On This Day: Christmas Day 1984

Maybe, despite all the effort, people just weren't as keen as they were on reciprocating in 1984. Call it due to weather, the miner's strike or whatever, but the most watched programme all week was a repeat of the ten year old festive special of Porridge on the 27th, attracting 19.4 million viewers, while Kramer vs Kramer (BBC1, 30th) and Airplane! (ITV, Boxing Day) both topped eighteen million, which only one programme on the 25th would do.

You know how nowadays Christmas morning ITV is pretty much the same as every other morning until they remember there should be a cooking element and get James Martin in to pretend it's Saturday? Well, something similar happens here as Good Morning Britain takes up its usual three hours up to 9.25am in the year it became solidly profitable and was regularly beating Breakfast Time with its solid presenting team, solidly amusing features and very unstable Roland Rat, whose Countdown To Christmas was the de facto centrepiece of TV-am's festivities with the likes of Thumbs Aloft Macca involved. Because of that success they can go live, the morning seeing a message from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Roland phoning children in hospital and the conclusion of the Caring Christmas Campaign, which three years down the line will be the cause of the walkout that changes its fortunes and in some ways that of television and the unions irrevocably.

Frank and Selina were of course too precious to be working on the 25th so BBC1 lies in until 8am, gets up to stick on some Pages From Ceefax and has another forty minutes' kip before being roused for Carol Chell and Brian Jameson reading the nativity story and telling the origin story of glow-worms for some reason, as part of Play School. It's actually the first of three consecutive programmes, four if you count the traditional morning service, to recount all that star/inn/manger business, as it's followed by Christopher Lillicrap's storyteller identity Busker telling the Christmas Story and then fifty minutes of a not yet nationally famous Aled Jones leading the BBC Welsh Chorus in carols, with Isla Blair and Martin Jarvis filling in the details, under the title Born In Bethlehem - which had been shown on BBC2 the previous night!

Once ITV has wrested control of the third channel they offer earthier children's fare (except for viewers in Scotland who have their own Moderator's Christmas Message), starting with a Danger Mouse double bill of Aztec shenanigans The Long Lost Crown Affair and, excitingly, a new episode, Once Upon A Timeslip, the one where the narrator accidentally takes over the story and the cast have to become Robin Hood cosplayers. Better than that, Thomas The Tank Engine And Friends offers two new episodes, one thematic - Thomas's Christmas Party - and one not, Dirty Objects, in which arrogant James pushes about some trucks and gets covered in tar. Then it's Emu At Christmas, in which King Boggle and his cortege escape from barely registered side Pink Windmill characters to save Rod and the gang from Grotbags' latest plans only to get captured instead, all while the kids sing Kool and the Gang's Celebration.

As usual it's ITV that get the Royal service with Alastair Burnet forelock tugging a step behind, still down south in St George's Chapel, Windsor, whilst the BBC's Morning Family Service is from Fisherwick Presbyterian Church, Belfast. Its accompaniment to putting the turkey in is Fritz Freleng compilation The Looney Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie, unless you're watching Scottish in which case it's baffling to non-Americans Our Gang animated variant The Little Rascals Christmas Special followed by that man again, Glen Michael's Christmas Cavalcade.

ITV would of course be right to get as far out of the way as possible, because for the first time BBC1 was heading up the Telecom Tower at 11.05am. Obviously church services and hospital wards had been providing live Christmas Day broadcasts for years but The Noel Edmonds Live Live Christmas Breakfast Show was something else entirely, a big live overarching spectacle supposedly the first show live from a BBC studio (even though it wasn't) on the day for twenty years, beginning five years of memorably ambitious live broadcasting and earnest pronouncements about whatever breakthrough is being planned for that year. While a helicopter traverses much of London, from a tower block to Gerry Cottle's Circus with all his employees gathered outside performing in a cold and wet concrete car park to nobody else until the confetti cannon breaks, and finally to Tony Blackburn exchanging quips in Richmond Park while flanked by women holding balloons and wearing a T-shirt that we're far too far away to see the source of, Noel links repeatedly to the Falklands for long distance reunions and a shaving that the subject clearly cannot recall agreeing to and which we never see the outcome of. Meanwhile Mike Smith is at Charing Cross Hospital with Kim Wilde and also Howard Jones with his band walking through and gladhanding in seemingly every ward, the Whirly Wheeler scales as much of the Tower as he's allowed, Michael Fish is on the roof of TVC, and the Thompson Twins and Strawberry Switchblade - who, it should be pointed out, had not reached the top 40 yet - join the throng. Controlled chaotic, partially unnecessary, and entirely magnificent, and there'd be four more in the years to come before Michael Leggo got bored and told Noel to just do the earned surprises instead, the sourpuss.



Channel 4, sensing they cannot compete, stick on the short film Il Poverello: the Story Of St. Francis of Assisi followed by undistinguished Children's Film Unit wartime countryside evacuee film The Custard Boys, the horrible sounding short The World Of Children ("full of images and ideas and this film plays with some of them. Parents, authority and racism are highlighted but slugs, snails and puppy dogs' tails are not excluded") and, just to ensure the whole day doesn't pass with a zero rating, Jacques Tati's Jour de Fête.

There's no way BBC1 can come down easily from Noel, or indeed get Noel down easily - the lift must have been on multiple pulleys and it's surely a skeleton maintenance staff - so they stick on Blue Murder At St Trinians. That means they can get to one of the great immovables (at the time) of Christmas Day telly, except being a great non-royal immovable means it's there to be shot at, which is what ITV attempt at 1.15pm with Top Pop Videos Of '84. In future they would do something with the format but for now it's a mere compilation of videos, including the laser version of Relax, and thus not really competition at all. Were they man enough they'd have put it on three quarters of an hour later; instead the 2pm slot is essentially a topical clip show, Jayne Torvill And Christopher Dean Special.

BBC2 finally rouses itself at 1.55pm and puts on A Dog's Life, a Charlie Chaplin from 1918 involving a mutt just as mangy as The Tramp, and the first film Chaplin made after being signed to a million dollar contract with First National Pictures that gave him free production rein, a contract so open and giving performer freedom that a year later he co-founded United Artists instead. And talking of United Artists... it's the Top of the Pops Christmas Special! The one show every year that the whole presenting roster jostled and politicked their way towards being picked for, except this was the one year Michael Hurll basically went "sod the lot of yers" and had the artists introduce each other in a loose chain. That's Frankie doing Relax for the first time on BBC TV since the first Pops of the year, Howard Jones, Duran Duran, Nik Kershaw, Culture Club, the Thompson Twins, Jim Diamond, Paul Young, Wham! and George Michael separately on video, and ending with a gang mimealong to Do They Know It's Christmas? including Paul Weller lipsyncing Bono's big line and Slade and Black Lace, both there to appear on the Lenny Henry-fronted second show on the 27th, casually inserting themselves into the climactic chorus group.

A message, your majesty? Sure, and some clips of Harry's christening too.



After which everyone is in filmic mood, and some greater than others. Tell kids of today and they'll laugh but the big family films used to be guarded jealously from prying home viewing eyes, partially leading to a slump over the decade so far in movie premiere quality and viewing figures. Yet both main sides would have their huge deal premieres to correct the slump this time around, ITV's coming later, but for BBC1 Mary Poppins made perfect post-lunch, post-Queen undemanding family fare as it leapt after twenty years from Disney Time perennial to airing in full for the first time. 17.35 million agreed, the Beeb's biggest audience of the day. Almost as reliable was ITV going into 3.10pm opposition with a Bond film and this year's was The Man With The Golden Gun, four years to the day after its own small screen debut.

Ten minutes in, and linking the two with Canadian ice melting/mammal wandering documentary Polar Bear Alert, BBC2 joined the fray with another Chaplin but from thirty four years after the earlier one, Limelight the self-penned and partially autobiographical story of a washed up music hall comedian who takes suicidal dancer Claire Bloom as his protégé, released in his Commie conspiracy days - it was while promoting it in Britain that he found his re-entry visa had been refused - but when reissued in 1972 won Chaplin his only competitive Oscar, albeit Best Original Dramatic Score. And that was shared. Channel 4 for their part choose this moment to launch a new made for TV adaptation of Victorian era bestseller The Young Visiters (which the BBC made a big deal version of in 2003), starring Tracey Ullman and future Victoria Wood sideman and Benidorm star Kenny Ireland. After a Queen repeat at 5pm the Kirov Ballet performing Giselle fills another awkward couple of hours.

It just so happens that not only have BBC1 and ITV's big afternoon films started at the same time, they also finish simultaneously and are followed by five minute news bulletins, Jan Leeming and Pamela Armstrong taking the respective rosters, followed by star-packed versions of their most reliable word or phrase based panel parlour games. 15.35 million chose Blankety Blank, with Les Dawson in his first year in charge dressed as a fairy (for the first couple of minutes) engendering an appropriately frosty relationship with Russell Harty, Ruth Madoc, Derek Nimmo, Suzanne Danielle, Ken Dodd and Lorraine Chase. Brilliantly, neither contestant scores anything on the Supermatch Game. Over on ITV Give Us A Clue is coping less well with a change of master of ceremonies, Michael Parkinson all stentorian and forgetting to ring the bell, and it doesn't have the rushed namechecks in the theme tune yet. Una Stubbs is joined by Julia McKenzie, Nicola Pagett and Julie Walters, Lionel Blair by Spike Milligan, Wayne Sleep and - christ, there's one of 'em! - Bernie Winters. BBC2 have a quiz show as well, but it's a right oddity, Telly Quiz running stripped across Christmas and New Year weeks with club comic and short spell Lennie Bennett straight man Jerry Stevens asking, well, questions about telly, not really a kind of Telly Addicts (which began nine months later) proof of concept given the easy, medium or hard question tiering and the potential of asking a very small cross-section of the audience for help.

