On This Day: Christmas Day 1985

Something about 1985 feels like a watershed. Obviously there had been a good decade of classic Christmas Day schedules, more or less, by this point, but a lot of what had seeped in around the holiday fortnight in the previous few years - extended specials, live broadcasts, genuine scheduling battles led by the aggressive planning of Michael Grade now into his second Christmas as head of BBC1 - is well on the way towards a peak. Throw in that the two most watched programmes of Christmas week were the Christmas Eve and Boxing Day episodes of Eastenders, no doubt the filip for the move the following year that would overhaul festive soap attitudes entirely, and the sea change for the next decade-plus is apparent.

As usual the prime independent channel is up much earlier than the Beeb, 6am, but doesn't quite know what to do with the time, and as usual you'd wonder how much of it is actually live as after an hour and a half of headlines and prevarication Anne and Nick front TV-am's Christmas Party "with the stars and their families". How much is this the case if not only are the Diamond and Owen families shipping in in the early hours but so are the nearest and dearest of Rolf Harris, Faith Brown, Rustie Lee, Roy Castle, Rory Bremner and that 80s kids' favourite Russ Conway, not to mention the Salvation Army Band and two different choirs? Meanwhile Wincey Willis and Henry Kelly are at "a national children's home" apparently with Adam Ant, Paul King, Michael Barrymore and Five Star. We know TV-am was awash with money at this point but that's a lot of people to be paying triple time to. At least Paul McCartney and Cliff Richard got away with "a special Christmas greeting", probably not together.

BBC1 ships up fashionably late from 8am and still pauses to give itself time to wake up with Pages From Ceefax for 35 minutes ahead of the traditional for the time starter Play School, which this year piles into Wayne Jackman's studio house, complete with Jonathan Cohen at the piano. Jackman as one Dr Wacky followed by unnecessary glove puppet Bingo could well be overbearing but the charm quickly reasserts itself, especially when Carol Chell, Iain Lauchlan with his guitar and an actual donkey arrive to ground the show back in traditional means by telling the nativity story in differing ways. It's a lot more wholesome and festive than what follows, the first episode aired in Britain of bloody Muppet Babies, in which Animal disappears and Baby Kermit starts to fulfil the Indiana Frog fantasies he didn't carry into adulthood. It's not even the first episode. Is everything alright in here? No! Get Bryan Murray and some children around a tree for a Christmas Knock! Knock! immediately! Oh, you have. Just after one Hensonalia has finished another starts once TV-am gives way to ITV - which, Moderator's Christmas Message in Scotland aside, is in regional unity for the day - with a repeat of The Bells of Fraggle Rock, and if that's not enough for the kids it's followed by a new Dangermouse episode, Journey to the Earth's... Cor! only Christmassy insomuch as it's set at the North Pole where the mechanism that keeps the world turning is being undermined and gives David Jason a chance to do his Yorkshire accent. Not the last time he'll travel north today.

Once the children are sated it's time for grown-up religion, but BBC1 has eschewed the usual trip to a cathedral by sending their Sunday morning show This Is The Day, of bread and candle request fame, to a Birmingham viewer's house, Bishop of Stepney in tow. ITV for their part send Morning Service to Kenton Methodist Church in Harrow. "It wouldn't be Christmas without Disney" proclaims TV Times but BBC1 got there first, their film from 10.05am being The Gnome-Mobile, the slapstick reunion of the Banks children from Mary Poppins in service to gnomes losing their livelihood. ITV catches up with Walt at 11am with a couple of shorts leading into... oh, it's just The Black Hole, just three years earlier ITV's big Christmas Day evening movie premiere, now filling a gap up to lunchtime. In any case Channel 4 is up early for them at the time, also 11am, and they've got something new. Just a shame it's Mister Skeeter, not a spin-off for Scooter's sister in Muppet Babies but a Children's Film Unit workaday tale about two children's home residents who run away and meet an elderly eccentric. While all this has been going on BBC2 has had the Pages From Ceefax snooze button on since 9am and can only rouse themselves at 11.30am with a repeat of a Horizon from a year earlier about intra-war Grand Prix cars.

And now, the first big event of the day. Roland Rat's move from TV-am to the BBC had broken in October and in the week leading up to the big day he was targeting all markets with appearances on Breakfast Time, Blue Peter and Blankety Blank, reflecting how much he'd crossed over as the saviour of commercial breakfast. With that in mind, and granting that it's still essentially a family character, 11.30am feels out of the way for a show that had essentially been built to for nearly three months, Roland's Yuletide Binge adding a child audience and singers as if this were just Crackerjack with a more human presenter. Russell Grant, Frankie Howerd, Jan Leeming, Ian McCaskill, Beryl Reid, Valerie Singleton and Jeannette Charles all take part. And talking of furry creatures, 25 minutes later comes the second Noel Edmonds Live Live Christmas Breakfast Show, "a Christmas show you are not going to be able to put down!" Two and a tiny bit hours featuring a race up the BT Tower, Feargal Sharkey's miming disaster on Concorde in what's claimed to be the first ever live pictures from mid-air in the company of Krankies and Gary Davies, various drowned rats (metaphorical this time) of regional reporters right across the country's outposts, a suspiciously large number of plugs for BT including Noel failing to understand Prestel, Smitty linking some speciality acts, Rowan Atkinson and competitions in a field, and most notably the launch of Comic Relief, having taken some satellite trucks the long way round to the Sudan to meet aid workers and the odd local in a broadcast fronted by Late Late researcher (speciality: the Golden Egg Awards), former Newsround stringer and future diarist Helen Fielding. Fun for all.

