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.

---

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?