This was of course the first Christmas following Eric Morecambe's passing and ITV's joint centrepiece for the evening was Bring Me Sunshine, a tribute variety gala at the Palladium filmed the previous month raising money for the British Heart Foundation and in the presence of their patron Prince Philip. The line-up is if not often in the Eric mode a showbiz Royal Variety Performance in itself, treated like one too including the national anthem and a Michael Parkinson introduction. Ernie Wise opens the show with a song before leading on, in chronological order and with a deep breath... Max Bygraves, the Tiller Girls, Roy Castle with unexpected hair accompanying Eli Woods and James Casey in that same Jimmy James routine they always did together, comedy tumblers The Halfwits, Jim Davidson not even getting two minutes in before introducing the Chalky voice, Leslie Crowther, Bruce Forsyth at the piano and threatening to revive Sunday Night At The London Palladium, Petula Clark, Bertice Reading with Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen, a parade of special guests from the Morecambe & Wise Show's history featuring an Arthur Tolcher run-in, Lionel Blair and Suzanne Danielle duetting on All That Jazz, Jimmy Tarbuck, Benny Hill making a rare stage appearance, Dickie Henderson, Wayne Sleep and Cherry Gillespie from the Hot Shoe Show, Cannon & Ball, Bonnie Langford involved in a song and dance routine with Ernie, Mike Yarwood, Des O'Connor and Elaine Paige. It even ends with a joke about Ern's parsimoniousness.

How do BBC1 react? After all, despite being a Thames property people even then regarded the BBC Christmas shows as Eric's high water mark. Wisely they continue on their own course with a pretty regular episode of Hi-De-Hi! set in spring, albeit the end of the sixth series where Ted seemingly raffles Clive's car, and watched by 14.85 million. It's followed by something that as we always point out is the great hardy perennial of this era of Christmas Day viewing, The Paul Daniels Magic Christmas Show being his fourth on the 25th in five years. It feels like classic Paul too - wig, "man who exhales" theme, Debbie established by name but not yet overexposed. The opener involves a series of boxes, Paul with a big bag over his head and the involvement of yachtswoman Clare Francis, Bonnie Langford, Anneka Rice (whose forename Paul pronounces as it's spelt), Val Doonican and Larry Grayson. There's a classic trick in memory of Tommy Cooper using his own prop. The special guests are appropriately exotic, juggler Kris Kremo and the astonishing veteran clown George Carl. The closer is one of Daniels' best remembered big tricks as he moves a million pounds in cash from now empty box to safe, something which takes nearly twenty minutes to do. One of the witnesses is the similarly inclined "man of integrity" Robert Maxwell, who seems to want to be very tactile with the money. BBC2 meanwhile venture a Scottish Ballet version of The Nutcracker.

In two years' time Just Good Friends will make its own mark on Christmas Day viewing, which would have been a surprise at this time to John Sullivan, Paul Nicholas, Jan Harvey and co because this ninety minute special (preceding Sullivan's first extended Only Fools And Horses by a year, so again it's possible that as he turned his thoughts back towards Peckham he was using this as practice) starting at 7.25pm was intended as a coda following Penny moving to Paris at the end of the second series a month earlier. Coda and indeed prequel, showing the pair's first meeting, the story of their affair and the eventual wedding day jilting. Surprisingly it became one of the day's biggest hits with 15.2 million tuned in, which is presumably what led to the recommission, although the episode itself is what people on the internet call Lost Media as it's never appeared on streaming or DVD (or in all likelihood YouTube unedited) in its original form due to a large amount of unclearable music.

Channel 4 for their part, after the news at 7.10pm, air in what sounds like a return offering for that Freddie Frinton New Year's Eve thing a showcase for the sketches and cartoons of huge name German comedian Loriot, with Andrew Sachs swallowing his pride to provide translated voiceovers, followed by a regular Brookside. This is listed everywhere including the STV on-demand archive and this very YouTube upload as going out on Boxing Day for some reason but we've checked back to contemporary reports and they're all wrong so there. "Marie is depressed about George and refuses to let the twins keep a donkey they find", while Sheila is confined to bed and Harry fears he's having a heart attack. A regular soap opera episode going out on this date is still a rare thing, though a set of divorce papers will soon enough sort that out. But then so even in these much more cultured climes is BBC2 giving over 65 minutes on Christmas evening to The Master Of Mouton, Russell Harty recalling his Aquarius days in visiting Baron Philippe de Rothschild at Chateau Mouton.

The other big Christmas film? That'll be Raiders Of The Lost Ark, from 8.30pm on ITV and getting the day's biggest audience of 19.35 million when no other show on this day made its weekly top ten. That overlaps with the last half hour of Just Good Friends, which BBC1 followed with the latest The Two Ronnies Christmas Special, the fourth of only six on the big day (discounting Christmas Night With The Stars contributions) and featuring a big song and dance routine by "stereo Santas", Patrick Troughton as judge in a courtroom that becomes a game show set and as this year's long closing film The Ballad of Snivelling And Grudge, starring Peter Wyngarde in a Gerald Wiley-penned medieval tale. For what might be the only time the final headlines are replaced by a warmly comforting and mostly straight seasonal song with Ronnie C "at" the piano. Also, "the lovely Elaine Paige".

The lovely Queen gets her BBC2 outing at 8.40pm followed by a 188 minute film taking the second channel all the way to closedown. Saves on energy, we suppose. It's a film released that year too, Kaos, an Italian anthology of four Sicilian short stories written by Luigi Pirandello. A little before that starts Channel 4 at 8.30pm offers a very British dramatic alternative, a small screen version (as opposed to the classic 1955 film version) of West End hit revival farce See How They Run featuring the stage cast of Michael Denison, Liza Goddard, Maureen Lipman, Derek Nimmo, Christopher Timothy, Peter Blake, Carol Hawkins and Bill Pertwee.

Leeming returns just before ten, leaving the night open to a respectful pilgrimage to the holy studios at verdant Shepherd's Bush Green and a special Wogan, the fine mist of thrice weekly hovering in the horizon. This festive sally features Freddie Starr singing and swapping shoes, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and Elton John both doing the same one of those things, and an almost too knowing rematch with recent icy interviewee Victoria Principal via satellite. At the same time Channel 4, committed to the brief to the last, offers a two part documentary about Jean Sibelius. Indiana has saved the day for ITV by 10.40pm so it's back to ITN and then to Des O'Connor Tonight but by comparison it's all a bit too LE with Shakin' Stevens with Hank Marvin, Chas & Dave, Russell Grant and French singer Mireille Mathieu, who had duetted with Des on telly back in 1970.

Now we're into the witching hours, the paper has filled the dustbin, the kids are pretending to sleep and the adult conversation can come out. To wit: BBC1 closes the day with the classic Some Like It Hot sixteen years after it premiered on the same day and channel, which ITV counter with, of course, a slasher film from 1972, Sally Field starring in the made for ABC Home For The Holidays, which they attempt to take the edge off by jamming in Peace, Gill Nevill meeting the societal bridge builders, before closedown, which Channel 4 do with the Christmas Diary of "the poor man's thinker", fine artist Ian Breakwell supplying eight provocatively all too realistic seasonal tableaux across the week before bed. And peace be with you.

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Radio choice

Wake Up To Christmas is the logical way Radio 1 wakes up, with Keith Chegwin and Maggie Philbin who had been contributing to Saturday morning shows all year between Superstore and Tony Blackburn. Then it's Peter Powell, who takes the Queen's message at 9.30am as all BBC radio does and "talks to children who won't be at home for Christmas", Simon Bates's All Gold, Mike Read overseeing the pretend Christmas dinner wackiness, Jonathan King ("favourite records in his own inimitable style"), Bruno Brookes who had only been granted his own show in September, Janice Long and John Peel with the mid-section of the year's Festive 50.

Ray Moore is up at 5.30am to start Radio 2 off as Paul McDowell is on at breakfast hours direct from Bethlehem visiting holy sites and hospitals. Terry Wogan does a couple of hours' shift before Hannah Gordon explores the festive customs of other countries. What those other countries' learned folk would have made of The Grumbleweeds' Wilf In Santaland at midday we can only speculate. The News Huddlines of the year follow as best they can up to a revival of Forces' Favourites, the armed forces abroad request show that later became Family Favourites, with original host Jean Metcalfe returning after it being part of Ed Stewart's show of later years. Nanette Newman then looks Through A Child's Eyes at the season, after which Broadway star Stubby Kaye gets an hour and a half to talk about his career and the stars he rubbed shoulders with. The Cliff Adams Singers reconvene in tinsel for Sing Something Seasonal at 5pm, after which Cliff, Dana, Roy Castle, Dora Bryan and company indulge in the annual A Celebration Of Christmas... repeated from the 22nd! Cheap BBC! Part ten of The American Popular Song, Hubert Gregg celebrating fifty years on the wireless in binaural stereo and The Impressionists At Christmas get the station through the evening and up to Brian Matthew Round Midnight.

Radio 3 spend the first part of the day criss-crossing Europe, taking the traditional Vienna Christmas Day concert from 7.05am, including Bach's Christmas Oratorio - best time for it - and then masses from Metz and Rheims Cathedrals before retreating to the safe home ground of A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College Chapel, Cambridge. Beethoven and Debussy take up most of the evening, interspersed with a commentary from the Bishop Of London entitled Being Born in the Likeness of Man and finding time for 27 year old Nigel Kennedy, who made his TV debut twenty years to the month earlier, taking up with the BBC Philharmonic to play Elgar's Violin Concerto.

James Fox's Nativity Reading starts off Radio 4 at 6.50am and carries on throughout the morning, in between Kathy Staff introducing traditional Yorkshire song in A People's Carol, the dream team of Brian Johnston, Martin Jarvis, Tony Slattery and Alison Steadman in The Rest Of The Day's Your Own, and a Christmas Day Eucharist from St Albans Abbey. An adaptation of Pride And Prejudice continues its merry way in mid-morning before the real modern literary classic, Stilgoe's Around, in which Richard has Sandi Toksvig - while still being Ethel, remember - in his team for some light comic song about education. That's followed by Quote... Unquote, which certainly taught us a lesson. After the news, The Archers and a 1957 Round The Horne, the afternoon play slot is The Prisoner of Zenda, adapted for the telly only a couple of months earlier and already being given a second go in audio form with Hannah Gordon, Martin Jarvis and Julian Glover amongst the cast. The rest of the afternoon feels pretty second hand too - a tribute to Sir John Betjeman extracted from Kaleidoscope, highlights of Down Your Way, another reading of Winnie the Pooh and Asterix - though non-Christians talking about their experiences of the festive season in Christmas Present would have been a summary jolt. Victorian Christmas Miscellany has been running after the evening news across the week in the slot 15 Minute Musical does now but this is of a higher calling, based on choral and piano recitals with words about aspects of late 19th century Christmas delivered by Richard Briers, Martin Jarvis and Miriam Margolyes amongst others. Can't imagine modern Radio 4 investing in an adaptation of Jeffrey Archer's Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less, mind. Alan Coren on party games links the Archers repeat to a reading of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan with Judi Dench and Michael Williams as leads. A Blast On The Old Coach Horn is intriguing in word alone, the memoirs of "gentleman coachman" Charles Birch Reynardson with, it says here, songs by Dragonsfire, presumably not the German metal band. "Every Boxing Day traditional sword-dance teams take to the streets of Sheffield" according to late fifteen minute documentary Crossing Swords, which via a 10.30pm news bulletin leads into a repeat from two days earlier of Every Man's Guide to Mornington Crescent, author Esther de Waal on The Meaning Of Christmas, Emlyn Williams presenting his own Dickens sketches adaptations, and Radio Brynsiencyn, the long running Radio Wales spoof local station given a national berth for a week. Don't forget to switch off your set.

