Advent Calendar 2020 Day 17: All This - And Christmas Too!

Some good old fashioned festive broad farce from the offices of Yorkshire Television today, where it's 1971 and Sid James has moved into a new phase of his career taking the lead in Bless This House, the twinkle in his eye that had so far guided him through fourteen of his eventual nineteen Carry Ons augmented by a jaundiced view of what the kids of today thought they were doing. This one-off, penned by playwright and Carry On contributor Sam Cree as a stand-in for the (brief) annual tradition of a festive show featuring all the gang, obviously had to be clearly different to that sitcom to differentiate the characters. So, James plays Sid Jones, a henpecked father of two teenagers, one called Sally, who is trying to get to grips with the generation gap... oh, wait. Anyway, with Sally awaiting childbirth Sid is left to take up most of the screen time, with the aid of neighbour Kenneth Connor, before a baby turns up intended for his other daughter to sit. Bless This House never had a seasonal special but most of this is practically the same setup anyway so it's as near as makes no difference - that is apart from the never properly explained opening titles that rather than explain what's ahead read more as just something Cree and James fancied doing. Warning: contains comedy values of the day.