A Child's Christmases in Wales (2009)
One-off period comedy, peeping into the lives of a south Wales family's Christmases across the 1980s, written by comedian Mark Watson and inspired by a Dylan Thomas short story. Christmas in this household may be a less than poetic affair, but it is just as eventful. So much changes across a decade in any family, and yet so much manages to remain the same.
rating 7/10 User rating 4 votes 72% ❄ Christmas Connection
The entire film is structured around three successive Christmas Days in a South Wales family home across 1983, 1986, and 1989. Christmas is not backdrop -- it is the engine of every scene, dictating who shows up, what they argue about, and how the family slowly changes. The title itself invokes Dylan Thomas's most beloved Christmas prose poem.
Our Review
There is a particular kind of British Christmas television that does not try to dazzle you. It does not have a Hollywood budget or a sweeping orchestral score. It just sits you down with a difficult family in a terraced house, pours you a sherry, and tells you to pay attention. A Child's Christmases in Wales, the 59-minute BBC Four comedy that aired on 17 December 2009, is exactly that kind of thing. It is modest in scale, precise in observation, and genuinely funny in ways that do not announce themselves.
What Is This Film Actually About
Writer Mark Watson structured the film around three snapshots: Christmas 1983, Christmas 1986, and Christmas 1989. We follow young Owen Rhys growing up in a terraced house in Ferndale, Rhondda Cynon Taf, where the annual arrival of his uncles and cousin transforms what might have been a quiet day into something closer to low-grade psychological warfare. His mother Brenda, played by Ruth Jones, spends each Christmas trying to hold the household together through sheer force of domestic willpower. His father Geraint and the two uncles are locked in the kind of sibling rivalry that never resolves because nobody wants it to.
Owen watches all of this. He grows older across the three segments. The men around him do not grow at all.
That is the joke, but Watson is serious about it. The comedy comes from recognising something true rather than from any scripted punchline. The 1980s setting matters too. These are Christmases before mobile phones and streaming, when the family had to be in the same room and there was nowhere to escape.
The Cast Doing Exactly What They Should
Ruth Jones had just come off the first two series of Gavin and Stacey, which she co-wrote with James Corden, when she took the role of Brenda. After playing the flamboyant Nessa Jenkins, Brenda is a deliberate gear change: contained, patient to a fault, quietly furious underneath. Jones is very good at this register. She makes Brenda sympathetic without making her saintly, which would have killed the comedy.
Paul Kaye plays Uncle Gorwel, and Kaye brings the same physical restlessness he used in his Dennis Pennis persona, except applied here to domestic dysfunction rather than celebrity ambush interviews. Steve Speirs is Uncle Huw, the other adult male determined to make Christmas about himself. The two uncles are credibly Welsh and credibly irritating.
Michael Sheen narrates. This is a casting decision that does real work. Sheen, born in Port Talbot, brings exactly the right kind of Welsh authority to the role. His voice carries both warmth and a faint melancholy, which is what the film needs. He is also the connection to the story's literary heritage.
The Dylan Thomas Thread
The title is not an accident. Dylan Thomas wrote "A Child's Christmas in Wales" from memories of his Swansea boyhood, first recording it for BBC Radio in 1945 under the title "Memories of Christmas", then expanding it for Harper's Bazaar in 1950. His 1952 recording of the final version, made at the Chelsea Hotel in New York for $500 upfront plus royalties, is credited by the United States Library of Congress with launching the audiobook industry in America.
Watson's film borrows the structure of nostalgic retrospection but strips out the poetry. Where Thomas gave you snow and mystical aunts and the general haze of childhood wonder, Watson gives you arguments about the remote control and a father who sulks. This is not cynicism. It is a different kind of honesty about what Welsh Christmases actually contain.
Having Michael Sheen narrate makes the Thomas parallel explicit without the film needing to spell it out. Welsh voice, Welsh landscape, childhood Christmas remembered. The audience gets the reference and the joke simultaneously.
Christine Gernon's Quiet Craft
Christine Gernon directed this. She had already directed Gavin and Stacey and would go on to direct all of the subsequent Gavin and Stacey specials, including the 2019 Christmas reunion that pulled in 17.1 million viewers on BBC One. She started her career as a runner on One Foot in the Grave, which is also a comedy about a man trapped in his own domestic circumstances.
Her direction on A Child's Christmases in Wales is unfussy. The camera does not do anything clever. It puts you in the room and keeps you there. This is the right choice for material that depends entirely on performance and timing. The house in Ferndale feels like a real house because Gernon does not dress it up.
Where It Falls Short
The film's biggest limitation is also its premise. Three Christmases at 59 minutes means roughly 15 minutes per decade-ish slice, which does not allow any single relationship to develop beyond a sketch. We get archetypes rather than characters in some cases. Uncle Gorwel and Uncle Huw are entertainingly drawn but interchangeable enough that their individual traits blur after the second segment.
The film also never quite decides what it wants to say about change. Owen grows up. The men do not. But that observation, while accurate, does not land with the force it could because Watson's script keeps the comedy too polite in the final third. There is a slightly more difficult film inside this one that got ironed out before broadcast.
None of this is fatal. A 7.4 on IMDb reflects an audience that found genuine pleasure in it, and that score is earned. This is a good film that could have been a great one with another ten minutes and a sharper ending.
Why It Belongs at Christmas
It aired on BBC Four on 17 December 2009 and was repeated on BBC Two and BBC One Wales on Christmas Eve the same year. BBC Four has historically been the home of thoughtful, smaller-budget Christmas programming that other channels would not commission. A Child's Christmases in Wales fits that tradition precisely.
It does not pretend Christmas is magical. It does not pretend Christmas is a disaster either. It says Christmas is the annual occasion when you discover, again, that your family has not changed and that you love them anyway. That is less quotable than Dylan Thomas and more accurate than most Christmas films.
Fun Facts
The film was shot in Ferndale, a small former mining town in the Rhondda Cynon Taf valley in South Wales, which provided an authentic period backdrop for the 1980s setting without requiring significant set dressing.
Dylan Thomas first recorded "A Child's Christmas in Wales" for the BBC in 1945, seven years before his famous 1952 New York recording. The earlier version was titled "Memories of Christmas" and was made for the Welsh Children's Hour.
Thomas's 1952 Caedmon Records recording, made for an upfront fee of $500, was selected for the United States National Recording Registry in 2008 and is credited with launching the commercial audiobook industry.
Paul Kaye, who plays Uncle Gorwel, first became famous in the mid-1990s as celebrity interviewer alter ego Dennis Pennis, a character known for ambushing Hollywood stars with deliberately awkward questions at red carpet events.
Director Christine Gernon started her television career as a runner on the BBC sitcom One Foot in the Grave. She went on to direct every episode of Gavin and Stacey, including the 2019 Christmas special watched by 17.1 million viewers.
Ruth Jones, who plays mother Brenda, had won the BAFTA Cymru Sian Phillips Special Recognition Award in 2009, the same year this film aired, recognising her work co-creating and starring in Gavin and Stacey.
Mark Watson, who wrote the screenplay, was born in Bristol to a Welsh mother and performed early in his career using a Welsh accent. He studied English at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he was a contemporary of Tim Key and Dan Stevens in the Footlights.
The film originally aired on 17 December 2009 on BBC Four, then received a Christmas Eve repeat on BBC One Wales the same year, making it one of the few BBC Four originals to cross over to a terrestrial channel in the same broadcast season.
Cast
