Bang on about Gavin and Stacey all you like but for This Writer the highlight of our Christmas TV was when Doctor Who savaged the Tories over Covid-19 lockdown parties.

Anybody who saw it will remember the scene because it overshadows what was otherwise an oversentimental episode, punctuated with some excellent humour.

It came in a scene where the Doctor, played by Ncuti Gatwa, unusually has the scene stolen right out from under him by Nicola Coughlan, playing Joy. I can’t give you a clip but you can find the scene here, about 33 minutes and 10 seconds in.

I won’t give away any of the plot; he asks her about her mother, and she responds with mounting emotion: “Don’t you dare talk about my mother.

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“She’s dead. She died in hospital. I couldn’t even visit. I had to talk to her on an iPad because of the rules.

“She died on Christmas Day. On Christmas Day! And I said goodbye on an iPad! Because of the rules! She died alone!

“And those awful people and their wine fridges, and their dancing, and their parties, and I listened to them, and I let my mother die alone!

“So I can never be home on Christmas Day, and I can never be with anyone on Christmas Day because I let her down. I let her down on the last day of her life, on Christmas Day.”

That would be Christmas Day 2020, when Boris Johnson told us that we had to observe “social distancing” (remember?) and if we had family members in hospital we mustn’t visit them for fear of spreading the virus…

… all while he and his little Tory helpers were raving it up, getting as close as they felt like (no doubt) in wild parties – in Downing Street, the heart of our government! as we discovered later.

We know it was Christmas Day 2020 because we see it later in the episode.

I have no doubt that there are still plenty of people who feel exactly the way Joy does in this Doctor Who episode.

I’m sure a lot of people feel much, much worse.

It’s almost funny; today (December 26, 2024), Nigel Farage has been banging on about his Reform Party being bigger than the Tories because they have more members, saying that Reform should be the lead Opposition Party to Labour but he’s wrong.

The biggest enemies the Tories have are those of us who remember how badly the Tories harmed us in their 14 years of misrule – either deliberately or because (as with the Covid parties) they simply couldn’t care less.

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