As battered competition BBC2 can only put on Fred Astaire's The Man in the Santa Claus Suit, whilst Channel 4 get through early afternoon with Wil 6, a 1920s set 1983 S4C Welsh community bilingual family drama, 1963 Oscar winning clown short Happy Anniversary and dolphin documentary A Closer Encounter, part of the channel's occasional series of animal films Assignment Adventure.

ITV re-emerge from the Black Hole at 1pm with, joy, an hour of Jim Davidson's Top Pop Videos Of '85, notably not confident enough to go head to head with Auntie's pop flagship. Indeed by the time ITV have got out of that and onto their speciality ground of The Royal Year at 2pm a full gamut of music is on offer over on the Beeb, BBC2 taking the Christmas Day Concert live from Amsterdam, a simulcast with Radio 3 of Mahler's seventh symphony which in pre-NICAM days Radio Times advises its readers to "turn off TV sound and position their speakers on either side of the screen, but a few feet away". That audience would gladly position their speakers several miles away upon Top Of The Pops Christmas Party over on BBC1. After the previous year's jarring experiment with getting the bands to introduce each other they weren't going to try that sort of thing again if they could help it so it was back to the roundel of Radio 1 regulars (Gary Davies, Janice Long, Dixie Peach, John Peel and Steve Wright) for this year. For the first time video clips of the year's hitmakers who couldn't or wouldn't make it into the studio interspersed those that did, namely King, Colonel Abrams, Alison Moyet, Dead Or Alive, Baltimora, Billy Ocean, Feargal Sharkey and Paul Young.

Channel 4 know a good black and white comedy when they see one, so the Marx Brothers it is, even if it is the lesser work At The Circus. Speaking of dysfunctional comic families, The Queen's Christmas Message brings us up to 3.10pm. Obviously ITV's subsequent entertainment is for Queen and country, Moonraker two days short of three years after its TV premiere and still able to land the channel's biggest audience of the day at fourteen million. BBC1 meanwhile spring us the Children's Royal Variety Performance, liberated at the fifth time of asking from LWT with an enormous cast spanning kids' telly and entertainment - Benjamin, Biggins, Castle, Chegwin, Clifton, Cricket, Dando, Soprendo, Harris/Orville, Hull/Emu, Inman, Krankie, Krankie, Langford, Pollard, Rat, Rippon, Sammarco, Savile (grnn), Saturday Superstore and Blue Peter representation, Just Good Friends representation and, of course, Leo Sayer. It's possible discerning older children turned over at 3.30pm to watch Shak, The Red Fox, a repeat of a Simon King film reshown as part of trilogy Three In The Wild. Whether those youngsters stuck around an hour later for Citizen Kane isn't clear. Maybe some drifted off before the end to Buster Keaton's Nothing But Pleasure on Channel 4, if not the subsequent Queen repeat and Douglas Fairbanks' The Thief Of Bagdad.

All Creatures Great And Small had been off the air for all of three years when it made a very successful comeback this time in 1983, so a couple of years later and with Peter Davison now post-renegeration they tried another ninety minute revisit, which itself was so well loved it set the scene for its full return in 1988, if without Carol Drinkwater as she couldn't see what else they could do with Helen, who promptly became Lynda Bellingham. James is now living in the practice, Tristan is now working for the Ministry of Agriculture and Siegfried has grown a tache. While that's on ITV go to the first news bulletin of the day anywhere, with Carol Barnes at ITN, followed by for some reason a regular episode of Name That Tune and Coronation Street, in which Percy and Phyllis spend Christmas with Emily. They'd have appreciated Hinge and Bracket on BBC2 in special episode A Prize Performance, in which Dame Hilda Bracket is invited to speak at the Cheltenham Ladies' College Speech Day.

Moira Stuart is on big day duty for BBC1 at 6.25pm, subsequent to which it's summer and an hour long Hi-De-Hi!, on the 25th for the second and last time and the second of four Christmas specials none of which are in the least bit Christmassy. In this one Peggy recognises a recently deceased cat burglar as someone who stayed with them and all decide he must have left his loot there, leading to an unexpected way round the existing campers. Post-Fairbrother but still just about existing on joie de vivre. ITV's answer? Why a 45 minutes Fresh Fields Christmas Special, of course! William and Hester have bought an extra lot of food and drink for family who suddenly aren't going to be there, but of course Sonia is on hand. Sonia is always on hand. That's why she gets a round of applause on entrance like an American sitcom. But if you call an episode A Dickens Of A Christmas it should be a riff on A Christmas Carol, shouldn't it?