On this day: Christmas Day 1994

Here in 2024 there's been a social media kerfuffle about how ITV haven't tried for Christmas Day, merely offering an Emmerdale, a Coronation Street (with a major character leaving) and The Chase. This apparently represents a low point for the main commercial channel, one that anyone who reads these blogs every year will be laughing down their sleeve at after 1993's prime time line-up comprising three films and essentially a stunt clip show. After an IBA telling off ITV was forced into making a real effort and were rewarded, still not overcoming the BBC viewing dominance of the day but their share climbed fully ten percentage points to 31.6 percent.

That said, ITV, in a move that echoes down the decades to these last few years' mornings of "same procedure as every day?", starts exactly as it always does. Well, actually we shouldn't be blasé as to blame them, it's GMTV that runs as normal with The Sunday Review, The Sunday Programme and long running but instantly forgotten basic linkage Disney Club. They had Christmas morning veteran Philippa Forrester and a tyro Craig Doyle at the time too. ITV pick up the baton from 9.25am with a Scooby Doo, but not a festive one - no, it's The Dynamic Scooby-Doo Affair from the 1972 The New Scooby-Doo Movies series in which the gang meet, but of course, Batman and Robin who are like them investigating a mysterious plane drop that turns out to be an aid to Joker and Penguin's counterfeiting ring. That's except for viewers in Scotland, who have their own cartoons and Moderator's Christmas Messages.

Meanwhile the firm hands of Ball and Jarvis are marshalling BBC1 through to 10am - no displaced and obviously to the point of admitting it pre-recorded Saturday morning shows this year (on either channel, actually) so start with what's been moulding in the special cupboard all year, namely Santa and the Tooth Fairies, something called Wishing, a Playdays repeat and Santa's First Christmas, followed by two premieres that would do likewise for the rest of the decade - The Bears Who Saved Christmas, with Pam 'Mindy' Dawber amongst the voice cast, and an episode of the Cosgrove Hall version of Noddy, meaning Jimmy Hibbert as far as the eye can see. Then it's as far as we can tell terrestrial's only ever airing of Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town, a 1970 stopmotion animation for ABC with Fred Astaire narrating (as a mailman) and Mickey Rooney as Kris Kringle himself, telling an origin story loosely based on the song. Channel 4 is also on its kids kick for the early risers with Paddington, Dutch film Sebastian Star Bear: First Mission, Canadian newspaper strip adaptation For Better Or For Worse, The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, Biker Mice from Mars and CBS' 1987 A Claymation Christmas Celebration, shoving The Big Breakfast Christmas Special with guests Claudia Schiffer, Bad Boys Inc and Zig & Zag singing - none of it live, we sort of suspect - out to 9.25am. BBC2, which never wanted kids anyway, harrumphs and sticks on MGM golden age of musicals celebration That's Entertainment.

It's a Sunday so there's still a God slot to be filled but that doesn't mean Songs Of Praise has to stick to its early evening slot any more. Instead it's put out to the 10am slot usually kept for the Christmas morning service and given a bit of the old showbiz razzle-dazzle, Linda Bellingham, Robert Duncan, Marti Webb and Roy Castle's widow joining Pam Rhodes in All Hallows Church in central London while a thousand strong choir sing carols in Blackpool, Marti Caine goes to Lapland with the usual selection of underprivileged children and "Don Maclean hosts a house party", of which more in the radio section. ITV fifteen minutes later looks at disability imagery from Tiny Tim onwards in filler social programme Link and then launches into a full two hours of Christmas Matters, a version of Sue Cook-fronted topical religious magazine Sunday Matters incorporating Christmas Morning Worship, a Roman Catholic service from Birmingham. Two hours! In that time your kids could be watching the original Doctor Dolittle on BBC2, Saved By The Bell, Take That In Concert and John Lasseter-directed Pixar short Knick Knack on Channel 4 (and, if they're particularly adventurous, Black Gospel Christmas Special), or 1990's Jetsons: the Movie for some reason and a filler Tom & Jerry on BBC1.



The morning over, the adults start filing back into the room as the final dinner preparations are carried out, and your choice of viewing is the Eastenders Omnibus, a tribute to Brian Lara's record breaking cricketing year on BBC2, Danny Kaye's musical biopic Hans Christian Andersen on Channel 4, or on ITV Mole's Christmas, a new animated Wind In The Willows offshoot with the voices of Richard Briers, Peter Davison, Imelda Sta/unton and Ellie Beaven (you do, she was in The Wild House and then was the teenager in Down To Earth. Mostly does theatre now.) Even if it isn't a Cosgrove Hall joint that's a prestigious line-up and a pretty prestigious marque to spin off from, so why's it on at 12.40pm against what's essentially filler and not even shown on Scottish, who prefer a compilation of Ms Young's chat show Kirsty? It's only been repeated thrice more too, once as first thing on Boxing Day 1995, then early on December 27th 1998, then Five stuck it on at 9.25am on Christmas Eve 2004. In any case it's got to be more worthwhile than acting as warm-up for 1986 Disney TV movie The Christmas Star, which takes up the 110 minutes up to the speech and wherein Ed Asner escapes from prison disguised as Santa Claus and while hiding is befriended by two local children believing him to be the real deal.

Talking of oddly scheduled programming, D-Day Remembered should surely be in prime-time closer to the end of the year and not at 1.10pm on BBC2, being recollections of the summer's fiftieth anniversary celebrations by Allied forces veterans. As if part of a theme afternoon it's followed by Going Underground, a repeat of the story of the escape from Stalag Luft by the few that survived it. Worthy, but you can't imagine a lot of household preferring it to Top Of The Pops, presented by Take That very much projecting to the back of the theatre with studio appearances by D:Ream, Doop, Toni Di Bart, Stiltskin, Wet Wet Wet, All-4-One, Let Loose, Whigfield, Pato Banton, Eternal - this wasn't a great year for pop's depth, was it? - and East 17 at number one, plus Mariah Carey via satellite.

An address! Again, mostly about the D-Day commemorations.



Or there's the Alternative Christmas Message from the Rev. Jesse Jackson on Channel 4, who were running a Black Christmas season. Or Tricks On Two, a handily ten minutes long compilation of some close-up magic clips that had been shoved in between programmes in recent times.

So with everyone coming out of whatever way they were marking 3pm, what next? Well, on BBC1 it's the fifth Noel's Christmas Presents, set to full heartwarming blast. This is the one with a Latvian émigré returning to his former home and being reunited with his last surviving relative, and another who from Edmonds' intro seems to have been led to believe he'd be taking part in a revival of Noel's Addicts. ITV... well, in today's other blog we talk about BBC1 getting to air Mary Poppins, and a decade later here it is in the same slot on the other side. Channel 4 were originally scheduled to show The Secret Life of Walter Mitty but that had since become a San Franciscan adaptation of Turandot, while BBC2 have put together an omnibus airing of Hard Times, produced for BBC Schools' English File in four half hour sections aired in October, but whatever necessary budgetary restrictions went on production aren't reflected in a cast list that includes Richard E Grant, Harriet Walter, Alan Bates, Bill Paterson, Bob Peck, Patsy Byrne and Alex Jennings, not to mention written and directed by Peter Barnes whose The Ruling Class became an Oscar-nominated film.

As if Noel and his gifts for the deserving weren't tearjerking enough for mildly sozzled folk who've stuck BBC1 on for the night, Animal Hospital Christmas should set them right off - we weren't to know then about Rolf - before the news with Jill Dando rouses them and The Wrong Trousers, premiered on BBC2 364 days earlier, brings them back fully. Or it's possible they'll turn over to BBC2 as Eastenders and Emmerdale teams vie for supremacy at Martyn Lewis' clip-festooned topical quiz Today's The Day followed by a Carpenters BBC live set from 1971, which coupled with the 25th anniversary compilation of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In seems like the start of a 70s theme night that the channel just decides it can't be bothered continuing with.

A year earlier Keeping Up Appearances had gone abroad and featured a role for Lord Lichfield. This year Richard has athlete's foot and Hyacinth wants a new kitchen which Trevor Bannister wants to sell her. It didn't do that badly in 1993, surely. Talking of Christmas specials featuring odd couples brings us to Channel 4 at roughly the same time, 5.30pm, and Zig and Zag's Christmas Special, also known as Zig & Zag: Entertainment Cops, a kind of pilot for their 1996 Dirty Deeds series in which they seek to undermine an Eamonn Holmes special with a remarkable cast list - Richard Wilson as their boss, Caroline Quentin, Keith Allen as their boss Marcus Plantpot (someone had fun with that one), Christopher Biggins, Frank Bruno, Chas & Dave, Major Ronald Ferguson, the Krankies, Lesley Joseph, Rod Hull and Emu, Rustie Lee, Kenneth MacDonald, Paul McKenna, Sonia, Tom O'Connor, Angela Rippon, Jim Rosenthal, Dale Winton, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Wolf from Gladiators and Helen Mirren as Superintendent Jane Tennison. Let's just say the whole thing ends on HMS Belfast with the pair dressed as Bruce Forsyth and Rosemarie Ford. The second hand Bugs Bunny that fills ten minutes to the news on ITV (Dennis Tuohy) cannot hope to compete, especially when Zig & Zag are followed by their old boss/running mate/offscreen flatmate Chris Evans, albeit a repeat of the previous day's Don't Forget Your Toothbrush with Roy Wood, a high powered drinks hose and a remote controlled turkey.



As we've said before, if you were keen to see some Disney on telly you'd usually have to survive on the meagre portions doled out every bank holiday Monday on Disney Time before, many years after release, the House of Mouse would relent but only one at a time. So it is that 1959's classic Sleeping Beauty has its TV premiere just after 6pm on ITV to a slightly disappointing given the circumstances eight million people, which you'd have to say is a contrast to Eastenders on BBC1 a little later. Nobody tries to kill themselves, unlike this time last year, the main story instead being Sharon signing the divorce papers with Grant - divorce papers on Christmas Day, do you see? - and walking out not to be seen again. For three months. And even if that doesn't appeal the Beeb has a large tangerine at the bottom of its stocking in the shape of the TV premiere of Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves. 14.3 million people agreed, which is of course coincidentally the number of weeks (Everything I Do) I Do It For You was number one.

