Advent Calendar 2019 Day 7: Christmas Morning With Noel, 1988

Change was in the air. After four years atop the Telecom Tower doing things that "had never ever been done before on TV" Michael Leggo took over as producer of the Christmas morning hullabaloo and decided straight away that Edmonds should get down from there and settle in a regular BBC studio like a normal human presenter. Noel tries his best and has various big features - in-studio reunions, a hesitant live linkup with the Mir space station, messages from political leaders including Edmonds having a chat with Thatcher, a Swap Shop quasi-revival - but going from the wide, loose, chaotic brief of the previous Christmas Mornings to a show centred around a game show with Shane Richie and Sophie Aldred as captains doesn't capture the attention anything like as much. This was the final year of Christmas Morning, with an afternoon slot of handing out Christmas Presents taking over from 1989 onwards.

NOEL AT HIS CHRISTMAS MORNING HEIGHT, LITERALLY: The Live Live Christmas Breakfast Show - Feargal Sharkey's Concorde miming failure, a race up the BT Tower and Comic Relief launched by way of sending a tyro Helen Fielding to the Sudan. We've also got a bit of 1984 but none of the rest of the shows. One day. ONE DAY.