Home Advent Calendar 2017 Day 18: The Mike Yarwood Christmas Show, 1978

Full disclosure: we were going to post a version of this which halfway through develops a huge audio lag, but just today we saw a new upload taken from when the Beeb repeated it the following May between the start of the election program and the first results, which as well as being fully synced has the added bonus of eighty seconds of Dimbleby, Bough and Wellings at the start. Anyway, we know now that Yarwood's show the previous year was the most watched show on that most famous of festive schedules, and in 1978 he got the Radio Times cover but was beaten by the TV premiere of The Sound Of Music. There's a reference in his brief opening spiel to Morecambe and Wise having Harold Wilson on their Thames Christmas debut, leading into the brave new world of having to hire a woman, Janet Brown, to do Thatcher, which is odd because she later does Anna Ford in a voice more like Steve Nallon's Thatcher. If you know this show at all it's because Abba were the guests, and we wonder how much their cameo on a Generation Game sketch had to be explained to them.