7.30pm is where we reach the apex of this night, and maybe the biggest direct battle of the whole Christmas Day peak era, especially as both programmes were the cover feature on their respective double issue listings magazines. Minder On The Orient Express was going to be the crowning achievement of the Tel and Arfur partnership (and was George Cole's favourite episode), taking up two full hours as the pair take the titular train finding it full of gangsters apart from, somehow, Chisholm on board. A whole phalanx of guest stars - Honor Blackman, Maurice Denham, Adam Faith, Ronald Lacey, Karl Howman, Jesse Birdsall, Amanda Pays, Debbie Arnold - amid reports that this might be the final ever episode, or possibly that (and keep this in mind for what was on opposite) it would turn into a set of annual specials, gave it that extra big push. Thing is, as well as the usual effect when a beloved series and characters become a tinselled televisual Stretch Armstrong, whether involving low lives or high societal ambition dramas set on the Orient Express rarely work because it's just a plush train around which a narrative has had to be stretched - in fact there had already been one just over a month earlier on the ITV network, Romance On The Orient Express being the one and only time Sir John Gielgud and Ruby Wax shared a billing, and that didn't work for similar reasons, though it gave the production team some replica carriages to use. And what's with Chisholm just happening to be on board? How much suspension of internal disbelief can it hold? Whatever, its 12.5 million viewers were the minority by more than four million compared to its comparatively compact ninety minute opposition - and something which is also partly set abroad for nefarious criminal purposes - Only Fools And Horses' To Hull And Back. Shot on film, no laugh track - this, friends, is the future of comedy. Or, at least, the special that showed you could make a feature length sitcom episode without overstretching the component parts and storyline, in a way that feels like a genuine sense of adventure and road trip in a way that things happening on a train don't. Even the regular programme itself would expand having found what was possible. And it's not even Christmassy! It's set in June!

So what does a channel do against those behemoths fighting? Kiri Te Kanawa At Christmas, of course. At least that's BBC2's answer, a programme of seasonal music from the Barbican, followed by a very unexpected thing to be throwing out not anticipating large viewership, Sir John Mills' TV acting debut in a three-hander with Omar Sharif and Golden Globe nominee (for an NBC docudrama on the Vanderbilts, despite being a Londoner) Lucy Gutteridge in Edge Of The Wind, Sharif as the wheelchair bound major general's manservant finding himself lost when his boss is forced by circumstances to go into sheltered accommodation. Over on Channel 4, The Mind Of David Berglas showcases the influential magician and mentalist with the help of Stephanie Lawrence, Graham Chapman, Britt Ekland and Freddie Jones, and then their own contribution to the minority channels' high culture evenings with documentary Fonteyn and Nureyev: The Perfect Partnership.

We wouldn't know it yet but the series that followed The Two Ronnies' Christmas show, the fifth of six to go out on the day itself, would be their last. They certainly throw plenty into it (unfortunately including a sketch as Indians), though there's little actively seasonal in the packed programme tonight aside from a big final musical number based on Alice In Wonderland, costumes and backdrops aplenty. This would win out the day with 18.5 million viewers and certainly expended more effort than Des O'Connor Tonight which began half an hour later on ITV at 9.30pm, Joan Collins or no Joan Collins, lining up with Dudley Moore, "America's top comedian" Alan King and dubious US ventriloquist act Willie Tyler and Lester. Couldn't we watch Film Buff of the Year on BBC2 instead, a kind of champion of champions for the cinephile grown-up quiz show?

Moira's back on news duty at 9.50pm, followed by Bill Giles in a flat cap and scarf at the robin and snow scene-bedecked weather screen, but it was the following show that made just as much news. A year earlier Dallas had come to verdant Shepherd's Bush Green; now Wogan was going to Denver to spend Christmas At The Carringtons, an awkward forty minutes where Tel has to snatch small talk where he can find it with Dynasty cast members dropping in and out of character who for the most part are only claiming to know who he is. But wouldn't that include Joan Collins? Why, no, but she's there on the other side. And that wasn't the only contentious issue, as a quip from Robin Day on the first Question Time of the new year set the pair at public odds, Day telling reporters Terry "was talking to people as characters. He was speaking to fictional people who don't exist as if they were real. It was appalling." It ended up being a press cause celebre and Day was invited onto the first live Wogan of the new year to tell Tel his issue with the show face to face. In fact, while it was the day's third most watched programme with just under sixteen million tuned in, Wogan later revealed in one of his many autobiographies that he didn't much care for the finished product either - it had been pitched as a fully set up Christmas Dinner With The Carringtons but when the BBC team got to America they found Aaron Spelling had changed all the plans on them and ended up having to snatch unfocused chats and set wanderings instead ("(the press) panned the thing, and I hate to say it, but they were right") Still, the festive titles are a treat. We're sure someone at the time made a gag comparing this to French comedy drama Diva, starring tremendously named American soprano Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, that began at the same time on BBC2 so we don't have to.

So with the Quality Street having to be hidden from view and the dirty plates teetering, what little is left after 10.40pm? BBC1 draws to a close with Paul Newman film Absence Of Malice; BBC2 drops off with an hour of Choirs At Midnight (actually at 11.55 - we want our licence fee back!) from an international festival of boys' choirs in Vienna; ITV follows the late news with the mighty Gregory's Girl and some Night Thoughts from Alec McCowen and Paul Miles-Kington; and Channel 4 offers Show Of Shows compilation Mel Brooks Hails Sid Caesar and a performance of Weber's Missa Sancta recorded in a monastery. Please remember to turn off all appliances.

