Unseasonal Xmas TV specials

Not all specials shown at Xmas make any reference to the holiday, in fact some will go some way to distance themselves from it. Here are 3 such specials from 1989.


Only Fools and Horses  - The Jolly Boys Outing

In the first episode after Rodney's marriage to Cassandra, Del manages to get his brother to join up the titular annual meeting even after making even after giving the most spectacular wrong answer during a game of Trivial Pursuits. The group make their way to Margate (after a delay caused by Rodney accidentally kicking a football into a policeman) during a sunny August bank holiday and enjoy their day out. However their coach blows up due faulty wiring. The group then split to find accommodation with Del hooking up again with Racquel. The episode end with Rodney punching Cassandra's after mistakenly thinking that he was making a play for her.


Miss Marple - A Caribbean Mystery

When one of her nephews pays for her to escape a extremely cold winter, Miss Marple goes to Barbados but however violent death follows her. And soon she is using her deductive skills  to get to the bottom of the mystery with the help of a tycoon played in a guest role by Donald  Pleascene. The episode went out on Xmas day night and attracted a large number of complaints over it's  depiction of murder and drug use. One such person was Richard Curtis who wrote the whimsical Lenny Henry starring fantasy  Bernard and the Genie as a response.


Bergerac - Second Time Around

Written by Ian Kenndy Martin who created The Sweeney, Second Time Around is not your usual episode of the Jersey based show. In the first 10 minutes a crook handcuff one of his former associates to a metal ornamental chair and throws them into a pool for the man to die. Made at a time when Bergerac was a show that was taking it's dues from Miami Vice, John Nettles as Jim Bergerac goes for the Don Johnson/Sonny Crockett look. the music soundtrack is of the big boomy syth variety that was poplar then, the episode was filmed during what was an obviously hot summer therefore making Jersey looking even more exotic and then there is a sequence which goes from a car chase to a speed boat chase which ends with a bad guy escaping from the clutches of the law by being picked up helicopter thereby making you wonder how it was done on a late 1980s BBC budget. Despite having a larger than usual body count the episode went out before the watershed on Boxing Day night.