Quarter 1 Reviews- 011 Contemporary Comedy- New

011 Contemporary Comedy – New

Christmas Conversations from a Long Marriage was an amusing and absorbing two-hander about a couple (Joanna Lumley and Roger Allam) that has been married for more than 40 years, with no kids, celebrating Christmas.  They start it off by being snide about Christmas cards people have sent them.  They muse that some years ago they sent everyone e-cards and no one seemed to notice the year before that that they hadn’t sent them any cards at all.  They derided the “humorous” cards and the pretentious cards. They pondered whether their friends felt sorry for them because they had no kids and therefore invited them over for Christmas, which they always refused. They wondered about their neighbors and how their relationships were faring.  They anticipated their Christmas Day, which was a varied program involving eating, drinking champagne for breakfast, and romping around underneath the Christmas tree.  Instead, it ended up snowing, they were worried a friend was going to come over for Christmas, and there was a really amusing aside in which the husband told the wife, “remember that conversation when we said we weren’t going to buy each other any Christmas presents?” and led her on for a long time into thinking he had taken her seriously when in fact he had bought her earrings.  They weren’t real diamonds, but she still liked them, and was glad that he hadn’t taken her seriously.  It was an interesting way of looking at the modern British Christmas, neither sentimentalized nor too cynical. It was written by Jan Etherington and produced by Claire Jones.