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Radio choice

Adrian John wakes Radio 1 up, Peter Powell does the usual check-in with kids in hospitals across Britain, Simon Bates goes thematic with Solid Gold - every record played went gold in records sold - Mike Read's turn to put on the Christmas Dinner, and Paul Jordan fills out the afternoon. At 5pm is a curio, Peace On Earth, "a musical presentation for Christmas Day composed by Richard Attree, featuring the voice of Jonathan Cunliffe, Choirboy of the Year 1985". On Radio 1! Something we'd much rather hear is Around The World In 30 Plays, where Read, Paul Gambaccini and John Walters combine to play "some of the world's more unusual rock and pop sounds of 1985". The Ranking Miss P gets her own Christmas Special with live Bobby Womack, and into the night we go with John Peel counting down the top ten of the Festive 50. Spoilers: Jesus & Mary Chain at 1 and 2.

Weekend early presenter Dave Bussey kicks off Radio 2's day, followed by Roger Royle in Bethlehem, two Queen-inclusive hours of Ken Bruce, and then at 11am the Syd Lawrence Orchestra live! In Manchester with, just to emphasise the retro nature, the Beverley Sisters. Midday brings The News Huddlines Christmas Cracker and the 1958 Christmas Hancock's Half Hour, after which lunch comes with Judith Chalmers presenting the listeners with My Kind of Christmas. Ray Conniff, a very old school Radio 2 figure, talks to Ray Moore from 3pm, after which the Swingle Singers join the BBC Radio Orchestra Christmas Special. At 5pm, Sweet Liza!, which without knowledge you'd think could be any number of things but is in fact an original musical by Hubert Gregg, the station regular who also wrote Maybe It's Because I'm A Londoner. "Tom and Liza are inseparable, according to him. But love is as blind as a Londoner in a pea-souper, we all know that." Oh, he's writing about London again, is he. Very children's show casting here, with Toni Arthur as Liza and Wayne Jackman in the cast. Benny Green's Sinatra!: A Man And His Music continues - Continues? It's Christmas Day! And it's part two! You could have saved it! - at 6pm, after which is a repeat of chamber orchestra classics in A Victorian Evening, first broadcast on 15th December 1984, the lush sounds of the Melachrino Strings and Orchestra At Christmas, 1920s nightlife memorial A Good Night Out and at 10pm Ian Wooldridge's Sporting Year, with Brian Matthew seeing the station into the night beyond.

Radio 3 had a day of classical music. Among these were the intriguingly titled Christmas Day Fantasies - just some Britten, Prokofiev and Vaughan Williams - that BBC2 simulcast from Amsterdam, A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, the start of six Bach Christmas Oratorios, Mahler and Strauss from the Aldeburgh Festival and, oh my, "a Burlesque Christmas Pantomime" of Cinderella, a traditional version from the Players' Theatre starring Patricia Routledge as the fairy queen, David Learner - Pickle from Knightmare! And also Marvin's body in the TV Hitchhikers', and he's still in panto this year in Haverhill - as Buttons, regular comedy straight man and Points Of View letter reader Alec Bregonzi as Dandini and, in a bit of a waste, musicals name Jenny Wren in the lead role.

So how would you like to wake up on Christmas morning? The Nativity story read by Timothy West? Dr Finlay's Casebook? "A selection of church bells from around the country"? Radio 4 can offer all of these and more before 9am. Morning Service comes from Belfast, and levity will be required when it's followed by a programme actually called A Sideways Look At..., not that we really know what that was. A lot of repeats litter the morning, including a 1976 Steptoe and Son and a documentary about holiday camps from 1948, up to the afternoon play Home For Christmas, which isn't even about someone coming home for Christmas but was one of a series by William Douglas Home, brother of Alec Douglas-Hume and forgotten playwright. That tends to happen when like this your plays are about debutantes, even if the deb is played by Helena Bonham Carter right before A Room With A View's national release, with Anna Massey and Terence Alexander as her parents. A retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk follows. Later on Richard Baker makes an appeal for radios for the blind, a repeat of Adrian Mole At Christmas (produced by John Tydeman!) and Through The Looking Glass And What Alice Found There, John Wells re-adapting Carroll's work with a Carl Davies score, Polly James as Alice, Ann 'Sonia' Beach making her second appearance on the station and third on the broadcast day, Spike Milligan as a wasp and... Patricia Routledge, David Learner and Alec Bregonzi! What's going on here?

On This Day: Christmas Day 1995

This is an odd Christmas schedule. While not near the infamous depths of ITV in 1993, you'd be forgiven for wondering if there was a funding crisis going on across television, which with recent years having brought BBC accounting and commercial income overestimations and ITV advertising recession downturns might be reasonable, and on top of that the Government was in the process of publishing a new BBC charter.

The staggered starts of yore really are a thing of the distant past in this not too far off completely 24 hour broadcast age, so both BBC1 and GMTV pitch in at 6am with Channel 4 following at 6.45pm and BBC2 at the very precise time of 7.05am. Three of them cater for the kids early on, so CBBC starts with Podddington Peas, Bump's Christmas Story, Moomin (singular), White Christmas (animation) and Playdays, moving on to the specialist animated buy-ins they have lying around collecting dust for the rest of the year. Namely: PJ's Unfunnybunny Christmas, a 1994 ABC special in which a bunny Learns The True Meaning Of Christmas with the voices of Bart Simpson, Yakko Warner, Pinky, Duckworth, Tommy and Chuckie, Powerpuff Girl Buttercup, Tiny Toon Buster Bunny, Dexter and, er, Babe; and McGee and Me, a 1990 episode from a Christian morality tale. That's not us ascribing religion to it, it's produced by Focus on the Family and Living Bibles International. Not exactly washing that taste away is A Flintstones Christmas Carol, because it's from 1994. They're doing a Christmas Carol tale within an in-universe Christmas Carol play.

