This evening I finally got round to watching the Brassic xmas special that my Tivo had recorded earlier in the week. What a masterpiece. Mind you, I personally think that Brassic is consistently good, so the main special-ness of this one is that it is 90 minutes rather than 60 minutes long.

If you have never seen Brassic before, then a) why on Earth not? and b) this is not a bad place to start. It works pretty well as a standalone episode. Most of the usual ensemble cast are there, plus a couple of excellent guest appearances from Imelda Staunton and Greg Davies.

In some ways it isn’t very festive. It probably holds the record for xmas special with the most instances of the word “cunt”, for example. You could say that it is the same sort of caper that the show normally has, except the jeopardy this time is in the production of a school nativity play, but it does have the necessary themes of redemption in it.

Most importantly for a comedy, it made me laugh. Out loud. Several times. And that doesn’t always happen for me. Even some things I really like a lot only make me smile. OK, I will admit that the biggest laughs are often down to the strategic use of extremely bad language in exactly the least appropriate places, but that still counts. Aside from that there is always a slightly surreal element to it, and a lot of the underlying humour is in the way characters so often encounter absolutely bizarre things and take them in their stride. Over the course of 5 series, Brassic has managed to create its own world, which looks like the real one up to a point, but where some very transgressive behaviour is normalised

It all goes to show that ‘xmas special’ doesn’t have to be a family show.