What’s wrong with sentimentality? The answer, I’d suggest, could either be: a) its almost bullying insistence on us having emotions disproportionate to anything a particular story has earned; or b) nothing at all. And if you want to see how both of these are possible, two of this year’s big Christmas TV offerings provide handy illustrations.

Firmly in category a) is The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, an animated film by Charlie Mackesy, based on his own mega-selling book and with some impressively big-name actors doing the voices. Its methods are established immediately when a boy lost in a snowy wood happens across a cute talking mole (Tom Hollander). ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ the mole enquires. ‘Kind,’ says the boy. ‘Nothing beats kindness,’ the mole agrees, as they go for the first of their many cuddles.

There then follows some mild jeopardy when the two encounter a vicious, mole-eating fox (Idris Elba). Except that he isn’t vicious or mole-eating for very long. One spot of kindness shown to him and he realises the error of his vulpine ways, soon joining in the platitudes with the best of them: ‘Always remember, you’re enough just as you are.’

At which point, the three meet a horse (Gabriel Byrne) who sees no need to dissent from the prevailing conversational tone. ‘Being honest is always interesting,’ he questionably declares when the fox shares his (justified) uncertainty that he has nothing interesting to say.

And this is essentially how the programme proceeds for 30 minutes. Now and again, it remembers the boy’s quest for home that’s supposed to be the narrative framework. Most of the time, though, it sticks to the exchange of little bits of ‘wisdom’ that are the opposite of hard-won, that could be spoken by any of the characters and that float entirely free from such action as there is.

Mackesy’s film is clearly hoping to join The Snowman as a tear-jerking Christmas classic. The trouble is that this hope is so nakedly, even desperately apparent on screen – with the programme practically begging us to find it both charming and touching in a way that The Snowman never did (despite having a main character who died). Granted, I haven’t checked this theory yet, but my guess is that there isn’t enough Baileys in the world to make The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse have anything like the same emotional impact.

And so to sentimentality of the more effective kind, as supplied by Christmas Carole. Any doubts left by the title as to which mega-selling book this drama is based on are banished straightaway when we meet the Carole in question (Suranne Jones): the CEO of a company flogging festive tat, made by eight-year-old children in Chinese sweat shops, at a huge profit. Even so, she’s no Yuletide fan, putting forward the robust theory that ‘Christmas is a lie made up by German royals, American corporations and Charles bloody Dickens’.

Invited by her poor-but-nice brother for Christmas dinner, she turns him down with an inventive series of sneers, before puncturing his son’s football with a kitchen knife. She then sacks her assistant Bobbie Crachit-Singh (Taj Atwal) on Christmas Eve and heads off for a live-streamed ceremony at which she’ll sell her company for £100 million to a US conglomerate poised to sack everybody.

If this set-up doesn’t sound especially subtle, then that wouldn’t be inaccurate. Luckily, we don’t have to wait long for the first sign that once it’s in place, the Dickens updating will be witty as well as gleeful. There are, for example, two Ghosts of Christmas Past: Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise (a pitch-perfect impersonation by Jonty Stephens and Ian Ashpitel), who take Carole back to various festive periods from the impoverished childhood she was determined to escape. ‘You showed me the wrong Christmases,’ she later complains. ‘We showed you the right Christmases,’ Eric duly replies, ‘but not necessarily in the right order.’

That same affectionate knowingness remains in place throughout, with deft nods to pretty much all of Britain’s agreed communal Christmas memories. Yet, despite the infectious fun it continues to have, where the programme really triumphs is in the sadder moments. Like Dickens, it makes no bones about manipulating our feelings – but, like him too, it does so in a way that’s impossible to resist. Equipped with a thoroughly imagined backstory, Carole comes to a ghost-inspired understanding of how much the father she’d always despised for his lack of ambition (i.e., money) and later abandoned had continued to love her. By the time her transformation is complete and she goes to seek him out, not a drop of Baileys is required for the tears to be jerked.

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