So what of ITV? Well, GMTV until 9.25am of course, and this is still Mr Motivator's world we're just living in so he's linking the cartoons with White Power Ranger Jason David Frank. The Mighty Morphin types come at the end of a sequence that starts with Tom And Jerry Kids, Galaxy High and forgotten fantasy series Starla & the Jewel Riders. Channel 4 opens up with Ulysses 31 - what? How did that broom cupboard staple end up all the way over there? - The Adventures of T-Rex and Little Dracula, but The Big Breakfast will not be denied so its Christmas Special is pushed out to 8am, packing out Lockkeepers' Cottages with Eternal, Eastenders' Paul Bradley, Peter Cunnah, Gloria Gaynor, Barbara Windsor and Dame Barbara Cartland. BBC2 meanwhile get completely the wrong end of the stick and start with a repeat of the previous day's Songs Of Praise special Christmas with Cliff, then the undistinguished 1938 A Christmas Carol and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

So which hot Children's BBC property are BBC1 fending off the start of the ITV day with? Er, The Movie Game, the currently John Barrowman fronted dress-up and film light knowledge game show whose celebrity edition tempts in Donna Air, Toby Anstis, Clare Buckfield, Mark Curry, Saturday morning vet Mark Evans, Grange Hill's Natalie Poyser and Gladiator Nightshade. Not that they should have worried much about effort as ITV's first job once in charge is Christmas Morning Worship from Arundel Cathedral, the religious quotient fulfilled on BBC1 at 10am not in a place of worship but at Beaulieu, a surprisingly common place for BBC media to head to for the big day usually on Radio 2, but this time it's Don Maclean dropping by Lord Montagu's gaff for Christmas Day In The Morning, taking Harry Secombe, Ruth Madoc and Clive Mantle with him. Channel 4 sense the way the heavy hitters' wind is blowing and repeat an episode of Saved by the Bell: The New Class instead, followed by a repeat of Showtime, Blur live at Alexandra Palace just over a year earlier, and yet another A Christmas Carol, this one the Oscar winning Richard Williams animation from 1971 with Alastair Sim and Michael Hordern reprising their famous roles, Michael Redgrave narrating and Melvyn Hayes as Bob Cratchit. "Melvyn Hayes has been in an Oscar winning film" is a tremendous fact to drop in, until someone retorts that so has Danny Dyer.

We're getting ahead of ourselves timeline-wise, ITV is still at 10.25am and showing The Little Engine That Could, which we're guessing is the 1991 animated version of the folk tale with Frank Welker's voice and financed by Universal with, oddly, S4C, which they follow with the all new (apart from being made in 1979) Bugs Bunny's Looney Christmas Tales and that most reliable of family film fillers, Herbie Rides Again. BBC1 also have a fantasy kids' film of a very different hue against it, The Neverending Story, an ITV property until now, followed by Neighbours, because no special occasion can stop it even if it has no festive content having aired in May in Australia. BBC2 counter with something for the dads and Propaganda fans, Top Gear Rally Special recalling the Lombard RAC Rally and Colin McRae clinching the world title at home, and then something for... mum? Treasures In Trust, a repeat documentary showing how the National Trust manages its properties. After that is a weirdly buried documentary about The Sound Of Music fandom, The Hills Are Alive!, which surely they could have shown in a better slot given the actual film wasn't airing until the 29th. Channel 4 are still in a cartoon frame of mind for a while, turning to two lightly satirical takes on fairytales with Prince Cinders and Beauty, and then interrupt that for Christian Rave Special. Now, there's a concept for a Christmas Day approaching lunchtime, fulfilling Channel 4's religious brief with an examination of the world of religious raves, as in Christian dance acts in churches and youth services in nightclubs. Oddly, as if predicting Channel 5, it's actually introduced under the title God In The House by its presenter... actually, no, we won't spoil it.

The day's first news on BBC1 is at 12.50pm, followed by Top Of The Pops seeing off the Christian rave but notably still trying to reclaim its status after the Year Zero disaster, and it's not going to do that an hour earlier than is traditional, almost as if they were willing to take it out of the firing line of... we'll get to that. The team of your dreams, Jack Dee and Bjork, introduce clips of the year and a strong line-up of new performances from - keep two of these names in mind for later - N-Trance, Annie Lennox, the downsized Take That, Boyzone, Robson & Jerome twice, Pulp, the Outhere Brothers, Blur, Simply Red and... well, as it was recorded a week or two in advance two endings were recorded based on who would be Christmas number one, so on the day a Michael Jackson video closed proceedings but when BBC Four repeated it the other year they somehow accidentally got the wrong tape and showed a version with Mike Flowers Pops in the studio heralded as festive victors.

