Hello everyone! 🙂

Welcome to ‘Bradley’s Basement’ blog and I’m Tim Bradley!

It’s Day 6 of ‘Bradley’s Basement’s Advent Calendar 2024.

Here’s the sixth Christmas recommendation by me on ‘Bradley’s Basement’.

The ‘All Creatures Great and Small’ Christmas Special is something my parents and I look forward to every year, and there’s no doubt we’ll be checking out the 2024 Christmas Special from the Channel 5 TV show in December. It’s become a nice Christmas tradition.

I suppose it’s easy to forget that there were Christmas Specials in the original ‘All Creatures’ BBC TV series, starring Christopher Timothy, Robert Hardy and Peter Davison. The first one was ‘Merry Gentlemen’, the thirteenth episode shown at the end of Series 2.

That, in my opinion, is the best Christmas Special in the original TV series, especially when it focuses on the Skeldale family of James, Siegfried, Tristan, Helen and Mrs. Hall celebrating Christmas. I can’t say the same for the next three Christmas Specials after that.

Not that they’re terrible by any means. I mean, the 1983 and 1985 Christmas Specials and ‘Brotherly Love’ from 1990 are considered longer to be treated as Christmas Specials. But the focus on Christmas isn’t as prominent compared to ‘Merry Gentlemen’.

‘Brotherly Love’ might be set at Christmas, but I don’t consider it memorable compared to ‘Merry Gentlemen’. Maybe because I’ve seen ‘Merry Gentlemen’ more than the other three original ‘All Creatures’ Christmas Specials. I highly recommend ‘Merry Gentlemen’.

Thanks for reading!

Check out what Day 6 of my ‘Bradley’s Basement’s Advent Calendars for 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 were about!

Bye for now!

Tim 🙂