“Give it a rest, Cliff,” Guz Khan’s Coventry office worker Arslan Farooqi snapped as he turned off the radio playing Richard’s Mistletoe and Wine. Being both a bit of a skinflint and a Muslim, he is not exactly keen on late December merriment.

The twist in the scriptwriter Andy Milligan’s warm if not especially funny Stuffed (BBC1) came with an £8,000 Christmas bonus that his wife, Hannah (Morgana Robinson), persuaded him to spend on a trip to Lapland with her idiotic brother and their two spirited daughters because it was somewhere her loving mother (who has just died) had longed to visit. Naturally enough, the bonus was an accounting error and his employers demanded most of their wonga back. Would he go to prison? Would Christmas be ruined? Or would they learn to prioritise memories over money? I think we know the answer to all these questions.

At times it worked nicely, as if A Christmas Carol were set not in Victorian London but a tacky package holiday while also dispensing with the ghostly visitations. Khan was adept at making his character — whose name can be fittingly shortened to Arse — both obnoxious and oddly likeable. And he was certainly ripe for a redemptive transformation.

I was less keen on the brother-in-law, Jamie (Theo Barklem-Biggs), whose ubiquitous presence in the Farooqi family set-up was never really explained except for his role as a comedy foil, yet one that didn’t spin out great lines. His suggestion that Arse used the money to go glamping in Darfur wasn’t his first tumbleweed moment. And jokes from others about suspect priests and Lapland being as “white as the front row of a Taylor Swift gig” weren’t as edgy as Milligan seemed to think they were. His script could have done with a few dustings of Christmas icing.

Similarly a pair of American influencers who were in the Lapland hotel and became the main competitors in a talent contest that Arse and his teenage daughters hoped would solve their money worries were, in the vernacular, extremely cringe. A joke about mums smelling like lemon sorbet didn’t make much sense either. Who says that?

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It was saved by Robinson, the star atop this second-rate Christmas tree. A comedy talent known for her slightly manic performances that make full use of those slightly unhinged-seeming eyes of hers, she showed what an actress of depth and texture she can be as she sought to give her marriage a kick up the Arslan. Her scenes with Lily (Sue Johnston), a widow who wanted to scatter her husband’s ashes in Lapland, were easily the best and explored grief with exquisite tenderness.

So while you can imagine the meeting to commission the show, with “diverse and uplifting” no doubt being the buzzwords over the BBC boardroom biccies, there was enough charm here to just about succeed if you’re feeling charitable. Cheap, sure, but suitably cheerful. It is Christmas, after all.
★★★☆☆
Available on iPlayer

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