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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Stuart Heritage

Tea With Judi Dench review – the most touching TV you’ll watch all Christmas (plus a sweary parrot)

Judi Dench and Kenneth Branagh in Tea With Judi Dench.
Two old friends with clear affection for one another … Judi Dench and Kenneth Branagh in Tea With Judi Dench. Photograph: Sky UK

Cast your mind back to Christmas 2017, and you might remember a slightly wacky BBC documentary called Dame Judi Dench: My Passion for Trees. On the surface, it seemed like one of those god-awful shows put together by tombola; matching a celebrity with a random subject and hoping it would pass muster.

However, this was not the case. Dame Judi Dench, it turned out, really did have a passion for trees. An obsessive passion, one that manifested itself in a small woodland where she named trees after friends of hers who had died. The result was unexpectedly tender and gorgeous, and the show ended up being the best thing on TV that Christmas.

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