Roald & Beatrix – The Tail of the Curious Mouse review: Festive nostalgia marred by Dahl’s real-life antisemitism

This only-slightly-true Sky One film is gentle fun for all the family… if you can overlook that Dahl grew up to be a bigot

There is something about Christmas entertainment that plunges even cynics into cosy nonchalance. Case in point: Sky One’s Roald & Beatrix: The Tail of the Curious Mouse, a pleasant bit of festive nostalgia decorated in snow and whimsy. Because it’s Christmas, you’re likely to forgive its fanciful exaggeration of a brief real-life meeting between a young Roald Dahl and his favourite author Beatrix Potter. Similarly, its chocolate-box celebrations of long-dead British icons, something that’s felt especially queasy ever since Brexit. But the fact that Dahl was last in the news because his estate finally apologised for his rampant antisemitism? Even the brightest of fairy lights can’t conceal the gravity of that.

Said apology, quietly published in early December, casts an unsightly pall over what is, in theory, an entirely inoffensive Sky film. (It will probably do the same to a forthcoming Dahl biopic starring Hugh Bonneville.) Dahl, played by winning newcomer Harry Tayler, is here depicted as a wildly creative six-year-old whose imagination helps pull him out of grief. When we meet him, his father and sister have recently died, his mother (Jessica Hynes) is bereft, and his only solace is found in the Beatrix Potter stories he reads covertly beneath the covers at night.

Potter, as embodied by an enjoyably miserable Dawn French, is in a similar hole. She is more or less barricaded up in her country house, pestered by the publishers awaiting her latest book, and slowly losing her eyesight. Eventually, but not exactly quickly, the pair meet, after Dahl flees his native Wales to track Potter down.

Trailers for Roald & Beatrix suggested that an adorable meeting of minds is at the heart of the film, that perhaps young Dahl would melt the icy heart of the Peter Rabbit mastermind. Yet their interaction is limited; Abigail Wilson’s engaging script is far more interested in the pair’s mutual traumas, and how grief can be a healing force rather than something destructive. It makes Roald & Beatrix far less treacly than it otherwise could have been.

Potter is a fun Christmas Grinch, shooing away festive carollers and rolling her eyes at anything remotely upbeat. Children shouldn’t be afraid of the grotesque or the horrifying, she insists, after her publisher complains that young readers should be given material “a little less ghastly”. There’s also a lovely through-line about the power of childhood imagination and how it can help shape the future. En route to Potter, Dahl encounters gooey-bearded twits, a proto-BFG (a show-stealing Bill Bailey), and a talking (and fantastically animated) fox who sounds like Tony Soprano. All are magical moments of foreshadowing, gesturing towards the classic children’s books that are standards on every youngster’s first bookshelf (a Dahl biopic is, coincidentally, to be released early next year).

But then there’s the reality of it all. Roald & Beatrix is gentle, handsome and well-acted family viewing, yet substantial Christmas-driven obliviousness is needed to overlook the factual sourness of its hero.

It’s not the film’s fault that Dahl grew up to be a bigot, nor that it’s arriving in the same month that his antisemitism has finally been acknowledged and apologised for. Yet it’s there, looming like a spectre just off-camera. Even at Christmastime, when all we want is a bit of saccharine fantasy to distract us from the winter blues, it feels like one bit of rose-tinted denial too far.