The Snowman finally shows up at 7pm on Channel 4, though it's all over the place for most of the next couple of decades, whilst BBC2 settles in for its usual night of the high arts with a Royal Opera House production of Aida. Channel 4 were actually going to air Turandot against it but the earlier change to the schedules left a gap that only the classic Irving Berlin musical There's No Business Like Show Business could reasonably fill. Earthier concerns over on ITV as it's their turn to try and grab the soap hindmost, this being the Coronation Street where Curly has a star named after Raquel, Phyllis returns after a year due to actress illness, and Deirdre promises to follow Samir back to Morocco, though he'll never make it there. And then it's Christmas Blind Date, which is exactly the same as normal Blind Date but with tinsel and one of the contestants being Jason Orange of Take That's twin brother.

One Foot In The Grave's Algarve set special a year earlier is recalled as a classic of the sitcom abroad genre now but it got some harsh reviews at the time, hence Victor and co now staying at home, though he'd likely wished he hadn't when Brian Murphy as Mr Foskett comes to visit seventeen years after a brief encounter on holiday. Reduced back down to forty minutes it's one of the series' genuine classics and features some patented David Renwick swings from ridiculousness to genuine bathos, and the rewards were reaped as it was the day's most watched show with 15.1 million viewers. Keeping the standards high it's followed by Victoria Wood: Live in Your Own Home, a recording of her Royal Albert Hall show. ITV's gambit for the 9pm hour is the fulsome nostalgia of Heartbeat, A Winter's Tale featuring Twiggy as a Lady whose estate's Christmas trees are purloined for fundraising requirements, while Greengrass both loses his lorry and gains a Santa Claus gig. In fairness it stood up well to Victor and co, being ITV's top rated show of the day itself with 13.8 million.

Meanwhile BBC2 and Channel 4 oddly get round to the Queen's speech at almost exactly the same time, 9.35pm/9.40pm, the latter following it with a Harry Connick Jnr concert, the former with a double bill of supernaturally inclined shorts launching a short series of them to run up to the new year, all written by, starring and directed by black and Asian women, under the header Siren Spirits. The first, the supposedly true story of a strange premonition, features Archie Panjabi's screen debut. More paranormality follows in The Butcher's Wife, a 1991 Demi Moore comedy-drama flop (and she regretted doing it) in which the titular figure influences everyone with her powers. Indeed there must have been something in the air as a little later Channel 4 show The Woman In Black, the ITV version of the Susan Hill novel adapted by Nigel Kneale that had been a big hit on Christmas Eve 1989, and indeed this has been its only TV repeat. Maybe it's the whole ghost stories for Christmas thing seeping back in when the main channels had abandoned all memory of it.

Television was really starting to get into the whole celebrities with cute but endangered animals thing and ITV, via a buy-in from PBS albeit through a British production team, had just the thing at 10pm, Robin Williams In The Wild With Dolphins, the human both sharply funny and naturally inquisitive about finding kinship with the curiosity and intelligence of the animals in Hawaii and the Bahamas. But BBC1 has the march on naturally funny men as it has years of Christmas specials by one and his short fat hairy legged friend, the post-news Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show being the 1971 one, Glenda, Shirley, Andrew Preview and all. After a five minute short entitled Christmas Spirit, which we don't know anything about so let's play safe and assume John Wells was involved, the last thing of the night is Trading Places. Hey, it's a Christmas film!

As for how everyone else ends the day, BBC2 go back to the late night horror well just after midnight with 1963 classic The Haunting, Channel 4 finish with Prince concert The Beautiful Experience and Chinese martial arts zombie flick Mr Vampire because at 1.55am you may as well, and ITV hosts Kiri's Coventry Carols, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa singing with the *checks notes* BBC Philharmonic followed by, depending on your region, a couple of films found down the back of the wardrobe. Phew. All that and no Movies, Games And Videos.

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Radio choice

Clive Warren, the very essence of a stand-in DJ, kicks off Radio 1's day, followed by Steve Wright and the Posse's Stars With Presents, Simon Mayo's Classic Christmas Years - the Golden Hour by any other name - and then Bruno Brookes delivers the Christmas Top 40 for the first time ever on Christmas Eve, which they could do now with computers, revealing Whatever stalling at no.3 behind Stay Another Day and All I Want For Christmas Is You. After that in the traditional Annie Nightingale slot, as a preview of something going out two days later, Paris, London explored the In Concert series from the Paris Theatre. Claire Sturgess introduces Donington highlights on The Christmas Rock Show at 8pm, after which comes Andy Kershaw armed with Johnny Cash's Glastonbury set up to Lisa I'Anson at midnight (she'd been asked to come in for 6, presumably) Boxing Day highlight: Chris Morris in the afternoon!

Roger Royle is an appropriate way for Radio 2 to get underway before Don Maclean, staying resolutely at home in Solihull, presenting Good Morning Christmas with Edward Heath, the Hall Green Salvation Army Band and stars of the Birmingham Hippodrome production of Jack and the Beanstalk, which means one or more of Kevin Lloyd from The Bill, Judi Spiers, Ray Meagher from Home And Away, Su Pollard, Malanda Burrows, Mike Doyle, Scorpio from Gladiators, Zippy, George, Bungle and, er, Don Maclean. Maybe he asked round the previous night. Ken Bruce follows the Queen, who himself is followed by Michael Aspel playing music that would have been played sixty years earlier and assorted anniversaries. We can think of a big one. Phillip Schofield Reads Joseph at 2pm in a repeat from Radio 5, which is just lazy, and then Robert Hardy narrates the story of The Christmas Truce, because it's Sunday The Cliff Adams Singers Sing Something Crosby whatever that means, Charlie Chester battles on with his music hall anecdotes which is why Tommy Cockles had to happen, The Huddlines cannot be stopped with a Bumper Christmas Annual, Richard Baker's Christmas Present is nothing of the sort, then Royle returns to host a gala Christmas concert from the Blackpool Tower Ballroom with lots of local choirs. Alan Keith is still wading through Your Hundred Best Tunes - a title that always confused us when younger, surely the list can't change so much that you wouldn't get through a hundred songs much quicker than however long that lasted? - before Steve Jones, presumably the Pyramid Game one, takes us through to midnight with "the best contemporary music featured on Radio 2 throughout the year", which is just what they do every day now. Nice to see Alex Lester on overnights even then.

The umbrella title Sacred and Profane sets out Radio 3's stall for the morning, including more than three hours of Brian Kay's Christmas Sunday Morning. The annual Christmas Quiz earns itself a lunchtime repeat from just the previous day, followed by Handel's Messiah as recorded in Cardiff a week earlier and A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols... again repeated from Christmas Eve! Budget cuts? Or could nobody be arsed? A new series of recreating Middle Ages nativity music, Paris 1200, is diverting enough at 6.10pm, as is the evening's feature Doctor Johnson's Christmas, an evening of plays, prose and poetry celebrating Dr Samuel's life and contemporary surroundings, the cast including Simon Callow as the great dictionarian, John Sessions as Boswell and Maria Aitken as his partner Hester Thrale. Music In Our Time at 10.10pm "takes a look at the lighter side of new music in the USA." Bagsy the Spin Doctors!

Richard Baker presenting festive classical music at 6am starts the day on, well, Radio 4. Sunday, what was there before Today ate everything up, presents guests, choirs, quizzes and "the Bethlehem story as it unfolds" for an hour before the Queen, the headlines and the morning service from Cambridge. Various repeats - the Archers omnibus, superior Comedy Store Players improvised play The Masterson Inheritance's Christmas Special from the previous year, I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue likewise - fill the gap up to Desert Island Discs, in which Sue Lawley strands, appropriately for the date, David Jason. Radio broadcasting on the 25th is as we've seen over the years prime territory for prose and poetry, and so Deck The Halls - another much used title, almost as much as Christmas Present - has Jean Marsh and John Mortimer do the job With Great Pleasure pretty much does now but with extra seasonal chorale. A repeated Harry Thompson documentary about radio greetings from afar, It Was Christmas Day In The Empire, takes up half the usual play slot, the other being The Twelve Days Of Christmas, but not that one, this being about the festive travails of the Iannucci family - that choice surely has to be deliberate - who run an end of the pier ice cream parlour. Lemn Sissay is in it as a DJ, oddly. Chris Serle takes his Pick Of The Year as dusk draws in, followed by 94 year old Bloomsbury Group writer Frances Partridge recalling what she did on the 25th down the years in Dear Diary. Terry Waite In Wilmslow sounds like a wryly mischievous title but it's actuality (and repeated from the 20th) as he retraces his childhood steps at 5pm, followed by Poetry Please! celebrating the winners of the Radio 4 Young Poetry Competition. After the news Ned Sherrin talks to nonagenarians in Ninety Not Out, and then with the old Radio 5 having breathed its last that year a shortlived children's section on Sunday nights presents a new dramatisation of Dylan Thomas' A Child's Christmas In Wales with Philip Madoc and Freddie Jones as those reminiscing. Just to make sure things don't get too sappy poet Simon Rae "loads his gun and sprays the festivities with satirical bullets" in Shoot The Turkey. The rest of the night is makeweight repeats, apart from a 10pm Kaleidoscope special about the history of the waltz and shocking ballroom dances down the years, followed by a very Radio 4 commission God's Secret Agents, the cultural range of heavenly bodies.

As mentioned we have Radio 5 Live now and its first Christmas Day is... patchy. Julian Worricker is still stuck on breakfast and the morning is full of programmes with confusing titles and no eludication like Spotlight 94 with Robin Lustig or The Ad Break Christmas Special. At least we can guess what Yule Never Believe This! is and know about The Big Byte, a festive special presented by Gareth 'Top' Jones, which is followed by the short-lived Top Gear radio spinoff and sports investigate programme On The Line talking about streakers for some reason. The news and sport teams are pitted into a late afternoon Quiz Of The Year, followed by a review of the American sporting year, Messrs H Reeve and Docherty's sly northern phone-in Jim And The Doc (with Mark Radcliffe contributions) and at 8pm The Ultimate Christmas Preview. Er, guys? Anyway, if you're staying up for whatever reason there's Test Match Special from midnight covering the traditional Boxing Day Ashes test in Melbourne. Shouldn't bother, though, Australia win by 295 runs and England are all out for 92 in their second innings.

