No surprises as 'Downton' decamps, but what about some good cheer?

Television

Ones to watch: Grim gothic and jubilant Donegal

Filmed in Dublin, the eight-part Ripper Street (BBC One, Sunday) set in the last decade of the 19th century and starring Matthew Macfadyen and Jerome Flynn, is gothic in its grimness. You have been warned.

It’s impossible to get the catchy supporters’ song out of your head, and not to find the story of the rise and rise of Donegal Gaelic Football under the inspiring coach Jim McGuinness, in Jimmy’s Winnin’ Matches, (RTÉ One, Thursday).

In this year’s Downton Abbey Christmas special (Christmas Day, UTV; St Stephen’s Day, TV3) it was summer, which made it slightly discombobulating, and the family decamped to Scotland.

They had not previously expressed any interest in going there, but it became an option when the plot replacement for the dead Sybil, the wayward cousin Rose, whose family had a castle in the Highlands, appeared rather hastily in the last series. So Doonton it was, then, for the Crawleys and their top servants, kitted out with fetching tweeds, a kilted chap with bagpipes and a trunk full of quips for Maggie Smith’s dowager.

Meanwhile, back at Downton, the remaining servants were having a rare old time at a country fair, so, to give the writer Julian Fellowes his due, although there wasn’t much compelling drama, there was plenty of activity.

Also left behind at Downton was Branson (Allen Leech), manfully enduring one of the more curious storylines, in which a maid (MyAnna Buring), whose actions and language were from an entirely different era, set about snaring him. He was, as Mrs Hughes reminded him in one of the many clunky verbal anachronisms, “on a learning curve”.

And after several characters mentioned bumpy roads, rattling train journeys and the dangers of pregnant women doing a jig, Mary gave birth prematurely. Fellowes likes to give viewers plenty of warning when anything significant is about to happen, so when we saw the new dad Matthew (Dan Stevens) barrelling along in his car and smiling broadly as he contemplated his good fortune, we knew – and not just because we’d read that Stevens wanted out of the costume soap – that he was about to meet his end. Not a festive closing moment but, as it wasn’t exactly unexpected, not too shocking either. A Christmas Day drama that was enjoyable in its peculiarly silly Downtonish way.

But what a mistake to watch Call the Midwife (BBC One) on Christmas Day. It was like being plunged in a cold bucket of reality when all you want is a bit of cheap sentiment and the warm fuzzies. The drama about a team of nun-led midwives in London’s East End in the 1950s was the surprise hit for the BBC this year, pulling in millions of viewers.

Miranda Hart, who had her own hilarious Christmas special, Miranda (BBC One, St Stephen’s Day), stars as Chummy, a posh midwife, and there’s generally a heartwarming story about Blitz spirit and cor-blimey East End pluckiness. But this Call the Midwife piled on the misery with a vagrant elderly woman pining for her dead children, a teenager giving birth in a derelict building and abandoning the baby and a woman giving birth in a filthy toilet. Seasonal cheer it wasn’t.

You couldn’t complain, though, about the broad choice of drama on offer, one-off feature-length dramas having now replaced the big big movie as the star telly attractions at Christmas.

Aisling Walsh directed the Victoria Wood-scripted Loving Miss Hatto (Sunday, BBC One), about the most audacious hoax in the world of classical music, in which a failed impresario, William Barrington-Coupe or “Barry”, passed off the work of top musicians as that of his wife, the elderly piano teacher Joyce Hatto.

Music buffs fell on the doctored CDs and Hatto was “rediscovered” while in her 70s. It was only when a reviewer stumbled on the truth due to the magic of iTunes software that the hoax was revealed. The film was in two parts, the most successful and emotionally affecting being the early years of the couple (Maimie McCoy and Rory Kinnear), in the 1950s. This captured their falling in love and established his character as a chancer and hers as a sensitive aspiring pianist whose stage fright meant her career would never blossom.

Then it shifted into this century when, after an anonymous life, he – now played by Alfred Molina – hit upon the idea for the hoax. Why he did it wasn’t clear and was one of the weaknesses of the script, as was the lack of explanation of how Barry, whom we saw shuffling home from the shops with a cloth bag, managed to fool so many experts.

Francesca Annis played Hatto as a distant sort of person but she was so distant, it was hard to feel anything for her. It was also difficult to get an idea of the scale of the fraud and the fallout among the snooty classical-music community who had been so taken in. And it’s unusual for a fraud-themed story to be so devoid of tension and suspense that there was time to ruminate idly on all those Dublin locations made out to be Hertfordshire and London. Loving Miss Hatto was simply too low key.

The children did best, which is probably as it should be, with The Snowman and the Snowdog (Channel 4, Christmas Eve), a new version of the 30-year-old animation of Raymond Briggs’s book The Snowman. It was old-fashioned, the graphics faithful to the original and gently uplifting, even if the story was pretty much the same, except for the addition of a dog. It was the sort of programme parents, brimming with nostalgia, feel small children should watch.

But Room on the Broom (BBC One, Christmas Day), an adaptation of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s magical book, was one children would want to watch unprompted for its gorgeous graphics and simple rhymes. Both films are sure to become hardy Christmas annuals. The moral of Room on the Broom, that we’re all in this together so we might as well help each other out, wasn’t a bad message given the season that’s in it.