The All Creatures Great and Small Christmas Special is comfort TV perfection ...Middle East

Perhaps only Call the Midwife, for obvious neonatal reasons, has more affinity with Christmas than All Creatures Great and Small. But for pure seasonal comfort and joy, 1940s Herriot country is the place to be. Even in wartime.

It was December 1941 in this year’s Christmas special. It began with Siegfried (Samuel West) bringing home a tree, James (Nicholas Ralph) decking the halls with boughs of holly, and Mrs Hall (Anna Madeley) trading food coupons for a goose. And having been born during last year’s festive special, this Christmas also marked James and Helen’s son Jimmy’s first birthday (filming regulations apparently meant three different toddlers played Jimmy, although I couldn’t spot the difference).

This cosy domestic scene in Darrowby was violently interrupted with news that Mrs Hall’s son Edward’s ship, HMS Repulse, had been sunk. Here then was an overdue prominent storyline for Skeldale House’s resident housekeeper and the consistently excellent Anna Madeley.

Madeley is one of those clever actors who can convey pretty much everything in one silent glance but here the storyline gave her the opportunity to voice a whole range of strong emotions. Mrs Hall’s habitual Yorkshire stoicism finally gave way to an explosive two-hander with Siegfried – nominally over whether Siegfried should put down a sick fox, but really a release of her pent-up anxiety over Edward’s fate.

Lightening the mood, Tristan (Callum Woodhouse) was dispatched by his commanding officer at the Royal Army Veterinary Corps to source some message-carrying pigeons for the war effort.

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Tristan’s mission led him to a cantankerous breeder called Enoch Sykes, played by former Victoria Wood regular Duncan Preston (Acorn Antiques, Dinnerladies). “You can bugger off… you’re coming nowhere near my birds,” he greeted the vet. Tristan resorted to blackmail when he noticed that a couple of Enoch’s pigeons were sick; he would spill the news to rival breeders unless he cooperated.

It’s good to have Woodhouse back in the cast – Tristan adds a comic dimension to the proceedings. Richard Carmody, the character brought in as a replacement comedic figure during Woodhouse’s absence in series four, didn’t bring quite the same energy.

The meat of the episode however was Mrs Hall’s agony following news of the sinking of HMS Repulse – a real disaster that led to the deaths of more than 500 crew. Her pain was intensified after receiving a Christmas card that Edward had sent before the Japanese attack, in which he asked her to visit an invalided comrade in Skipton and give him a bottle of rum “and some of your shortbread (if you have the sugar)”.

The visit only deepened her distress when the injured friend revealed that Edward would have been working in the bowels of the ship and was unlikely to have survived.

But hey, this is All Creatures Great and Small and my guess that Edward would have survived proved correct when he phoned his mother to say that he had been injured and was lying in a hospital bed in Singapore. Anyone with knowledge of the Second World War will have twigged that this wasn’t altogether good news, since Singapore would fall to the Japanese in February 1942 with baleful results. The next series will presumably pile on fresh agonies for Mrs Hall.

In the meantime, relief and Christmas cheer were unbounded, despite Siegfried forgetting to collect the goose. As the rest of the household played charades, Mrs Hall looked out of the window and noticed it had even begun to snow. In any other drama that might have seemed shamelessly corny, but not here.

All Creatures Great and Small is streaming on Channel 5

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