Plug’s pulled on festive TV
CHRISTMAS Day was once the biggest date in the television calendar, with more than 20 million people tuning in to see the latest blockbuster film or comedy special.
But programmes this year will be lucky to get audiences half that size, as festive TV has fallen out of fashion.
Ratings for the most-watched show on December 25 have dropped by nearly a quarter this decade and by just over a third since 2000.
The decline is even steeper from 2017 to 1997 (down 41 per cent) and from 1987 (down 50 per cent).
Last year’s most-watched show on Christmas Day was Call The Midwife on BBC1, with 9.6 million viewers.
By contrast 21.8 million saw the TV premiere of Crocodile Dundee in 1989 – the biggest single audience for a Christmas Day broadcast since comparable records began in 1981.
And 21.3 million tuned in for Only Fools And Horses in 2001.
The data is from Barb, which publishes ratings on behalf of the TV industry. The average Christmas Day audience remained broadly steady
through the 1980s and much of the 1990s, before starting a downward trend around the turn of the century.
Coronation Street had 14.6 million viewers on Christmas Day 2000 and 10.8 million in 2011. But just seven million watched last year.
EastEnders has seen a Christmas Day slump from 14.4 million in 2007 to 8.1 million last year.
TV Years magazine editor Graham Kibble-White says seasonal TV has few surprises and lost the sense of a special occasion. “Christmas TV tends now to conform to a similar template, with most things – soaps, Strictly, Call The Midwife, Mrs Brown’s Boys – feeling quite expected,” he said.
“Gone are the days when you’d have to wait five years for the latest big film to get a TV premiere on December 25. The sheer availability of everything today has made such things commonplace.
“It’s now incredibly easy to ‘serieslink’ a show with the intention of catching up with it after Christmas, but then never getting round to watching it.”