Ghosts of Christmas Past

Nine years after Ferdy Villiers died by suicide, his family gathers for Christmas to mark the anniversary. They mean it to be a reunion, a chance to put the grief behind them and enjoy the season. They are quite wrong about that. Someone at the table has been holding a grudge, and revenge is the real guest of honour.

The festive warmth is brittle from the start. Under the goodwill and the turkey, old resentments are still very much alive, and when violence finally breaks the holiday open it lands DCI Tom Barnaby and Sergeant Dan Scott in the middle of a family's unfinished business. Ferdy's death left emotional wreckage that nobody cleared away, and the investigation has to pick through it, working out which of the relatives has been nursing the same anger for nine years and how far they are prepared to go. The family has had nine Christmases to avoid the subject, and this is the one where it finally catches up with them.

David Hoskins and Caroline Graham wrote the special, with Renny Rye directing. It went out on Christmas Day 2004, so it arrived with an audience already full of turkey and goodwill, and it made very little of either. John Nettles is Barnaby, John Hopkins is Scott, and Jane Wymark and Laura Howard return as Joyce and Cully, with Barry Jackson as Dr George Bullard. The suspects and mourners around the table include Haydn Gwynne's Jennifer Carter, Margery Mason's Lydia Villiers, Bruce Alexander's Dominic Jones, Mel Martin's Kate Frears and Philip Quast's Ross Villiers.

This is a satisfyingly atmospheric piece of television. It takes the most sentimental occasion on the calendar and quietly turns it into the setting for a murder, wrapping something genuinely cold in holly and good cheer. That the trick still works speaks well of the writers. And as Christmas Day murder mysteries go, you could do much worse for your after-dinner viewing.