TV treats for the kids
Not everything rots their brains.
So many movies, but at least there’s time. The best preChristmas movie of all time is Tim Burton’s stop-motion masterpiece The Nightmare Before Christmas, which screens, appropriately, on Christmas Eve (TVNZ 2, 3.45pm). Director Henry Selick would go on to helm James and the Giant Peach and Coraline.
Blockbuster of the season is, of course, Moana (TVNZ 2, Sunday December 23, 7.00pm), a hero’s journey in a Disneyfied Pacific, starring New Zealanders Temuera Morrison, Rachel House and Jemaine Clement.
On Christmas Day, you can’t go past Paddington (Prime, 7.40pm), which is so delightfully English it hurts.
The ultimate babysitters are the online streaming services (we won’t judge) and, incredible as it sounds, Kurt Russell, Snake Plissken himself, is playing Santa Claus in Netflix’s The Christmas Chronicles. For the kid who prefers the dark side, there are now two seasons of the excellent adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events. We have also recently discovered three seasons of The Adventures of Tintin.
Our own Rose McIver has embraced the silliness of A Christmas Prince on Netflix and its just-released sequel A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding.
Lightbox is especially good for the little ones, with plenty of Sesame Street and Wiggles fare. Our favourite, Adventure Time, is there, and four seasons of SpongeBob SquarePants.
Don’t forget local site heihei.nz, which includes content especially for Kiwi kids, including Nanogirl & the Imaginauts, Kai Five and Siouxsie and Eve Investigate.
Amazon Prime Video original The Snowy Day is a lovely adaptation of the 1962 children’s book by Ezra Jack Keats.
If they’re up really early on Christmas Day, there’s nothing wrong with Christmas Storytime on RNZ National (6.08am). government in uproar over Brexit, perhaps this year the theme will be unity.
The Simpsons (TVNZ Duke, 7.50pm). TVNZ Duke is something of an exception, today, in that it isn’t screening wallto-wall movies. Instead, there’s a series of Christmas episodes of animated favourites The Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad and Futurama. In this 2013 episode, White Christmas Blues, there is nowhere in America with snow thanks to global warming – except Springfield, of course, where radioactive steam from the power plant combines with particulates from the city’s tyre fire to form, as Professor Frink explains, “a microclimate aberration”. If the real beautiful natural world is your thing, Prime is having a Planet Earth marathon today from 9.15am; BBC Earth (Sky 074) is screening all of Wild New Zealand from 10.05am and all of David Attenborough: 60 Years in the Wild from 8.30pm.
FRIDAY DECEMBER 28
Call the Midwife Christmas Special 2018 (TVNZ 1, 8.30pm). Christmas in Poplar 1963 will be considerably enhanced by guest star Miriam Margolyes, who plays the “forthright and indefatigable” Sister Mildred. Of course she does. Her arrival at Nonnatus House is unexpected, and she is accompanied by four Chinese orphans who were found abandoned in Hong Kong. While Margolyes isn’t staying
long in Poplar (what a shame), there are new cast members Fenella Woolgar and Ella Bruccoleri as Sister Hilda and postulant Sister Frances and Georgie Glen as the new surgery receptionist. In the UK, the Christmas special precedes season eight of the wildly popular show, which will arrive here early next year. “People often ask me how we can keep coming back year after year,” says creator Heidi Thomas, “but the answer is simple – we never run out of stories and we never run out of love”. Aw.
Alan Davies: Little Victories (UKTV, Sky 007, 8.30pm). We may know him from QI and Jonathan Creek, but “stand-up is very much my thing”, says Davies. Talking about his family is also very much his thing and in this special, filmed in the Opera House in Wellington, he’s very frank about parenthood, his father’s Alzheimer’s and his childhood. “It’s all quite based on life. I think my material has always been really close to home and personal,” he told the Listener. “‘Steal from life’ has always been my writing motto.”
NEW YEAR’S EVE
Review of the Year (TVNZ 1, 7.00pm). A lookback on 2018: what a novel idea. Hilary Barry and Jeremy Wells are recapping the year in current affairs and entertainment and although it couldn’t ever reach the dizzy heights of Paul Holmes’ live broadcasts from the TVNZ roof garden, we’re sure they’ll do a creditable job. At midnight, the event that has become something akin to our version of the Times Square ball drop will be broadcast: the Sky Tower fireworks, which will screen on all TVNZ’s channels and online on 1 News Now and 1 News’ Facebook page.
Lucy Worsley’s Fireworks Fit for a Tudor Queen (History, Sky 073, 7.30pm). Historian Lucy Worsley never misses a chance to play dress-up and in this dazzling – and slightly dangerous – recreation of Britain’s
earliest fireworks display, she is, of course, the Virgin Queen. Artist and materials scientist Zoe Laughlin joins Worsley to decipher instruction manuals and eyewitness accounts in order to replicate the fireworks spectacular laid on by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, in a final attempt to win Elizabeth’s hand in marriage. It takes place in Kenilworth Castle, the site of the original event in 1575, and is accompanied by feasting and dancing. Poor Dudley; a three-week extravaganza and she still said no.
NEW YEAR’S DAY
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire UK (TVNZ 1, 7.00pm). Jeremy Clarkson may have made a plonker of himself when he hosted a series of episodes celebrating Millionaire’s 20th anniversary, but that hasn’t put ITV off ordering more. In these episodes that screened in the UK in May, Clarkson told one contestant he’d won £32,000 when he’d actually lost £15,000. In addition, during a new feature of the show, the Ask the Host lifeline, he admitted he didn’t know the shape of a stop sign, quipping that “stopping is for other people”. Ah well, it’s all in good fun, reviews were generally positive and Clarkson enjoyed himself, saying, “I absolutely loved hosting the anniversary shows and cannot wait to spend a few precious hours away from James May and Richard Hammond making the new ones.”
WEDNESDAY JANUARY 2
Doctor Who New Year’s Special (TVNZ OnDemand). In another break with tradition, Doctor Who is having a New Year’s rather than a Christmas special this year, and the title is, appropriately, Resolution. There are few details, of course, except that the Doctor, Graham, Ryan and Yasmin come across “the DNA of the most dangerous creature in the universe”. What do we think – Daleks, Cybermen or something else entirely?