Oi, spoilers!
As is now traditional, instead of flooding your timelines we take this space up to go through the Christmas Day schedules from thirty years ago in longform - and in 1989 they're a fascinating mix of the famous, the fading and the transient.
So where are we starting? 6am seems as good as anywhere even if the Beeb is still in bed, excited youngsters waking up with TV-am's Cartoon Capers, Timmy Mallett introducing festive cast-offs including Mr Men and a Punky Brewster animation. Alternatively Channel 4 offer a gospel version of Joseph Haydn's Creation recorded either in Vienna or at the Canterbury Festival depending on which source you believe. Their morning continued under the umbrella of the Channel Four Daily, though surely their bureaus wouldn't be open on such a day, with Dennis, Aladdin, Countdown Masters, Dai Mouse - about which there is no information other than "read by David Jason", and as you can imagine searching for information about Jason providing the voiceover for a D Mouse is dominated by his other work - and Poetry Book, a series of poems read by Paul Scofield, Alan Bennett, Derek Jacobi and others. TV-am meanwhile fills out with Benji, Zax And The Alien Prince until Good Morning Britain throws a Christmas Party from 8am with "a host of celebrity guests". As well as giving away its pre-recorded nature the list of stars starts very strongly with Bros and Jason Donovan, quickly plummets with Russ Conway, and then gives up and lists its regulars (Russell Grant, Gyles Brandreth, Lizzie Webb, Kathy Tayler, Jimmy Greaves, Ulrika Jonsson) Beatrice Hollyer, now an acclaimed parenting author, drew the short newsreading straw.
By this time BBC1 is up and straight in to a morning of Children's BBC with Andi Peters and Lisa Jones, who was a regular co-host of the Christmas and New Year strands over this period and was then never seen again. They're on from 7am to 9.30am with The Nativity Play, 1988 Canadian animation Bluetoes The Christmas Elf, The Christmas Tree Stop on Playdays with the Why Bird, Dot and Patch together, Ziggy's Gift (an 1982 ABC silent cartoon directed by the great and sadly passed this year Richard Williams with future Shrek and Pocahontas directors involved plus music by Harry Nilsson), A Merry Mirthworm Christmas and A Flintstone Christmas (from 1977). BBC2 for their part are going about business as if it's a normal day from 8.25am with an episode from the first series of The Third Man adaptation and a Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon Buster Crabbe double.
With breakfast TV commitments done it's into the morning TV for kids, with BBC1 easing into Eggs 'n' Baker an hour and a quarter later than its usual slot at 9.30am and given all of half an hour. None of their usual scraping around for guests to come to Manchester despite the time restriction as Jason Donovan, Sinitta, Big Fun, Sonia and Jimmy Somerville all pitch in. The nebulous Bugs Bunny & Friends At Christmas fills the post-TV-am hour on ITV - that's except for viewers in Scotland, who get the Moderator's Christmas Message followed by depending on region Glen Michael's Christmas Special (Scottish), Christmas Comes To Pacland (Border) or Dusty The Snowman (Grampian) - while Channel 4 go with A Sesame Street Christmas, presumably the one from 1978 featuring cameos by Henry Fonda and Michael Jackson. BBC2 meanwhile links live with what is still officially referred to as East Berlin at this incredibly auspicious moment in history, six weeks after the wall fell, for the landmark Berlin Freedom Concert, Beethoven's Ninth conducted by Leonard Bernstein with the word 'freude' (joy) in Ode To Joy changed to 'freiheit' (
By 10am BBC1 is off to church, Christmas Celebration led by Roy Castle at his local Gold Hill Baptist Church in Chalfont St Peter, Bucks. Fifteen minutes later ITV's big morning encompassing spectacular begins, The Other Side Of Christmas hosted live from Docklands Arena's free funfair and circus by Anneka Rice. In between entertainments we're taken to Glasgow Royal Maternity Hospital for the traditional welcoming of festive babies and chat with harried midwives, to St Michael & All Angels Church, Hackney where local children re-enact the nativity, and as was tradition to Lapland with David Bellamy and 23 former care home children who benefited from Central's Find A Family project. Corrie's Thelma Barlow, Helen Worth and Bill Waddington talk about Those Less Fortunate At This Time Of Year while Michael Aspel and Nick Owen launch Telethon '90 with "a dramatic pledge for the homeless". The mind shudders to think.
