Finding Father Christmas Review – Lenny Rush and James Buckley’s chemistry is so great | TV and radio

IIn an age where it’s now an annual tradition for US streaming giants to release cute, algorithm-driven holiday movies, there’s something rather satisfying about a British indie Christmas special. The components tend to be: appearances from the year’s favorite comedians; Specialized cultural references, with or without engraving; A biting but warm-hearted script that would rather leave the viewer in tears at Baileys.

In many ways, Finding Father Christmas hits all of these notes, even if it never quite achieves its potential. The film follows 16-year-old Chris (BAFTA winner and cheerful Lenny Rush), who still believes in Santa despite being in the middle of his high school exams. Three years after his mother’s death and with Chris still writing letters to the North Pole, his worried father and depressed postman Nicholas (The Inbetweeners’ James Buckley) decide it’s finally time to have ‘the talk’.

Nicholas reveals it. Santa sips whiskey. Snow on the roof. Reindeer trails. Everything was done by him. But the show will be too short if Chris believes his father, so he embarks on a mission to prove him wrong and discover the science behind magic, with the help of his eccentric cousin, Holly (Ellie MacKenzie), and a group of experts.

The show’s USP is that the experts mentioned are actual scientists and thinkers in play: Professor Hannah Fry, Dame Maggie Adrien-Pocock, and, for reasons I don’t quite understand, Jason Fox of the SAS: who dares wins. All participants are good sports as they use physics to explain how Father Christmas does the seemingly impossible in just one night. But it’s Stephen Fry who steals the show.

After being hounded by a tip-off from the local Santa (guest appearance by People Just Do Nothing’s Asim Chaudhry), Chris, Holly and superfan Nicholas find themselves in Fry’s front room where they’re given a full presentation weighing the logistics of Christmas Eve, complete with chalkboard and equations. (Look for the framed newspaper clippings above Fry’s toilet in the basement.)

There’s a nice side plot in which Nicholas tentatively goes back to dating Miss Bailey (Roshinda Sandall), Chris’s science teacher who lives across the road. But the characterization certainly could have been more in-depth had Chris gone on the exploration trip with his father instead of his cousin. Buckley and Rush are a great pair and they clearly could have pulled it off, with Rush displaying the same easy chemistry that made him shine with co-star Daisy Mae Cooper in Am I Unreasonable? I find myself wishing the script had been brought back around February with a note from Channel 4 bosses requesting it be turned into a double screenplay, in the vein of 2018’s pathos-filled Click & Collect.

Instead, we are given multiple characters that we never get enough time with. There’s a fun scene reminiscent of Paddington where Chris and Holly break into a warehouse to discover the truth about Santa Claus, but Taskmaster’s Greg Davies is criminally underutilized as the big man himself, other than a quick joke about air fryers being old gifts. Likewise, there’s a nice joke about Royal Mail (you can imagine legal action being initiated over the claim that they’re shredding children’s letters to Santa), but Nicholas’ unhappiness at work never gets a chance to be properly explored. However, we spend time with Holly and her podcast without any explanation of her role in Chris’s life or why she was so keen on committing crimes for him. It’s the television equivalent of a Christmas buffet. A nice hot dog roll there, a bowl of Pringles here. But you can’t help but wish you were sitting down to a full roast dinner.

In the end, I have the feeling at the same time that it goes on for too long (call me anti-expert but after the physics in terms of Santa’s movements have been explained once, do we need it over and over again?) and we might as well do with an extra 15 minutes. The loss of Chris’ mother is covered briefly in the first and last five minutes, but some exploration in the middle would have given the whole thing more emotional impact. As the credits roll, I’m not crying at Billy’s. Maybe I’m dead inside. I probably started drinking this morning and fell asleep in the third commercial break face down in a panettone. Perhaps – and I support this option – there should be a sequel next year to fill in some of the blanks.

I vote for Chris and his father to spend Christmas Eve with Santa Davis, ideally with post-watershed liberalism to the cursing. Physicists can come along for the ride (if they have to).