On This Day: Christmas Day 1983

Only six years on from The Greatest Christmas TV Schedule In History (TM) and already it wasn't as good as it used to be. The BBC was actually in something of a crisis of popularity at the time, as only The Two Ronnies were regularly breaking a commercial stranglehold on the weekly ratings top tens by December, the big historical drama By The Sword Divided had failed and Nationwide replacement Sixty Minutes was getting pelters. "There may be scarcely a new idea in the whole thing" the Times wrote about their festive package in words that will burn the ears of any DigitalSpy forum poster, "though that is not necessarily bad for the ratings, but one wonders if this desperate recycling stands much chance of success." What was new was ninety minute specials of two of its biggest hits, one below, one Last Of The Summer Wine on the 27th, which a different Times article reckoned "could herald a new direction for BBC drama... there is a move to make film productions for showing through cinemas, cable and satellite outlets as well as conventional television". Imagine Getting Sam Home on the big screen. Imagine if it had let to a Don't Wait Up film.

As breakfast television had come into being during the course of the year the big two are more than used by now to warming the transmitters up earlier, but despite that BBC1 still chooses to start at 8.35am, which in previous years had comfortably made them the first to rise but now seemed positively tardy. By that time ITV has already passed a special on TV-am's early weekend show via Anne Wood for primary and pre-schoolers Rub-a-Dub-Tub, which over its year and change on air featured everyone from Stratford Johns via Dick King-Smith to Ivor Cutler, this one giving space to Bonnie Langford, Edward Woodward and Michelle Dotrice.

The actual hour of Christmas with TV-am followed from 8am, with Cardinal Basil Hume's Thought for Christmas and Chris Tarrant reviving the already once traditional children's hospital visit. If that doesn't grab the kids, then when BBC1 finally rises they have the UK premiere of The Christmas Raccoons, in which Cyril Sneer cuts out the middleman and tries to cut down the entire forest, featuring songs by Rita Coolidge and Rupert Holmes, who also cameos as the voice of the forest ranger. It probably has the theme at the end too, yes. The kids' entertainment swaps back round at 9am as while BBC1 takes fifty minutes of Carols from Newby Hall in Ripon, fronted by Ian Carmichael with Grace Kennedy joining in TV-am ends by collecting the recent Alpine adventures of Roland's Winter Wonderland together, followed by a repeat of 1970 animated Jesus birth story The Night The Animals Talked. That's except for viewers in Scotland, who have their own Moderator's Christmas Message followed by something called The Sound Of Christmas.

So if you've got a captive audience of excitable young children, what better to do than dangle something they'll love the look of in front of them even if it isn't very festive to then snatch it away? Actually The Fraggles Are Coming aired the previous morning as well, which if nothing else shows the commitment of Children's ITV in plugging the new Hensonalia that began two weeks later. Those five minutes you'd imagine captured more adolescent imaginations than the following Messengers To Earth, a "musical fantasy recorded at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Crediton" put on by the Sheldon Theatre Company of Devon. Over on BBC1 Away In A Manger delivered half an hour of similarly cutesy "children's stories, songs, pictures and thoughts about the Nativity."

Interestingly, both BBC1 and ITV went to their major religious services at 10.20am, BBC1's Christmas Morning Family Service traipsing off to the Mint Methodist Church in Exeter while Christmas Morning Worship went to St Molua's Church, Belfast. But hold hard, because in Scotland there was one more surprise for the kiddies - Glen Michael's Christmas Cavalcade! Who needs organised religion when you've got a scraggy dog puppet and some second tier carttons? It's during this time that Channel 4 starts up, though they immediately disappear to Austria's Cloister Church of Wauldhausen for 160 minutes for a performance of Bach's Christmas Oratorio.

Back from church at 11.20am both channels have something dazzling and international for us. For ITV it's The Magic Planet, a fantasy spectacular on ice about an astronaut falling in love with an alien queen. On BBC1 it's the premiere of The Little Convict, starring Rolf Har... oh. Oh no. *cough* Made in 1979, Harris, as an artist who is also Jake The Peg because why wouldn't he be, bisects a part-animated hybrid tale of the early convict settlers in Australia, fictional but based on fact and authentic enough to be shown in schools. That's followed by another imported cartoon making its UK debut, in this case one that would be shown four more times on the 25th (1987, 1989, 1991, 1993) Ziggy's Gift, a version of a long running US newspaper cartoon strip, was brought to life by the great Richard Williams as director, with Disney and Dreamworks animation emerituses Eric Goldberg and Tom Sito drawing and Harry Nilsson providing an original song for the soundtrack. Aired on ABC the previous December, it won the Outstanding Animated Program Emmy. Although the unfortunate blob isn't everyone's favourite it's likely better than the made for TV film ITV stuck on to cover an hour and three quarters, The Capture Of Grizzly Adams, aired the previous year as a three years on finale to the TV series in which the hirsute backwoodsman is shot, has his daughter taken away from him and is found guilty of murder. Merry Christmas!

Mind you, if you thought that was filler leading up to 2pm so as not to distract mum from the cooking (1983, that's how it operated then), BBC1 were after a Bugs Bunny five minutes (Abominable Snow Rabbit) offering a Children's Film Foundation cut, The Glitterball, in which two kids stumble across an alien being in the shape of a small silver ball with an appetite and a whole host of people after it, which offset its budget (the sphere was often a painted ping-pong ball) with technical skill - effects man Brian Johnson had worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey and Space 1999. In 2010 it was aired at an Edinburgh film festival event for 'lost and forgotten films", reportedly "rediscovered after more than a year's detective work", which is a bit weird as it was shown on BBC1 twice more over the next four years. Channel 4 finally returned from Vienna just after it started with its own TV first, Busby Berkeley's biggest spectacular and the film that popularised Carmen Miranda's fruit hat, The Gang's All Here.

It's 2pm, so it must be Top Of The Pops, but cutbacks have struck as the usual mob-handed assortment of DJs is cut down to four, namely Simon Bates, Janice Long, Mr Light Entertainment Andy Peebles and, so you won't have seen it, Mike Smith introducing studio performances from Freeez, Shakin' Stevens, Eurythmics, Adam Ant, Bucks Fizz, Heaven 17, UB40 and your festive chart topper the Flying Pickets. And what is the natural antithesis to pop music? Royalty, of course! But while ITV trotted out Alistair Burnet's personal scrapbook for The Royal Year - which got the TV Times cover, the periodical being very much in love with the family - BBC2 kicked off its day quite lazily (where's your Play School mid-morning break-in, lads?) with Nobody Minded the Rain: Impressions Of Coronation Day, reminiscences of that day in 1953 that were first seen on the actual thirtieth anniversary back in June. And yet they wouldn't even air the Queen's speech until 9.50pm, not like the big two, instead opting for The Book Game, one of a series of four literary panel shows across the period in which Anthony Burgess, Germaine Greer, Susan Hill and Adam Mars-Jones "try to identify recited extracts and then give vent to their literary likes and dislikes."

Another big occasion followed the royal message, namely Terry Wogan's final Blankety Blank, seen off with a panel of at least semi-regulars, namely Sabina Franklyn, Roy Kinnear, Ruth Madoc, Patrick Moore, Beryl Reid and Freddie Starr. And yet a twist would emerge much later as one contestant is Captain Tom Moore, far from Sir, and also far from the prizes as he loses his round. An auspicious, and auspiciously placed, occasion for a programme Tel dropped out of as he felt it was running fast out of steam, but not one that people were going to engage with in large numbers.



Not when at the same time ITV was premiering Superman, which while only fourth in the day's ratings battle was ITV's big winner by some distance with 11.3 million viewers. Actually once Wogan and his wand had been dealt with BBC1 had its own film premiere for the family lazing around afternoon, and one that had been held off telly for longer than Clark and co. Yes, that'll be a Disney film, then, namely their first fully live action film, the 1950 version of Treasure Island. BBC2 and Channel 4 gamely stepped out of the way, the former with a repeat of the week's final part of The Great Palace: The Story Of Parliament, a festive first run Henry's Cat in which the titular drawling moggy helps Chris Rabbit prepare Christmas dinner for everyone until a pot of glue gets in the way, and the reliable standby of a classic black and white film in Meet Me In St Louis, the latter with Robert Llewellyn-voiced alien fantasy animated short Skywhales first aired in November, an episode of Fragile Earth dealing with the fauna and flora of Alaska and yet another TV premiere, Monsieur Hulot's Holiday.

As we enter the evening, BBC1 follows the news, Jan Leeming's turn on the roster, with Jim'll Fix It promising "an 11 year old Hi-de-Hi! Yellowcoat, two pupils of a school for the blind riding at the Horse of the Year Show, an 8 year old Father Christmas and how to crack Christmas walnuts." And how do ITV ride off the back of their enormous film premiere? With Bullseye, of course! Kenneth Kendall, Anne Diamond and Judith Hann do the answering, Eric Bristow does the charity throwing and Anne Aston does the scoring. Channel 4 slings the Queen on at 6pm and follows it with those markers of everything innovative and alternative that early Channel 4 stood for, the Barron Knights. What's more, Twice Knightly was their second special for the channel that year, producing a series of videos for their most recent songs. Carol Lee Scott makes an undignified cameo, like there could be any other kind here. For its part BBC2 is reminding its viewers that it's a bitter world out there with Winter Days, an edition of The Natural World voiced by Robert Powell about how wildlife cope with the cold. Actually you'd have thought both would have made the effort in the 6pm onwards slot as Christmas Day fell on a Sunday and the God Slot still applied, so BBC1 goes to Peterborough Cathedral for a traditional Songs Of Praise Special and ITV follows the Prince and Princess of Wales - obsessed, we're telling you, to A Royal Concert of Carols, a hospital choir joined by with Marti Webb and classical pianist Peter Donohoe in aid of the Malcolm Sargent Cancer Fund for Children.

As if ordained that the day's televisual victors would be a comedy double act, the third Christmas Day Two Ronnies followed the example of the previous year by being the day's most watched non-Queen programme. This was the lowest rating Christmas Day of the decade, BBC1 in a slump that would lead to the Michael Grade era and ITV maybe complacent with their big film, so that meant all of 12.3 million tuning in for Elton John, two singing Welsh train operatives, a taxidermist, a judo demonstration and the annual big closing sketch The Adventures of Archie, in which the titular Corbett character is transported to a desert island by a genie with only Carol Hawkins for company and is rescued by a Tardis piloted by Worzel Gummidge. See what they've done there?

