (Christmas Eve, BBC One, 4:55pm)

This is an animation of the illustrations by Charles Mackesy. His book has been a bestseller on the charts for more than 150 weeks. He’s sold more than a million copies and has got everyone from Oprah to the Queen Consort as a fan. Remarkably he only really got into illustrations - in terms of pursuing it as an actual career – in his fifties.

His sketches first became popular when they were shared on Instagram in 2018. People really seem to relate to them and found them incredibly emotional – a lot of them contained quotes weaving in topics of grief and healing. And now it’s been turned into a 30-minute one-off.

For a sense of what it’s like – put on BBC one before any show because it is the theme for this year. It’s quite touching. It’s saying a lot while saying very few words. I think it’s going to be one of the highlights of the Christmas season for sure.

Scott recommends: Detectorists (Boxing Day, BBC Two, 9pm)

It is a one-off revival of the much-loved BBC Four sitcom about friends who share a passion for metal detecting, starring Mackenzie Crook and Toby Jones.

It ran for three series on BBC Four and has gained quite a following in the years since it originally concluded.

It is a slow watch, but that's also the appeal. It has such a heart. The series has managed to build an audience because of how tender it feels.

If you’ve not watched it before, perhaps consider watching an earlier series to gauge what it is like. For me, it is one of the highlights this Christmas.

Must Watch is released as a podcast every Monday evening from BBC Sounds and all other good podcast providers.

In this week's festive edition the team speak to Tom Burke about Strike: Troubled Blood on BBC One & Gaby Roslin on Channel 4’s Christmas Bake Off.

Click here to listen to the latest episode.