So why did BBC1 go early with TOTP, sticking a repeat of the 1992 Only Fools And Horses special Mother Nature's Son (the Peckham Spring one) up to 3pm? Because on ITV at 1.55pm, after Disney short Lambert The Sheepish Lion, news and a repeat of presumably the episode of Coronation Street from the 22nd comes the first hour, with more to follow on Boxing Day, of Take That At Earls Court, one of a ten night run marred by the reduction in numbers and more notoriously the Smells Like Teen Spirit cover. God, we hope that was included in part one. Channel 4 at this point are half an hour into Elenya, the premiere that we can't imagine was greatly fought over - note the editor is an Alan Smithee credit - of a 1992 film about a WWII German aircraft crashlanding in Wales and the sole survivor being rescued by a twelve year old. BBC2 is at the same time reminding us of the summer's fiftieth anniversary of VE Day, contemporary compilation Victory Stills followed by highlights of the commemorations Memories And Celebrations.

Anyway, how's her majesty been?

Channel 4's Alternative Christmas Message was still being pitched directly against HRH and this year was given to Brigitte Bardot to complain about live calf exports and the Dangerous Dogs Act, while BBC2's alternative was a compilation of their Tricks On Two shorts.

3.10pm was still regarded as valuable real estate for the big two and they went about it in their separate ways, ITV with Ghostbusters II, and on BBC1 the equally spectral Noel's Christmas Presents, the seventh in all, mining a handy invocation of the Victoriana that used to go hand in hand with popular Christmas imagery. The emotional crux ties in with the WWII anniversary, before which Noel and Chris Jarvis take kids to Lapland to meet Santa, as everyone did, and Noel lays territorial claim on behalf of the show to Antarctica. Airier fare elsewhere, a Baz Luhrmann reworking of La Boheme from Sydney Opera House on BBC2, a repeat of the previous New Year's Eve sprawling two and a half hour launch of Heroes Of Comedy on Channel 4 which apparently requires something called Coping With Christmas afterwards.

The day's first big film premiere is Hook at 4.30pm on BBC1, or if you prefer Martyn Lewis fires archive clips at celebrities on a Today's The Day Christmas Special at 5.05pm on BBC2. At the same time there's a new version of Wind In The Willows on ITV, a year in the making combination of a live action Vanessa Redgrave as narrator and luxurious animation by the same studio that made The Snowman (which was on Channel 4 at 6.30pm), with a cast that proves the worth of a good casting director - Rik Mayall as Mr Toad (he would win a voice acting Emmy for follow-up The Willows In Winter, but his being so close in cast to Vanessa went unremarked upon), Alan Bennett as Mole, Michael Palin as Rat, Michael Gambon as Badger, with Emma Chambers, James Villiers, Judy Cornwell and Enn Reitel amongst other voices. Some Enchanted Evening may be on BBC2 at the time - a Julie Andrews hosted celebration of Oscar Hammerstein's musicals' lyrics - but this is the real thing.

It's kind of surprising to find that the night's Coronation Street was its first ever hour-long episode, both because we're so used to the form and because Eastenders was kind of there nine years earlier. Newly secretly married Curly and Raquel's families want answers, the Duckworths are in no festive mood and Steve MacDonald's day is spoilt by a police raid. It was obviously ITV's most watched programme of the day but only sixth overall, and it's tempting to wonder how many potential viewers were instead drawn to the surprisingly behemothic Auntie's Brand New Bloomers, still in its Wogan days. The other channels respond at 7pm with very different layers and levels of populist fare - a repeat of the Austen Easter hit Persuasion on BBC2, Turtle Diary on Channel 4, a 1985 kind of rom-com screenplayed by Harold Pinter starring Glenda Jackson and Ben Kingsley who find love over the sea turtle enclosure at London Zoo and Michael Gambon as the zookeeper who helps smuggle them out.

Eastenders was doing the two half hour parts thing again, 7.30pm and 8.30pm laid out for the traditional misery, what with Arthur despondent in prison and Frank Butcher surprisingly returning to an unhappy Pat. In between is a very different type of familial saga and what would turn out to be the final episode of Keeping Up Appearances before Patricia Routledge left fearing typecasting, Hetty Wainthropp Investigates beginning nine days later. Not that you'd know it as Hyacinth organises a Civil War pageant which is turns out nobody else wants to take part in. This and the second 'enders episode landed clear of sixteen million watching.

Facing down the colossus of soapland, ITV pull out the big guns for the drunk mums. It's the Robson & Jerome Christmas Special! This was the year of the singing squaddies' imperial phase, not just two number ones and the biggest selling single of the year in Unchained Melody but the biggest selling album of the year - no, really, it topped two million sales in just six weeks, beating (What's The Story) Morning Glory? by a good 200,000 sales by year end. (Over the next ten years it shifted less than 300,000. Rip up all those theories about cultural long tails) And because it already has a prospective captive audience nobody even needs to really try, comprising clips of the pair chatting aimlessly about their year between Soldier Soldier moments and the singles' videos. As for more professional singing actors, that can be arranged by the subsequent big evening movie premiere, Sister Act. And if you want bad ideas by actors out of their depth, try The Other Christmas Story on Channel 4, a fifteen minuter in which Michael 'Sinbad' Starke tells "an alternative to the first Christmas story in which everything goes wrong".