So why were RonnieSquared so popular? Perhaps because, also for the second year running, ITV countered it with a bog standard episode of Play Your Cards Right and followed it with Jimmy Tarbuck's Christmas All Stars, a studio based variety spectacular as she is spoken, meaning Brucie appears again this time in music hall pianist mode alongside Cannon & Ball, Max Bygraves' song about the year, a mini-Game For A Laugh, Yarwood, Barrymore, Shaky and via satellite the Temptations, Andy Williams and the stars of Hart To Hart, Freeway inclusive. BBC2's form of entertainment is Rossini's comic opera version of Cinderella recorded at Glyndebourne over the summer, while Channel 4 put out an unwisely commissioned Christmas Special of Father's Day, a John Alderton family sitcom that seemed to be forgotten while it was on. Hey, one of its time failed comedy not good enough for your Christmas day evening? Good, because that's followed by a regular episode of Struggle, a local government satire of polarised politics in the GLC/Militant era starring Tim Piggot-Smith and written by Guardian political commentator Peter Jenkins, who wouldn't write anything else for TV but his daughter Amy created This Life. We're all for alternatives, but what the hell, Channel 4?

Taking third place in the viewership chart for the day was the extended special we referred to back in the first paragraph, a ninety minute All Creatures Great And Small (part two), three years after the third series, four before the fourth and rather splendidly getting a follow-up episode two years to the day later. The war has ended so the call-ups that ended matters in 1980 have been demobbed and James, Tristan and Siegfried have to readjust to civilian and vetenary life. Despite its undoubted popularity, it was maybe over on Four that the big event of the night was airing as remarkably, despite being released to British cinemas less than six months earlier and in the US in February, Channel 4 were able to premiere The King Of Comedy, mostly because it bombed at the box office and this was seen as the best way that the distributors could get some money back, which even given its blackness feels a very odd thing to think about the Scorsese/De Niro/Lewis modern acknowledged classic. Look, even now it's been freely available on YouTube for four years!

Had enough film premieres? Tough, there's two more to come, the first being The Revenge Of The Pink Panther, Sellers' last during his lifetime, on ITV at 9.10pm. But if a glut of new movies to TV is one regular from this era of the schedules on the 25th, a greater one was being established 25 minutes later on BBC1. Thicker Than Water was the third Only Fools And Horses Christmas special, which finished fifth in the ratings chart, but the first of fourteen to go out on the day itself. John Sullivan is finally getting to grips with the special form and it advances the family story and the "men without women" angle of the set-up, something it wouldn't come back to at Christmas for some time, as Del's dad Reg Trotter, played by the voice of Pigsy from Monkey Peter Woodthorpe, briefly retuns. It would turn out to be Grandad's final appearance, Lennard Pierce dying ten days short of a full year later while filming the next series.

That final first showing on British television follows the BBC1 news at 10.15pm and interestingly it's another film released to cinemas that very year, though you might argue Better Late Than Never doesn't quite have the reputation of The King Of Comedy. Directed by Bryan Forbes, it stars David Niven, who was long since suffering from motor neurone disease when he filmed it and died that July, as a faded entertainer who meets a ten year old claimed to be his granddaughter and heir, only for Art Carney to show up and claim to the the real thing and that they shared a partner when she was born. Lionel Jeffries as the attorney and Maggie Smith as the governess show up. It was never released in Britain and despite this elevated scheduling you can kind of see why. Over on BBC2 the comic chat of The Bob Monkhouse Show ended its first series with Bob feeding Norman Wisdom, Yakov Smirnoff - in Soviet Russia entertainment lights you! - and Bertice Reading, while Channel 4 classed up the joint with Tadada: Peter Brook's Paris Cabaret, his Bouffes du Nord theatre company doing cabaret songs.

As this of all days heads towards its end BBC2 switch off with the kind of thing you'd see slipped onto the screen quite often over the festive period, the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup. ITV hire the King's Singers and send them to Harewood House to declaim The King's Christmas before launching into a variety of overnight repeats, bottom of the basket films and spare festive messages, including everywhere A Different Christmas wherein "Gillian Reynolds chats to Jimmy Savile at Stoke Mandeville Hospital". Urgh. Channel 4 signs off with Peace On Earth, a gathering in Jerusalem Manger Square with Laurence Olivier reading and Dame Flora Robson narrating, while an earthier kind of singing closes BBC1's day, The Spinners at York. How come the Spinners always seemed to get the last thing on Christmas night slot around then?

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Radio choice

Radio 1, once Mark Page has done the early shift, once more turns to Tony Blackburn for his traditional Great Ormond Street-bound morning show, accompanied by Keith Chegwin taking "flying visit to Belfast, Aberdeen, Liverpool and Norwich", so they're persisting with the idea they're making all those journeys in real time. Peter Powell does the mid-morning before the oven gloves of supposedly serving up Christmas dinner to his colleages are handed over from DLT to Mike Read. Steve Wright hangs on to the afternoon with "Steve's characters in festive mood, with the Afternoon Boys unashamedly bawling carols... and will Damian enjoy his soya bean turkey?" Nothing as hilarious as the concept of vegetarianism, eh. But then Radio 1 remembers that it's Sunday - you'll notice that a lot of regular Sunday programming remains, and far from just the religious stuff - so Tommy Vance announces the chart and Annie Nightingale does a festive request show as per, leading to 10pm and The Adrian Juste Christmas Morning Show. Yes, wacky funster, we see what you've done there.

Don Maclean gets up for 5am on Radio 2 and he's waking up kids unnecessarily at The Children's Hospital, Birmingham alongside usual Sunday early jock George Ferguson. Presumably it's that early because the religious requirement means the actual breakfast show is a god slot, with usual Sunday morning contributor Bishop Bill Westwood - yes, Tim's dad - and St Paul's Cathedral School Choir. Most of the day is actually much like any other Sunday at the time, what with David Jacobs' usual Melodies For You and Desmond Carrington's Rainbow Connection, in which Jim Henson puppeteers the lifeless body of... oh, no, just two hours of his usual All Time Greats playlist on a colours theme. Lunchtime is home to Chris Emmett's annual panto, this year Sleeping Beauty starring Stacy Dorning from Black Beauty, who at the time would have been coming off Thames sitcom Keep It In The Family, with Kenneth Connor, Frank Thornton, June Whitfield, Nerys Hughes, Maureen Lipman, and obviously Tel'n'JY. Ed Stewart takes some annual dedications from the forces overseas at 2pm and the Cliff Adams Singers pop in for their usual 4pm Sing Something Simple half hour leading up to the last in the series, half an hour earlier than usual just to catch people out, of The Fosdyke Saga, a reversioning of Bill Tidy's Daily Mirror strip with Miriam Margolyes, David Threlfall and Enn Reitel among the cast. That's done with in fifteen minutes before Charlie Chester, Christmas At The Dome (no idea), Christmas Night with Hinge & Bracket, then back to normal from 7.30pm with Max Jaffa and the Palm Court Orchestra's Grand Hotel, god slot Sunday Half-Hour and Your Hundred Best Tunes. The hour before Pete Murray's Late Show at 11pm lets its hair down in the way only Eighties Radio 2 could, with easy listening piano duo Rostal & Schaefer and the BBC radio orchestra commandeering Mantovani Magic.

Radio 3 is taking it easy and at first obvious, with Your Christmas Choice at 9am, Christmas Music at 10.30am. After that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Sir George Solti play two Mozart piano concertos, followed by an old Schubert recital, Spanish Songs and Arias by the Austrian Radio Symphony Orchestra plus Placido Domingo, a Beethoven piano sonata, the BBC Symphony lot doing Haydn, A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in case you forgot what day it was, a reading of the play Sir Thomas More that even the billing admits is only here because Shakespeare did some punching up work on it, Brahms from Salzburg conducted by Herbert von Karajan with a sermon by Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie in the interval, and finally Bach on the ol' joanna, as we're sure the continuity announcer would have called it.

As usual Peter Barkworth opens up Radio 4 with a nativity reading for a bit before self-explanatory Sunday, "which takes a seasonal look at the Christian Church" and ends with a whole load of festive bells up to the Queen at 9.30am. Morning Service is a Salisbury Cathedral Eucharist; the other side of the Archers omnibus Christmas Briers has Richard of that name unwrap - of course he'd unwrap - some comedy clips. News Review of the Year follows the one o'clock news, and that's evidently too much emotional effort for the time and day as The Countryside at Christmas, which follows, is a repeat from the previous evening, wherein Wynford Vaughan-Thomas tells country tales largely of yore including "the story of a young couple hoping to promote goats' milk". Everyone settled? Good, time for Afternoon Theatre, Christmas At Dingley Dell, a bowdlerism of The Pickwick Papers and some of Dickens' Christmas stories with Helen Atkinson-Wood, who began the year in OTT, the only immediately recognisable name in the cast. Yet more fanciful seasonal readings follow at 4.15pm with A Birthday At Bethlehem, in which "Thora Hird and Peter Goodwright invite you to eavesdrop on some of the likely and unlikely conversations between ordinary folk who may or may not have taken part in the first Christmas story.". Hedging your bets well there. A repeat of a documentary about roses leads into News Quiz of the Year Part 2, Alan Coren, John Wells and Joan Bakewell among Simon Hoggart's extended panel. Christmas 43 looks back at the radio of forty years previously - what a stupid waste of everyone's time that endeavour is - up to the news, Lord Soper visiting a Crisis centre and then Helpston Cracked Pippins Northamptonshire Christmas. The ambassador was found dead that evenin... no, hold on, it's a kind of folk ballad by George Deacon based on the work of Northants poet John Clare. This features the day's second credit for the excellently and seasonally named Clive Panto, this time as Beelzebub. We need to hear this. From 7pm there's the latest part of The Magic Carpet, a serial telling the story of the development of the R101 airship, festive literature celebration All Our Christmasses with Timothy Bateson among the readers, and then... lord, Glyn Worsnip suggests Christmas Isn't What it Was. "In the old days, Christmas was a real festival. Children believed in Santa Claus and valued the modest gifts he brought. After the traditional lunch, everyone enjoyed charades and nobody quarrelled. Today Christmas is a commercial event with children greedy for expensive presents, adults greedy for food and drink and no thought for love and goodwill to men. True or false?" 1983, remember. 9pm brings a radio version of a farce, A Cuckoo In The Nest, starring Joan Hickson, Freddie Jones, Ian Lavender and one of Percy Edwards' voices; the 10.30pm news is followed by Behind The Chalet School, in which Kate O'Mara is among those celebrating the titular endless series of books by Elinor Brent-Dyer about a Nazi-era Austrian international boarding school. The religious quotient of the day concludes with the Bishop of Middlesborough reflecting on The Festival Of Peace and A People's Carol, Kathy Staff presenting the south Yorkshire hymnbook that pre-dates those the Victorians brought us. And not even a Desert Island Discs to be seen.

