Losing the plot | 31 December 2015

On the face of it, ITV’s Peter & Wendy sounded like a perfect family offering for Boxing Day: an adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s novel, with a framing story about how much Peter Pan can still mean to children today. In fact, though, the programme suffered from one serious flaw for any Boxing Day entertainment — if you were slightly drunk, slightly hungover or both, it was almost impossible to understand. Then again, I suspect that even the most weirdly sober of viewers might have struggled with a drama that never seemed to know the difference between the intriguingly suggestive and the utterly baffling.

The opening sequence played to one of its undoubted strengths, with an introductory cameo from Stanley Tucci’s Captain Hook. Tucci did appear to have learned how to act English from a box set of Terry-Thomas films — but his all-chortling, all-moustache-twirling performance would still prove a master-class in the art of shameless scene-stealing.