A year earlier One Foot In The Grave had pulled off one of the great Christmas Day sitcom episodes, the one with Brian Murphy. The Wisdom Of The Witch, which came at the end of the last regular series for five years (though there would be Xmas specials in the next two) and at one time was intended by David Renwick as the series' finale, isn't far behind and demonstrates again how to make an hour long episode run smoothly despite a maze of sub-plots and footnotes. Clearly the trust was there from the audience as 16.8 million made it the day's most watched show. In actuality, Patrick and Pippa finally move away but find they still can't shake Victor's capacity for building farce or their having to deal with him as they ignore the prophecy of Tarot cards and get snowed in with a psychopath played by Phil Daniels, with an ending met by an audience reaction that can only be transcribed as "HAHAHAohfuck".

Meanwhile on BBC2 is an odd thing, The Abbey With Alan Bennett, the start of a three part series in which the melancholic observer goes behind the scenes at Westminster Abbey with fresh erudition. Channel 4's post-watershed offering is a real punt at the highest mark, England, My England, a musical drama about Henry Purcell part-written by John Osborne who died almost exactly a year earlier, which because not much of Purcell's life story was known about goes and makes up a Restoration timeline as within a storyline about a 1960s actor played by Simon Callow writing a play based on what he imagined Purcell's life to be like, in which he has cast himself as Charles II. Bertold Brecht, were you alive for this moment. Purcell, by the way, is played by the natural choice, Michael Ball. In fact this cast list brings up new thrills throughout, whether that be Letitia Dean as Lady Castlemaine, Lucy Speed as Nell Gwyn, Rebecca Front as Queen Mary II, John Shrapnel as Samuel Pepys, Corin Redgrave as William of Orange, Sir Robert Stephens as John Dryden, Bill Kenwright essentially as himself, John Fortune, Patricia Quinn, for christ's sake, Antonia de Sancha fresh from the David Mellor affair.

We've already had two decent sized film premieres today and at 10.10pm on BBC1 after Peter Sissons has read the news we get a third, Indecent Proposal, direct from the summer of erotic thrillers. In fact there's another starting ten minutes earlier on BBC2, Chinese milestone Farewell My Concubine. ITV's idea of something for those stopping up is by comparison the kind of programme that could have fallen anywhere within the festive week and just happened to land here, a special episode of ensemble cricket club sitcom Outside Edge based around, in a neat subversion of cliche, watching back the video of a recent tour to Corfu and the key events happening during the get-together. That's followed by another premiere but not quite one of the same stripe, Bette Midler's Scenes From A Mall. From there it's the race to see who can most successfully keep people who really are stretching out the definition of Christmas Day the longest. BBC1's then usual festive themed short is I Hate Christmas, "a poem about a man who gets into a taxi after arguing with his wife on Christmas Eve", followed by The Greatest Music Party In The World, a special extravaganza at Birmingham NEC intended as advertising for of all confectionary Twix featuring David Bowie, Rod Stewart, Diana Ross, Soul II Soul, the Lightning Seeds, Des'ree, Echobelly, Alanis Morissette, Alannah Myles (hello 1990), Curtis Stigers and Diana King. BBC2 has picked up a 25th anniversary Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In compilation and the Marx Brothers' A Night At The Opera; the whole ITV network is together for once to enjoy Margot Kidder crime thriller Trenchcoat, Jean-Paul Belmondo's Cartouche and, my oh my, a 1992 German TV version of Snow White; and Channel 4 see the day off with Hepburn and O'Toole's How To Steal A Million, maudlin old Sentimental Journey which surely isn't something you should be showing at 2.20am in the early hours of Boxing Day and just to cap off the night... an episode of Rawhide. And merry Christmas to you too, Channel 4.

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Radio choice

Allegedly Chris Evans is live on breakfast at 8am, following Claire Sturgess' breaking in of the Radio 1 day, and he's got Mick Hucknall and Cher with him. Simon Mayo has an early lunch at 11am with "the stars of 1995", namely Boyzone, Michelle Gayle, Deuce, Sean McGuire, Louise and EYC - hey, remember all you've been told about how Britpop dominated culture that year? A curio at 2pm, Danny Baker's Reeling In The Years, a one-off pop quiz with actual willing members of the public, after which Wendy Lloyd coasts through the afternoon. And then, via the magic of Lunewyre Technology in total Spectrasound, Kid Tempo and The Ginger Prince, whose first series of Radio Tip Top had been a sleeper cult hit with readers of Corsair magazine in the spring/summer so now regathered in the Starlight Ballrooms for a two hour Christmas Cracker (part two; three; four) at 5pm. Back down on Radio 1 The Evening Session goes back through the year's best live music, Peter Cunnah's Star Review looks back at the year in dance, and then at 10pm Wet Wet Wet Live at the Bowl, which nobody has ever previously or since called Wembley.

