The Night Before Christmas

The Night Before Christmas is Boon's only feature-length story, a 90-minute special made for Christmas Eve 1991 and dedicated to the memory of the co-creator Bill Stair. It is built around Harry, and it begins with the season of goodwill in short supply at Crawford Boon Security.

The partnership is strained because both men have fallen for the same woman. Jo Beckett owns a jazz club, Smoky Jo's, which she inherited from her father, Ray. Harry decides that he has found the ideal partner in business and in life. He buys her a £2,500 engagement ring, makes plans to marry her and invest in her club, and prepares to resign from CBS and sell his share to a rival security firm. That last decision dismays Ken.

Jo's past complicates matters. Her former lover, Mike Hubble, has been seen lurking round the club and has been stalking her. He has recently been released from a clinic where he was treated for alcoholism, and he wants his old job back as saxophonist in the club's house band, along with a reconciliation with Jo. When he finds that Harry and Jo are together, he is furious and looks for revenge, which puts Harry in grave danger.

Elsewhere, Rocky aspires to be the next Olivier when he and Laura volunteer for a nativity play organised by a local church. It is also Laura's last episode. Elizabeth Carling, who had played her since the start of the fourth series, left to go on tour in The Rocky Horror Show.

Peter Palliser wrote the special, John Woods directs, and the cast is a distinguished one. Alfred Molina plays Hubble, Jill Gascoine, who has a page on this site, plays Jo, and Peter Vaughan is her father. The singer P. P. Arnold and the actor Clarke Peters appear as themselves. Wikipedia notes that ITV spent heavily on its Christmas schedule that year, with specials of Taggart, The Darling Buds of May, Minder and Sherlock Holmes, and that Boon was meant to be one of its focal points.

The strength of the story is that it gives Harry a leading part. He is the programme's comic figure, whose business plans fail and whose romances end badly, and here he is willing to give up his partnership for a woman. Ken's mixed feelings, as a friend who is also a rival, are what make it more than a comedy.

The weakness is the standard one of the Christmas special: the story is long. Hubble's relapse and revenge give it a threat, and the church nativity adds a seasonal strand for Rocky and Laura, but the main story depends on Harry's romance being worth ninety minutes. IMDb users give it 6.0.

Even so, it is a notable episode. It was the only feature-length episode Boon was given, and it marks the end of the Laura years, with the shape of the final series, Alex, Harry's resignation and Ken's romance, still ahead.