Buster Merryfield and Horses" in January 1985, as the former seafaring Albert Gladstone Trotter, known as Uncle Albert, who was Grandad Trotter's globetrotting long-lost younger brother, and who was known for Uncle Albert's catchphrase of "During the war..." The character took over the role of senior citizen member of the Trotter family from Lennard Pearce, who played Grandad, after Pearce died unexpectedly in December 1984. Coincidentally, nine months earlier, in March 1984, Merryfield appeared in two episodes of a "Shroud for a Nightingale" alongside Lennard Pearce. He did much work for various charities, notably the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. He wrote his
The Fight Before Christmas Matthew Schofield. Similar to the show's "Treehouse of Horror" episodes, this episode features several segments. Since all four of them are set during Christmas, the episode was originally broadcast in December 2010. There have been many Christmas episodes on "The Simpsons" ever since the first episode of the series, the 1989 holiday special "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire", and "The Fight Before Christmas" was not the first time a Christmas episode was divided into segments. Several parts of the episode were inspired by popular culture. The train that appears in the first dream segment references the train featured in