Was Christmas TV really so much better in the olden days?
Michael Hogan compares this year’s line-up to past offerings and makes some surprising discoveries
It’s become an early December ritual to rival the excitable opening of Advent calendars, the fraught family travel negotiations, the dread of the office party and the panic over the supermarket delivery slot. Every year, the eagerly awaited festive TV schedules are released. Every year, they’re met with an outpouring of complaints about how formulaic, predictable and plain disappointing they are.
The response to this year’s Christmas Day line-up on BBC One, released yesterday, was no exception. There was the now traditional animated adaptation of a children’s book by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler in the early afternoon: a lineage which began with The Gruffalo a decade ago and now continues with The Snail and The Whale.
This will be followed by the Queen’s speech, of course, then special festive episodes of Strictly Come Dancing (sparkly), Call the Midwife (weepy), Eastenders (shouty) and Mrs Brown’s Boys (bafflingly unfunny). Forget Christmas Day, this feels more like Groundhog Day.
The Doctor Who special has been moved to New Year’s Day for the second year running. The only mild Christmas Day excitement this year is the return of much-loved sitcom Gavin & Stacey for a one-off revival, 10 years since Smithy, Nessa, Uncle Bryn and their Barry-via-billericay extended family last appeared on our screens.
So has seasonal programming really stagnated and gone stale? Are we now so enthralled by the lure of streaming and our smartphones, that appointment TV at Christmas is all but dead? Or are we looking at the telly treats of the past through rosetinted specs? We dug out BBC One’s Christmas Day line-up at 10-year intervals for the last half-century to examine the evidence.
Christmas Day 2009
It feels as if things haven’t really changed in the past decade. The Julia Donaldson tradition started here, with The Gruffalo at 5.30pm, followed by a landmark Doctor Who special: “The End Of Time” was the final story for its star David Tennant.
There was also Strictly (this was the era when Bruce Forsyth co-hosted and Alesha Dixon was on the judging panel) and a typically bleak episode of Eastenders, which saw villainous Archie Mitchell (Larry Lamb) get a Christmas gift to die for – a fatal blow to the head with a bust of Queen Victoria. We even had Gavin & Stacey, with 10million watching its penultimate episode.
Catherine Tate’s Nan was in the late-night Mrs Brown slot, but the primetime comedy was Royle Family special “The Golden Egg Cup”, when 12million of us followed Jim and Barbara celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary with an illfated caravan holiday in Prestatyn. Much like this year, but marginally better thanks to Brucey, Tennant and the Royles.
Rating: 7/10
Christmas Day 1999
This was a decidedly lowbrow selection box. Noel Edmonds was still a festive tradition in these premillennial times, with Noel’s Christmas Presents airing in the afternoon. There were not one but two episodes of Eastenders, with bald brothers Grant and Phil Mitchell to the fore, like a pair of snarling Christmas baubles.
Terry Wogan introduced vaguely amusing out-takes in Auntie’s Cracking New Bloomers and there was also Before They Were Famous – a schedule-filler if ever we saw it. Comedy came from The Vicar Of Dibley’s nativity play and The Royle Family, although this was the classic instalment where patriarch Jim tried to comfort daughter Denise when she went into labour in the upstairs loo.
The Royles cheered things up alongside a starstudded dramatisation of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield,
with its high-calibre cast including Ian Mckellen, Bob Hoskins and Maggie Smith – plus a 10-year-old Daniel Radcliffe making his acting debut as young David. We predict big things for that lad. Rating: 6/10
Christmas Day 1989
The BBC top brass must have thought the nation needed cheering up in 1989 because comedy dominated the festive schedules, starting with afternoon repeats of Dad’s Army and Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, plus new episodes of such mediocrities as Bread and The Russ Abbot Show. Even the big Christmas Day films were of a comic bent: Crocodile Dundee and Clockwise. The best by far was the Only Fools and Horses special, which saw Delboy Trotter run into his lost love Raquel on a “Jolly Boys’ Outing” to Margate. The sole slice of drama was Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple in unseasonal sunsoaked Barbados – an episode deemed one of the weakest in an otherwise excellent series. Rating: 5/10
Christmas Day 1979
Looking at this schedule is like looking through a window into another age. Folk quartet The Spinners and figure skater John Curry somehow both got their own Christmas specials, as did impressionist Mike Yarwood.
Larry Grayson compèred The Generation Game and Terry Wogan hosted a Christmas edition of Blankety Blank – with celebrity panellists including Lorraine Chase, Wendy Craig, Kenny Everett, Roy Kinnear, Patrick Moore and Beryl Reid.
The cosy drama was All Creatures Great and Small, while the showpiece comedy was ratings winner To the Manor Born, with Penelope Keith and Peter Bowles bickering over who would provide the village church’s crib. However, the BBC seemed to give up at 8.30pm, sticking on classic film The Sting and a Parkinson compilation. Rating: 7/10
Christmas Day 1969
Forget The Royle Family, here we had The Royal Family – Richard Cawston’s historic documentary following a year in the life of the Queen and her young family (the events surrounding which were recently dramatised in The Crown on Netflix). Indeed, viewers were in for a Yuletide treat. We not only got the glorious Morecambe & Wise Christmas Show, but dear old Val Doonican introduced Christmas Night with the Stars: a light entertainment bonanza featuring Dad’s Army, Dick Emery, Marty Feldman, Kenneth Williams and Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Those were indeed the days.
Rating: 9/10
Conclusion
Complaints that this year’s December 25 offering is overfamiliar and formulaic feel unfair. ’Twas ever thus.
Nostalgia and unreliable memory tends to make us think that festive TV of yore was far superior, but often we’re conflating many Christmases into a single idealised one. The exception was 1969 – proof perhaps that in the early days of TV as mass entertainment, executives really knew what they were doing. Since then, we have tended to have one or two stone-cold classics, surrounded by middling filler and light entertainment fluff. And this year,
I’ll wager, will be no exception.