This festive special isn’t so much about angling against gorgeous Highland backdrops as a harrowing existential meditation on the ubiquity of death. Certainly for those of us with free bus passes, it’s more chilling than any MR James ghost story.
Not that I’m complaining: after a Christmas of unremitting festive faux bonhomie, how refreshing that Paul Whitehouse and Bob Mortimer plumb the depths not for salmon but for matters that usually get airbrushed from our mortality-averse culture.