ABC BRITISH CHRISTMAS SPECIALS ★★★★
Various days and times, ABC

It's not that we don't do television Christmas specials here. Gardening Australia has handy hints on how to keep your perennials alive while you're away at the beach. Neighbours marks the occasion with a meltdown around the tree. And there's the Sydney versus Melbourne carol-off, when network personalities in Santa hats melisma their way through the seasonal songbook. But in Britain, feature-length Christmas specials are almost mandatory. Well-loved characters reward their audience with a bit of cheer and pause to reflect on the year past. It's usually an excuse for a spot of silliness as well, to ease the tension building around whatever, or whomever, is threatening to spoil Christmas.

Doctor Who, for reasons best known to herself, has this year ditched the Christmas special for a "festive" one, airing on New Year's Day in Britain and on January 2 on our ABC. Fortunately, for those nostalgic for a northern Christmas with all the trimmings, some period British imports have stuck to tradition.

Luxuriating in the full 1950s parish pantomime palaver is Father Brown (Monday, 7.30pm, ABC). But of course the crime-solving priest is cast as a barn animal in the production of Cinderella, and his bossy housekeeper Mrs McCarthy overlooked for pretty vixen Bunty, for the role of Fairy Godmother. With Sid home for the hols bearing gifts from Lady Felicia, and everyone (except Mrs McCarthy) in a playful mood, it seems a shame that there has to be a murder. But the show must go on for this jolly whodunit, and the discovery of a body in the forest reopens the scandalous case of a slain Red Riding Hood some Christmas pantomimes ago.

Going considerably harder with poignant plotlines including a Nativity parable is Call the Midwife (Thursday, 7.30pm, ABC). Christmas in 1963 Poplar brings the heaviest snowfall in 300 years and these ordinary angels of childbirth must overcome more obstacles than usual to see in the new souls. Narrator Vanessa Redgrave sets the ponderous tone in her opening refrain about metaphorical unwrappings and new beginnings, before parallel stories of hardship unfold. One concerns the sadly seasonal issue of family violence, the other an unwed mother-to-be, accompanied by a Joseph figure, due to give birth in a lowly caravan. Her story is a horrifying rollercoaster that begs for an unlikely Christmas miracle. Back at Nonnatus House, the women must pull together against the unholy weather, their WCs frozen solid and the milkman unable to deliver. Once more these formidable humans show that it will take more than mere inconvenience to stem their flow of kindness.

Meanwhile, at Buckingham Palace in 1848, in Daisy Goodwin's imagining of the life of Queen Victoria (Victoria, Saturday, 7.30pm, ABC), grumpy Prince Albert has brightened at the prospect of maintaining his German traditions for his English offspring. He causes consternation among the staff by insisting that conifers be decorated and displayed in the hall, thereby instigating the Christmas tree in his adopted homeland. Diana Rigg's disapproving duchess utters a timeless reproach of the aged: "In my day, we were perfectly happy with an orange!" And Jenna Coleman's stoic queen must bear with grace the presence of not merely meddlesome but murderous family members at the table. But it is a storyline based on fact involving the arrival of an African orphan, a gift from a tribal king, that is the catalyst for an examination of the true meaning of Christmas, in both the drawing rooms and in the servant's quarters. The pressures and the peacemaking that are as enduring a part of Christmas as Albert's tree are reflected through this sparkling prism of Victorian palace life.