For all the jollity and fun that Santa and his elves bring to ‘Last Christmas’, the Dream Crabs take the episode to some very scary places indeed.
“It’s a lovely episode because it’s got really good shifts in tone,” says Starkey, “so it’s going to be quite funny, but also because there are good laughs, I think the scares are also going to be quite a lot deeper as well. So it’s got a nice kind of Christmas ghost story feel, even though it’s science fiction, a bit sort of M. R. James-y in some bits – so, like, things out of the corner of the eye that are happening that are just slightly sort of scary. Because you’ve got both of those qualities, you can amp one, you can control and release tension.”
Nick Frost reports being chuffed to bits at the opportunity to play Santa: “It was that really weird thing when I’d got the whole costume on, you know, with the hat and the little glasses too – which, by the way, are Richard Attenborough’s glasses that he word in Miracle On 34th Street, which is kind of amazing – it was that thing, you look in the mirror and you think, ‘I look just like Father Christmas!’”
Indeed, the role required that Frost’s own dapper, darker facial hair was thoroughly shoe-polished every morning to achieve an appropriately jolly shade of winter white.
“It’s like an hour in the morning,” he said, “and then I’m fiddled with constantly throughout the day by these lovely ladies with toothbrushes reapplying and reapplying because my own ginger gene is so strong it wants to take the ice-white out of it.”
As for Santa’s working relationship with the Twelfth Doctor, Frost says he and Peter Capaldi worked together to suggest a rather prickly past onscreen: “It’s like Maggie Simpson and that baby with one eyebrow – they hate each other and you never know why.”
While he plans to save watching ‘Last Christmas’ at home until his toddler son is old enough to understand that Dad is only pretending to be Santa Claus, he is looking forward to a Christmas tradition he shares with his best friend, Simon Pegg.
“We do a thing each year where, we bought a bauble together years ago – it’s like a big crystal star, but we think it looks like the thing that Superman’s dad put Superman in to fire to Earth in the Christopher Reeve film. He has it now, and every Christmas Eve he’ll send me a photo of it on the tree, and then I – it’s going to be hard to write this – and then I always text him back exactly the same message every year, and that message, if you can spell this out, is exactly this: ‘Dum-da-da-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum.’”
If you can’t tell from my expert transcription, that was the theme tune from The Box of Delights.
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> Order Season 8 on Blu-ray on Amazon.
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