On This Day: Christmas Day 1993

ITV were in a right state in 1993. The franchise changeovers at the start of the year had brought discontent and the suspicion that the companies involved had spent too much on the licensing and, maybe consequently, not enough on entertainment. A recession had struck down advertising spend, an area where ITV often didn't make their best profits in good years despite the seasonal bump in viewership as it's a day when shops aren't open and the general tone advertisers look to exploit is caught between presents and food for the big day and the sales and holidays of the post-Xmas period. The previous year a lot of ITV's biggest shows had seen their internally made festive specials scheduled either side of the big day and that was apparent in 1993 with not just three episodes of Corrie bridging the 25th but Gladiators, Poirot, Dame Edna and a Les Dawson all-star tribute, all surely light entertainment suitable for a family audience, collapsed around the living room from overindulging, packing out Boxing Day instead. So John Birt's first Christmas as BBC DG and Alan Yentob's first as BBC1 controller - he'd accidentally told a press briefing "Christmas is a BBC institution", which might go to prove that old maxim about revealing slips of the tongue - saw them have the field practically to themselves, but little did we anticipate how little effort there would be at times.

In these 24 hour broadcasting times we're used to most channels kicking off early with the usual palette of kids' entertainments, which on ITV means a morning of the GMTV service Rise And Shine and Saturday Disney with Stuart Miles pre-Blue Peter and Carmen Ejogo very pre-True Detective, featuring Rosie & Jim, Muppet Babies, Count Duckula, The Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, Chip 'n Dale and Darkwing Duck, plus Bad Boys Inc somewhere along the line. BBC1 put Philippa Forrester in charge of the Children's BBC suite and sent her to the Czech Republic, illustrating how them lot celebrate the season in between linking Henry's Cat, 1987 Australian doll-comes-to-life tale Candy Claus, Mythical Magical Creatures - a series that had been running throughout the period putting traditional animal stories to song - Felix the Cat, Fox series Peter Pan and the Pirates (with Tim Curry as Captain Hook!) and The Flintstones. Channel 4 meanwhile fling everything they have in the pile at it, namely The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Heathcliff, Bobobobs, what seems to be an adaptation of festive song Up On The House Top, 1991 Canadian special The Boy Who Dreamed Christmas, moving version of Toronto comic strip For Better Or Worse, Melchoir tale White Camel, and before those last two a hardy perennial of this feature, not least this year - yes, it's Ziggy's Gift, the newspaper column turned by Richard Williams with the aid of Harry Nilsson into life. Sad news, however, as after exactly a decade this is the sixth and last time, all but one on the 25th, where it will go out on British TV.

BBC2 rise at 7am and buy themselves time, and try to win a few childless and ageing viewers, with a double bill of John Wayne western Rio Lobo - strange day and time for it - and the one that wasn't Holiday Inn, White Christmas. Channel 4 meanwhile make a gesture at keeping the youth onside with an episode of Saved By The Bell, then give up and stick The Great St Trinian's Train Robbery on. That, you suspect, is because the Saturday morning programmes, that being the day of the week, have arrived, and bravely Live & Kicking On Christmas Day has taken up the Noel mantle by going out live (apparently, we have no direct evidence of this) and dragging Take That in, unbilled in advance for reasons we'll come back to, as well as Eternal which seems weird given half of them are devout Christians. In contrast to useful it starts at 8.30am and lasts ninety minutes, after which the winning trio of Roger Royle, Bernard Hill and Sally Ann Matthews drag a thousand people into a tent in Liverpool and call it The Giant Nativity Festivity, wherein carols are sung and the greatest story ever told is told by circus performers. ITV meanwhile hold their horses with a first thing (well, 9.25am when GMTV hand the reigns over) Morning Worship from Cathedral Church of St Peter, Bradford and fill out ten minutes with Disney Cartoon Time before a very different cartoon studio tie-in, What's Up Doc? The oft forgotten series had actually been winning the ratings battle for the time being, possibly doing so today too despite only lasting fifty minutes as BBC1 were giving another appropriate airing to the Albert Finney Scrooge, and not yet having been gutted of its production team and menagerie of characters following a dispute with their STV paymasters, Andy, Pat and an about to go on maternity leave Yvonne were joined by... Take That. And, er, Gary Glitter.

And, well, that's about the size of the effort ITV put into it. If you think just sticking the regular suite of morning shows is lazy now you ain't seen nothing yet. The (ITV) Chart Show did always have an end of year special... but this isn't it, that's the following week. This is a plain standard edition revealing the week's chart and so forth. Even more egregious what what followed at 12.30pm, namely an edition of Movies, Games And Videos, in which Steve Priestley voiced over a package of film clips and EPGs intended as nothing other than filler, this edition cycling through some of the recent cinema offerings and a few things expected in early 1994 with very little acknowledgement of the season. And they kept it in place.

At least BBC2 didn't have to pretend to be offering a major channel's service when it filled an hour with highlights from the summer's athletics world championships, though that was followed by a preview of the actual highlight of their week, Inside The Wrong Trousers, the latest Wallace & Gromit adventure (remember that, it may come in useful later) premiering at 5.20pm on Boxing Day. A reminder follows of the evil outside world in The Way Of The Cross In Sarajevo - "in the devastated city, a remarkable Mass is held as two priests follow a contemporary road to Cavalry" - before dropping the hammer on the family's emotion limits by showing The Railway Children. Channel 4 for their part come back from St Trinians into another early 90s favoured filler, the first part of The Third Genius, a two-part profile of Harold Lloyd. The Pete Smith Specialities cupboard must have been bare. It continues into the afternoon with the curiously titled animation Ginger Nutt's Christmas Circus, traditional seasonal music in Christmas In Rome, and more black and white memorialising in The One, The Only Groucho.

But do you really want something big when the turkey and trimmings are in? BBC1 didn't think so for a lot of the 90s and into the 00s, hence the Christmas Comedy Cracker, putting together some light festive fun from previous years, in this case the 1985 Two Ronnies, the one that ends with the musical Alice In Wonderland set-piece, and the turkey dinner Dad's Army. 5.6 million watched. That's why they keep repeating it. Top Of The Pops follows as traditional at 2pm, but the warhorse is lame and struggling at the moment as this was the only full year of the Year Zero revamp, Tony Dortie and Mark Franklin by now the only presenters on the roster, introducing studio performances from West End featuring Sybil, 2 Unlimited, Snow, the Bluebells, Ace Of Base, Gabrelle, Take That, Bitty McLean, M-People and Meat Loaf via satellite, all of course building up to the Blobbified number one. BBC2 offered their own big pop star in parallel with an episode of The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air. ITV for their early afternoon pre-Queen part fill 55 minutes with a Bugs Bunny double bill followed by Six Little Angels, Phillip Schofield catching up with the Walton sextuplets, just like someone from ITV would every three weeks or so.



So The Queen has her usual things to say, mostly about the hope of world peace (clearly passe, the speech losing a total of five million viewers compared to 1991), and BBC1 follow as they often did, with the fifth Noel's Christmas Presents - this is the one where the Hollies play in someone's garden. With Bond being saved for the Licence To Kill premiere on 3rd January, ITV's follow-up is The Never-Ending Story, not a premiere but also the first demonstration that, news aside (Libby Weiner taking the ITN rota short straw), there will be one actual programme between the message to subjects and 11.40pm. Something else notable this year is, as part of a Christmas In New York themed season, Quentin Crisp became the first person to give Channel 4's Alternative Queen's Message, as it was then known, in the days where they were brave/man enough to run it at 3pm, though they do run the actual speech much earlier than usual at 4.15pm maybe just in case. Theirs lasts longer too, right through to 3.15pm and Christmas Star, a rigorous investigation into the Star of Bethlehem. BBC2 diverts itself to paying tribute to Rudolf Nureyev, who died six days into the year, firstly with a documentary tribute involving colleagues, then his 1966 ballet verson of Romeo And Juliet.

BBC1's big family film premiere, which has to wait out until the oddly late seeming time of 4.05pm, is Back To The Future III, though you imagine there'd be some generational battling over the remote twenty minutes in when Channel 4 let The Snowman loose, though they'd be switching back when it was superceded by - again, happy Christmas, Ange - the Brookside Omnibus, though a repeat of A Grand Day Out on BBC2 in advance of tomorrow's evil penguin capers would have to cut a substantial audience away from the last twenty minutes off of Seamus McFly and co. We can't imagine many were invested in the one actual TV programme ITV deigned to let interrupt their movie schedule, Beadle's Daredevils, a one-off of Beadlebum introducing 'death-defying' stunts.

John Humphrys does the BBC news which we imagine he was delighted about, followed on BBC1 by, ten years after its first outing on the 25th, Only Fools And Horses. Now two years on from the final regular episode of the show, this is the last special before the "final" Christmas trilogy (not to be confused with the final FINAL Christmas trilogy), John Sullivan bemoaning to Radio Times that he could easily write a new series immediately but David Jason was making Frost and with Nicholas Lyndhurst entering his time travel era he wouldn't be able to get anything on in 1994. Fatal Extraction is a curious one to go out on regular Trotter travails, given Raquel leaves Del over his drinking and Del dates a dental receptionist who he thinks then starts stalking him and accidentally starts a riot, reputedly with Aled Jones among its participants. 85 minutes is far too long for the plot and it's justly overlooked as the one between Peckham Spring and Batman & Robin, but it's obviously a national event and with a day best of 19.59 million viewers - albeit half a million less year on year - trounced ITV's premiere of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, with the Northern Ballet Theatre's version of A Christmas Carol holding up the classy end for BBC2 and Christmas With Luciano Pavarotti, recorded in Mexico's Notre Dame Cathedral, likewise on Channel 4.

