IT’S AN UNWRITTEN LAW that the post-celebration week of Boxing Day until New Year’s Eve is your favourite hunker down screen time. Part of the shared joy of being British is anchoring yourself through this rudderless six days with a box of clubcard Quality Street, frayed pyjamas, old blanket, possibly (definitely) a bottle of Baileys and the remote control. It is the week that brings out the inner Gogglebox family in all of us. A chance to catch up on the brilliant things ever yone talked about during the year, to indulge in rewatching an old faithful and to perhaps even venture from the couch/bed into town for a brief interlude at the cinema. Our customar y and, in many ways, fundamental guide to how best to navigate this joyously lazy slump -week life intermission is here.
You’re very much welcome.
THE ONE TO REWATCH FROM 2023
Colin From Accounts. Because, frankly, you can never see enough of this. Low budget, high ideas: this Australian will-they-won’t-they romcom with a brain also has heart, people you actually recognise from the real world and a remarkably strong zinger count. The thing that is so fantastically rewatchable about CFA (that’s fan-speak) is not its clever quotability but the very simple fact that, whatever their shortcomings, you want to hang out with this potentially adorable couple. You root for them. Funny how telly forgets that sometimes, isn’t it? BBC iPlayer
THE ONE TO WATCH WITH A DEAR ELDERLY RELATIVE
– one who’s run out of Richard Osman audiobooks by Boxing Day – is Murder Is Easy. Any BBC Agatha Christie adaptation has ‘nana’ written all over it and will avert any awkward inter-generational political differences that may have arisen over the dinner table. And in the hands of an adept team, this one doesn’t even need a Miss Marple or Inspector Clouseau to make it swing. It rattles along, burrowing in the undergrowth of a pastoral English town. Perfect BBC One and iPlayer
THE ONE TO HATE-WATCH WHILE SORT OF FANCYING EVERYONE IN IT
The Diplomat. Rufus Sewell and Keri Russell are deployed by the White House to a very filmic London, including a hitherto unseen stately home in the middle of Regent’s Park (eh?) in the most annoying, infuriating and absolutely compulsively, randomly brilliant action thriller since 24. You will recommend it to no one. But you will secretly adore it. Netflix
THE ONE TO WATCH FOR A REALITY FIX
The big reality-drama hit of 2023, Jury Duty arrived out of nowhere, like an old episode
