Doctor Who delivers the atheist skewed sci-fi horror we all need at Christmas

Television is nothing more or less than a survival tactic during the festive season.

The phrase “Oh look, The Hobbit’s on” can momentarily distract a loved one from their Yuletide quest of waterboarding themselves with cranberry jelly and stuffing. Telly is also a good way to wind down from the real-life Hunger Games that is Christmas shopping, a sport that drops you, totally defenceless, into a shopping mall and demands you scale a mountain of produce – ahem, presents – by garrotting your fellow contenders with weaponised Christmas ribbon.

Perhaps that is television’s other appeal at this time of year: a chance to mentally detach yourself from the madness and stop asking so many questions. Why are we celebrating a humble baby’s birth by trying to gastronomically outdo Henry VIII between bouts of retail fever that would make Imelda Marcos blush? You might as well celebrate the life of Buddha by pouring gravy on an orgy.

Of course, the most traditional televisual offering of them all is the carol concert. Nothing quite captures the glory of God-made-flesh than two hours of singing punctuated by the occasional spruik for the network. Channels Seven and Nine were so keen to shoehorn participants from their various reality TV shows into their respective concerts this year, you’d be forgiven for thinking Jesus Christ was the first ever winner of Bethlehem’s Got Talent.

Both Carols by Candlelight and Carols in the Domain were fun, but did they need to be Peter Jackson long? No issue if you’re a big fan of carols but those members of the audience still young enough to believe Christmas is about Santa Christ (rather than choke-slamming rival shoppers while nursing your gout) didn’t make it to the end awake.

Happily, Doctor Who was an excellent Christmas outing for slightly bigger kids (some of them with beards and a TV blog), tackling adult themes with a sense of childlike adventure. Here, the Doctor and Clara found themselves in the north pole being hunted by Dream Crabs, horrid things that attach to your face and induce a dreaming state as they feast on your brain (feasting being how they celebrate the birth of the Dream Crab Messiah).

The message was profound and – especially at this time of year – bold. Dreams can be harmful even if they start off pleasantly. Also well-observed was the fact that delusions are not cast over us for our sake, but for the benefit of those weaving the false reality – an anaesthetic given to us by those who would do us harm.

I never thought, slumped on a couch under a festive blanket of meat, that I’d stumble on an atheistically skewed sci-fi-horror allegory, but Doctor Who delivered. Better still, it did so without being conspicuously judgmental. The hero of the episode was Santa Claus (played excellently by the always enjoyable Nick Frost), a character in the victims’ subconscious that pulls them out of the dreamworld.

Some beliefs, then, can be helpful ones, and we shouldn’t be so quick to judge those who hold them. There was even a brief slap on the wrist for ardent atheists, with Peter Capaldi’s Doctor chiding someone for claiming Santa doesn’t exist. “How did you become an expert on what does and doesn’t exist?” he inquires in the perfect curmudgeonly Glaswegian husk.

Wonderfully stimulating, grossly horrifying, yet somehow utterly festive. Can we campaign for a Doctor Who Easter special as well? I have a feeling it would be more pertinent than a physiologically perverse rabbit laying eggs in your kid’s mouth.