As so often Roger Royle is pressed into morning Radio 2 service, handing off at 8am to a remarkable piece of blurb: "Charlton Heston, Kriss Akabusi and the Roman Catholic Bishop of Portsmouth join Don Maclean for Christmas celebrations live from Beaulieu". Sure. Why not? Ken Bruce is the other side of the Queen at 10am, Aled Jones does the midday shift, followed by Celebrity Choice, celebrities not listed. And then from 3pm, a Radio 2 exclusive as Mickey and Minnie Mouse are given the DJ gig their voices cannot surely carry for a full hour, Merry Christmas From Walt Disney World. Carson sidekick Ed McMahon is parlayed into action to help out despite his name surely meaning nothing to 99.9% of the audience, but then guests such as Whitney Houston, Steve Martin, Gloria Estefan, Mel Torme, Natalie Cole and Bill Clinton are doing the heavy lifting. Equally glamorous fare subsequently, Roy Hudd's Extremely Amusing History Of The Comic Song. Ed Stewart fills a gap to the documentary O Come All Ye Jacobites, a new version of the old "stories behind the carols" canard, and then a slight return to Natalie Cole recorded live in Birmingham. The BBC Big Band Christmas Special do their thing from 9pm and Martin Kelner sees off the day promising "Christmas turkeys from his own record collection".

By now Paul Gambaccini has set up a spot on Radio 3 and he's on at 9am with some of his Russian ballet music. Saint-Saens is Composer Of The Week so Richard Langham Smith visits the Parisian church where he was organist to talk to a musicologist about him. In fact there's quite a bit of talking on this day where there's more devotional classical music than the rest of the year for most people, such as "Musicians haven't always played string instruments they way they do today. Tommy Pearson finds out about the changes that have taken place in string technique since 1830." At 5.30pm British Cities asks what music Burns might have heard in Edinburgh, but after two hours of that comes a curveball in the shape of Dave Brubeck's Birthday Bash, his 75th celebrated at the Barbican with a backing band of his sons. An operatic version of Holst's The Perfect Fool comes later on, as does The Shellac Show. A selection of 78rpm records, not what you might have been thinking.

Russell Davies is our first guide through the Radio 4 day on the pleasingly titled Morning Cordial. Richard Wilson, in no way stereotyping the man by his character, begins reading A Christmas Carol just before 9am, at which Christmas Morning Service is from Edinburgh. One of those splendidly opaque Radio 4 documentaries is on after that, Lashings Of Ginger Beer, involving Lenny Henry, Michael Rosen, Sophie Grigson and the food in children's books, and then yet another of those John Walters projects we'd love to hear, Walters' Festive Frolics, in which he searches for the perfect winter break. Silent film pianist Neil Brand is responsible for part-autobiographical drama The Player at 11am, with Supermarionation regular David Healy as Cecil B De Mille. Healy died that October, as well. In fact there's a real treasure trove of new programming being thrown in here, an adaptation of Agatha Christie's At Bertram's Hotel starring June Whitfield as Miss Marple, Sian Phillips, Geoffrey Bayldon, Freddie Jones and Maurice Denham at 11.30am, followed by the start of Trumpton Riots, the Brian Cant-fronted cultish series about 70s children's television beginning in Smallfilms' back yard, and then the Comedy Store Players' wildly improvised historical comedy epic The Masterson Inheritance Christmas Special. After the 1pm news is more of the same, sort of, in the I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue special, while after The Archers a young woman denied the chance to go and see the Bolshoi Ballet finds the real ballet was within us all along in The Nutcracker Christmas. Maeve Binchy has written a story, Christmas Present, and Hannah Gordon reads it to us at 4.45pm, followed by Kate Adie's favourite writing in With Great Pleasure. After the 6pm news Nanette Newman reads letters from Edwardian children in Dear Peter Pan. Neil Brand's back in the evening in a repeat of a production of Coward's Private Lives with Imogen Stubbs, Stephen Fry and Louise Lombard before Spike Milligan reads his poetry in Spike's Fleas, Knees And Hidden Elephants. Kaleidoscope ponders the popularity of dream sequences in film, Nick Baker seeks a life of joy In Don't Worry, Be Happy, and the Book At Bedtime is Memo From David O Selznick, the producer behind Gone With The Wind, followed by the BBC Singers indulging in some of that light music for A Christmas Cracker.

Jane Garvey and Julian Worricker are still in charge of Radio 5's Breakfast Programme as every day. Indeed the station really doesn't know how to pitch all this, Robin Lustig's Spotlight 95 and Bosnia At Christmas followed by I'll Eat My Hat, Des Lynam's history of the stars of radio sport, and Phill Jupitus' timeline of football songs Nice One Cyril both ongoing. Now The Good News gives a Martyn Lewis-approved (presumably, it's not him) sheen on the year, Sybil Ruscoe looks back at her own show's highlights and then it's The Christmas Quiz, news vs sport for an hour and a half. Sheena MacDonald returns with another hour from Bosnia at 5.30pm, and then it's all stand by your beds for the worst title perhaps in the history of Christmas day broadcasting, The Holly And The Archivy - "questions of Christmas sport answered by Geoff Hurst, Frank Bruno, Harry Carpenter and Mike Gatting". Another quiz? What? We're not even going to ask what A Criminal Crisis is and why it's taking up two hours of Christmas evening from 8pm, but it's seen off eventually by Voices Of The Old Firm, Rangers and Celtic's rivalry explained, then Jon Ronson remembering his teens in Ages Of Being and Gareth Gaz Top Jones talking to Jim Lovell in Spaced Out to take things up to midnight. Where we don't yet find Up All Night. Not even Up All Night All Day. Nope, back to Bosnia. Happy Christmas to you too.