After the main run of The League of Gentlemen TV series finished in October 2002, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith continued to work together, first on the (very) dark sitcom Psychoville (2009-2011) and later on the constantly clever and innovative anthology series Inside No.9 (2014-). After two award winning series, the third batch of episodes kicked off with a Christmas special that proved to be as extraordinarily inventive as ever but also something of a disappointment.
The intention was to create a loving facsimile of 1970s British television and in that respect The Devil of Christmas succeeds admirably. They production team were able to source genuine period equipment which they used to record the episode at Studio D in the BBC Elstree Centre to help capture some of that authentic 70s feel and the wardrobe – supervised by veteran BBC costume supervisor Hazel Pethig – is spot on, with lots of drab beige and brown.
A British family arrive at cabin no.9 in the Austrian Alps for a Christmas break that goes horribly wrong. Julian (Pemberton) has not only brought along new wife Kathy (Jessica Raine) and his son from an earlier marriage Toby (George Bedford) but also his hen-pecking mother Celia (Rula Lenska) who doesn’t do much to hide her dislike of Kathy. They’re spooked by caretaker Klaus (Shearsmith) and his tales of Krampus. Before long strange things are afoot as it seems that the family really are being menaced by the Devil of Christmas.
At least that was the original plot of the “lost” 70s TV special. What we actually get is a rough cut of the programme, complete with stops, starts and voices off from the production team and, from three minutes in, what initially appears to be a DVD commentary from director Dennis Fulcher (Derek Jacobi) who starts off pointing out continuity errors (the painting of Krampus hanging on the cabin wall moves between shots) and making bitchy remarks about both the cast and others he’d worked with (he reserves some particularly barbed comments for Jon Pertwee and Doctor Who). But the “commentary” takes a sinister turn as the show enters its finals and it becomes clear that what we’re actually hearing is a police interview tape and that The Devil of Christmas is actually a snuff film – and not, by the sounds of it, the first one that Fulcher had made.
Despite being one of Inside No.9‘s more ardent admirers, on first viewing I was left rather cold by The Devil of Christmas. It was hard at first to work out how we were hearing this recording and why but repeat viewings have rendered that less problematic. It’s still hard to swallow the idea that, no matter what other appalling real-life monsters were stalking the BBC in the 1970s, that a crew of snuff film-makers (this clearly isn’t their first as Fulcher tells the interviewing cop that “Kathy” was “one of the better ones”) could have operated in Television Centre undetected. Pemberton and Shearsmith were far more successful in their manipulation of the media in their inspired 2018 Halloween special Dead Line.
But even at its worst – and The Devil of Christmas is certainly not that – Inside No.9 is still head and shoulders above anything else of its kind. Though it doesn’t pay to spend too much time thinking about what’s going on, The Devil of Christmas still has so much to enjoy. The performances are absolutely spot on – slightly stilted, a bit theatrical and occasionally clumsy, missing marks or mis-timing cues. The cast pull this off without any grandstanding, none of the nudge-nudge, “look at us taking the piss out of old television” feel that mars some similar recreations. Having veteran BBC director Graeme Harper (who had worked on both incarnations of Doctor Who among many, many other gigs) was an inspired decision and he gleefully joins in the fun, leaving brief glimpses of cameras at the edge of frame or wobbly shadows of boom mics falling over the cheap sets, something that happened more often than we might like to admit in 70s television. The whole episode was shot in just two days, reflecting the rushed production methods of 70s British TV.
When it works, The Devil of Christmas is as good as any episode of Inside No.9, which is to say that it’s extraordinarily good. It doesn’t really hold up to too much scrutiny sadly, but it’s a lot of very dark fun, certainly the nastiest the programme had been thus far. The real disappointment though is that we never actually see the original “lost” The Devil of Christmas in its final, edited form. We couldn’t of course, given the way the larger story develops, but it’s still a shame – though knowing Pemberton and Shearsmith very probably a deliberate irony – that the original The Devil of Christmas remains “lost”.
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