Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (BBC1)
Doctor Who (BBC2)
Butter me crumpets, lad! All this new technology is jolly clever, but you can’t beat the tried-and-trusted old favourites — whether that’s a Wellington boot or a classic story.
Our Plasticine hero Wallace and his loyal mutt Gromit returned in an 80-minute special that was essentially a remake of their best-loved adventure, 1993’s The Wrong Trousers, but with vanloads of extra gags.
Vengeance Most Fowl saw them pitted once again against their arch-enemy, the penguin master villain Feathers McGraw, who was still intent on stealing a gigantic diamond. It was hidden in Wallace’s teapot at his home at 62 West Wallaby Street.
Cunningly disguised as a chicken, with a red rubber glove for his coxcomb, Feathers broke out of his enclosure at a maximum security zoo with the aid of an army of garden gnomes, manufactured to the blueprint designed by eccentric inventor Wallace.
Young viewers will have been held enthralled throughout by the excitement, as silent comedy star Gromit gave chase — first in a motorcycle with sidecar, then in a high-speed narrow boat — before a perilous confrontation on a canal viaduct.
A non-stop torrent of sight gags, puns and movie references cascaded out of every scene, to delight older viewers. I loved the news presenter, Anton Deck, and the nods to films such as The Magician’s Apprentice (as the gnomes multiplied) and The Italian Job (as the barge teetered on the brink of a sheer drop).
New technology is clever, but there’s no beating tried-and-trusted classic favourites, such as the latest Wallace and Gromit adventure
Animators and co-creators Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham. A non-stop torrent of sight gags, puns and movie references cascaded out of every scene, to delight older viewers
For Wallace And Gromit fanatics, there were dozens of callbacks to plotlines and jokes from previous episodes.
Wallace’s flying wellies gave a whole new meaning to the concept of rebooting electronic gadgets. And funniest of all was the moment when evil genius Feathers spun around in a swivel chair, to reveal he was stroking a white seal pup on his lap, like the Bond villain Blofeld with a cat.
Reece Shearsmith from Inside No. 9 did his demented best as Norbot the smartgnome, while comedian Peter Kay was a blundering police chief.
Bridgerton’s Nicola Coughlan was the star guest in Doctor Who, which was a subdued affair by the standards of recent Christmas specials — no set-piece musical spectaculars, no megabudget CGI backdrops and very little Disneyfication.
Nicola Coughlan was the star guest in the Doctor Who Christmas special, which was a comparably subdued affair
In their place were exploits in more traditional Time Lord fashion, mostly taking place in a series of hotel rooms.
Coughlan, whose nude Georgian love scene was the talk of the internet this year, was having huge fun as a nicely-spoken young lady with a horror of breaking the rules. It was a relief, she admitted last week, to play a role she could watch with her family without blushing.
Her character was called Joy Almundo, or ‘Joy to the World’, and she ended up going supernova as the Christmas star.
But it was Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor who shone brightest. He’s got the best winning grin since Tom Baker.