Eastenders famously set out to deliberately ruin people's Christmas Day with a set of divorce papers and that's what they came to live by as this time around Phil Mitchell embarks on an affair with his green card wife Nadia and Aidan threatens to throw himself off the top of a block of flats. None of that put off 17.4 million people, fourth highest for the day. At the same time BBC2 debut the underrated Michael Palin Englishman abroad bringing his troubles (Connie Booth) back with him film American Friends, while Channel 4 similarly premiere Cousin Bobby, Jonathan Demme's 1992 documentary film about his Episcopalian minister cousin. Films? Yeah, ITV have them out the wazoo and another to offer at 8pm, Kevin Costner's building/coming baseball fantasy Field Of Dreams, ITV's most watched programme of the day with 5.8 million tuned in, which placed it ninth on the day. BBC1 also exhibits big American dreams of a different kind, Birds Of A Feather going to Hollywood when they come to believe the father who put them up for adoption might be George Hamilton. He and George Wendt play themselves, a young Amma Asante doesn't. 19.4 million watched, running Only Fools close for the day honours (One Foot In The Algarve the next day topped both for the festive week) Does a half hour short count as a film premiere too? Sod it, Channel 4 called Swan Song one at 8.30pm, the Kenneth Branagh directed Chekhov two-hander starring John Gielgud and a beardy Richard Briers having an Oscar nomination to wield as proof.

By now it's 9pm. Channel 4 go back to their roots with Placido Domingo in Puccini's wild west opera La Fanciulla del West and BBC2 string together the Queen with BSL, the latest in five minute verite series Christmas In Sarajevo and Selected Exits, a Bookmark dramatisation by Alan Plater of comic writer Gwyn Thomas' autobiography starring Anthony Hopkins and his daughter Abigail Harrison on screen together for the first time. Somewhat more populist is Ghost, the day's actual big film premiere on BBC1 capturing 18.5 million, certainly a lot more than ITV's final first look of the day, Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan neo-noir D.O.A.

As people begin to slope off for the night, BBC1 finishes off with - of course - the 1977 Morecambe & Wise which still pulled in 10.4 million viewers to put it seventh for the day, "contemporary meditation for Christmas Day" Watching Flocks for the usual late God slot and the 1958 Cushing/Lee The Hound Of The Baskervilles. BBC2 dredge up a three year old episode from French & Saunders' first series, Bunuel classic Belle de Jour and a horror for the night, 1945's Hangover Square. Channel 4 repeat Quentin Crisp's words, then repeat Robin Williams Live at the Met, start a horribly timed Marx Brothers season with Monkey Business and, for some reason at 2.15am, the LA Law episode in which the accused in an assault case only speaks through a ventriloquist's dummy. As for ITV, there's a very late South Bank Show produced tribtue to Irving Berlin which of course is called Dreaming Of A White Christmas and then we're into regional variations valhalla in which most regions take Airport '77, some Wet Wet Wet In Concert, Central a series of films no other part of the country bothered with and on LWT another clips and VO job, Cinema Cinema Cinema. Somehow those together say more about this day in ITV history, when their audience share of 21.7% was a full forty down on BBC1's to the IBA's open criticism, than we ever could.

Radio choice

In what seems a bit like nobody else would make the commitment Lynn Parsons does breakfast on Radio 1 right through to midday and the usual inhabitant throwing Simon Mayo's Christmas Lunch. But never mind them, there's bigger fish following at 2pm with The Take That Christmas Take-Away - archived by the estimable Andy Walmsley - "with all your Christmas messages and all their favourite records, eating a Christmas curry and having a great time." You know, Christmas curry. You get the impression someone thought of a clever title and then worked backwards in the wrong direction. The natural follow-on to the lads is of course Johnnie Walker, reviewing a year of his show for four hours until the necessity strikes for religious content which leads to God In The Flesh, Glasgow Christian community the Late Late Service writing and performing songs for "a contemporary, hard-hitting religious experience that takes a look at what Christmas means in 1993", followed by Simon Bates' Whitney Houston Gospel Special. Bates had actually left Radio 1 in October after resigning so presumably made an incredible pitch to Matthew Bannister. That just left John Peel, playing the entire Festive 50 from 10.30pm to 2am.

After Roger Royle does the early shift Don Maclean takes his usual Radio 2 breakfast position, except this year he's live from Manger Square, Bethlehem, as he "celebrates the new-found peace in the area and talks to some of those involved in the agreement, including Yasser Arafat". *sucks air through teeth* Ken Bruce and Michael Aspel share mid-morning duties as per 1992 with The News Huddlines' White Christmas taking up the late lunch half-hour up to, oh my, Chas & Dave's Christmas Knees Up, with guests including Marti Caine, their old mate Albert Lee and, in a battle of the novelties, the Barron Knights. Christmas Concert Classics is the vague title for the afternoon light music with Young Musician of the Year, violinist Yuri Zhislin, and the BBC Concert Orchestra, followed by Gillian Reynolds picking her favourite Christmas radio. The Daniel O'Donnell supremacy is just beginning to leak into British cultural spheres which is why they have one of his concerts to block out an hour from 5pm. Again for the second year running we're forced to confront the mental image of Alan Titchmarsh's Christmas Glow, a series of readings and traditional song from Hagley Hall. There really does seem to be an obsession with the way things used to be, which may well be par for the course of Radio 2 in the years immediately before its hip revamp, but half an hour of memories entitled Christmas Past at 7pm is stretching it far. Things are immediately taken back down a gear by David Jacobs and the BBC Big Band, then David Mellor predicting his radio future with favourite classical music and the 11pm sudden switch to Gloria Gaynor's Christmas Concert, a gospel concert recorded at the Hippodrome, with Alan Dedicoat and his delicate voice seeing us into the night.

It's fair to say Radio 3 went right in on branding the day, what with A Christmas Stocking to open, the last door of an Advent Calendar, an 8am Mass for Christmas and Spirit Of The Age, "a selection of lighthearted early music to accompany Christmas lunch" following the seemingly irreplaceable Record Review. This lunch must have been very early because it ends at 1pm and is followed, in Table Talk, by a discussion on the act of roasting right before A Festival Of Nine Lessons And Carols. Into the afternoon with some BBC Symphony Orchestra cuts, Christmas Music Old and New, Jazz Record Requests and the supposedly annual but we couldn't find it in the last couple of years Christmas Quiz, hosted by the acclaimed critic Jeremy J Beadle (actual Jeremy Beadle's middle name is also a J but leave that be) before the station goes Live From The Met for a Barber Of Seville production sung in in Italian, "in association with the Texaco Metropolitan Opera International Radio Network". While they're in America there's the first of five John Cheever Stories, the short story writer brought to life by William 'Porkins' Hootkins. Forward an hour and in a great break with the seasonal choral tradition, it's the Dave Brubeck Quartet recorded at Royal Festival Hall to close the day.

John Walters! As we've said before his is a name that should be far more celebrated these days for many reasons, the latest of which is that Radio 4 gave him the morning for John Walters' Xmas Fayre, seemingly live and advertising "four mystery time zone guests, some literary consequences, and radio's first ever crossword of the air". Things get back to normal once comfortably clear of 9am, which Christmas Day Morning Service coming from a Crisis shelter and linking up with Don Maclean in Bethlehem, which is a neat signpost into It Was Christmas Day In The Empire, Harry Thompson delving into the archive of festive radio greetings from around the world. Sue Townsend has penned a new Adrian Mole short story, Mole Cooks His Goose, for the occasion and we're delighted to see it was produced by John Tydeman. The Michael Rosen helmed children's book programme Treasure Islands goes seasonal - Christmas Treasures, of course - with guests Martin Jarvis, Rachel Billington and Helen Lederer, and then a "did we have to be there?" moment occurs in Pick of the Week That Wasn't, where "Father Christmas looks back at some seasonal broadcasts that might have been". The only name attached is the producer's, who we don't know, but it makes a neat combination with the I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue Christmas Special, featuring a Mornington Crescent nativity, and the compilation News Quiz Of The Year. The Queen and news interrupt at 1pm but can only hold the fascination at bay for so long before another programme we really want to hear right now, The Discreet Charm Of The BBC, "a celebration of BBC radio at its worst", and then The Masterson Inheritance Christmas Special, the Comedy Store Players' improvised historical drama. In the 2.30pm drama slot begins a season of plays set in 1920s theatreland, Christmas At The Ritz, which is followed by Laughter And Hope And Sock In The Eye, sadly not an oblique playlet based on Stephen Tin Tin Duffy's Kiss Me but a repeat of a documentary about Dorothy Parker. There is, as you can tell, a lot going on on this day, and we're only just up to 4.45pm and What A Difference A Day Makes, an "aural snapshot of the days of the week". At least we're on surer footing with With Great Pleasure, baritone Thomas Allen picking his favourite prose, then after the 6pm news Fourth Column, Simon Hoggart's version of a broadsheet diary, Quote Unquote and a 1988 production of The Taming Of The Shrew with Stephen Tompkinson and Robert Glenister down the cast list. Music In Mind, sometime King's Singer Brian Kay's music show, really doesn't look at home on Radio 4, let alone taking up space on this night. Three different Liverpool-based religious figures consider the season on Ten To Ten, then after the news is Humbug!, a repeated documentary about the lasting appeal of A Christmas Carol, Famous For 15 Minutes talking to people who were just that - Bernie The Bolt tonight - Personal Records sifting through a notable's record collection and a dramatisation of F Scott Fitzgerald's Pat Hobby's Christmas Wish to finish.

Radio 5, in its original tricks-performing mongrel form, already knew it would be onto its final Christmas Day, and it only had four as it was. Cliff Morgan opens up the morning with the prosaically titled We Wish You A Merry Christmas, then the children's show Get Set takes requests with Steve Johnson off Motormouth. Children's Christmas Carols bisect midday, followed by a Christmas edition of Talking Poetry, two hours of BFBS and a simulcast of Nine Lessons And Carols. Then we're into the readings that the station made some of its original name with, namely a series of kids' stories about astrological signs Spinning Stars, Philip Schofield reading Joseph And His Coat of Many Colours and one of Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes. Then at 6pm is the Christmas Extravaganza of what we reckon is the most obscure show in the Mark & Lard canon, Cult Radio, a ramshackle series of road trips loosely related to cult concerns in which uniquely Marc Riley was the superior figure. That lasts a full hour and a half, up to Afropop Worldwide Caribbean Christmas Special. Le Top, the weekly European chart, kept its place, then after the regular airing of US detective series Nightbeat the most forgotten of the stripped Big Noise At Night shows, The Way Out, from Birmingham fights the Medium Wave late night interference.