Not that anyone would have been watching the later stages, as Michael Leggo's new initiative bore its first fruits at 11am. Under his watch Christmas Morning With Noel had devolved from Telecom Tower, world-spanning broadcast firsts into studio bound games the previous year and Leggo couldn't see a way forward so the format was put to sleep. Instead he came up with Noel's Christmas Presents, a simple but effective tearjerking idea to, as Radio Times put it, "give some very unusual presents to some very special people" that ran annually for all but one year until 1999 when Noel and the BBC fell out, and then from 2007 to 2011 on Sky. Channel 4 for their part got to midday with regularly scheduled repeats of Tintin and Batman plus Silent Mouse, the story of Silent Night shot on location in Austria from the point of view of an actual mouse with Lynn Redgrave narrating. BBC2 continued their family film season at 11am with the 1977 The Prince And The Pauper.
In fact the hours leading up to the Queen and the dinner are generally repeats and filler. For the two hours after Noel finished at midday BBC1 served up Christmas Comedy Cracker, an umbrella title for episodes of Porridge (the one where Mackay briefly leaves), Dad's Army (Mainwaring's brother) and Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em (the Nativity episode). ITV choose 12.25pm for the Bond film, On Her Majesty's Secret Service ten years after its TV premiere; BBC2 follow Reed, Rex and Raquel with Canadian cartoon The Boy And The Snowgoose and the second of a two part tribute to Fred Astaire; and Channel 4 showcases The Greatest (Little) Show On Earth, an Australian documentary about a children's circus troupe, and Oscar nominated animated short George And Rosemary - made for the National Film Board of Canada but co-directed by Brit Alison Snowden and her British based Canuck partner David Fine, a pair who would later create Shaun The Sheep and their daughter was the original voice of Peppa Pig. Following that, the 1940 Pride And Prejudice shown as a tribute to Laurence Olivier who died in July.
While the royals get ready 2pm is music hour on the Beeb. BBC2 goes to Amsterdam for the live Christmas Concert with a performance of Ravel's ballet Daphnis And Chloe; more earthily the Top of the Pops Christmas Show sees Bruno Brookes, Gary Davies and Jakki Brambles welcome Erasure, Mike & The Mechanics, Marc Almond & Gene Pitney, Jason Donovan, Bros, the London Boys, The Beautiful South, Sonia, Black Box and Lisa Stansfield, and confirm the previous day's news that Band Aid II was the Christmas number one.
Come 3pm, outside Channel 4 (still on Pride And Prejudice) and BBC2 which embarked on the first of the Pagnol Trilogy with 1931's Marius, stuff had to be said. On stage from the Royal Albert Hall, no less, Queen Elizabeth II - Live 'N' Lewd!
What next? Well, BBC1 went into the second Christmas special for Bread, apparently Carla Lane's son's favourite episode. According to the official synopsis "Joey tries to help out when Shifty's released from prison, Billy's left facing the anger of the family when the Christmas presents are stolen from the car, the Boswell boys manage to put a smile on Martina's face, Jack and Nellie go out to buy the Christmas turkey, Adrian decides to have a chat with Julie when she upsets Billy yet again, and Joey finds himself faced with a difficult choice." And yet in the TV listings, and in a very 1989/Lane plotline, "in an attempt to do their bit for the environment and the ozone layer, the Boswells agree to a plastic tree and an organically grown Christmas dinner". That's a lot of story even for fifty minutes, not that 16.5m viewers would all have minded - and that was in the face of strong opposition on ITV, the celebrated animated version of The BFG. Cosgrove Hall's only full length feature, with reliable David Jason as the titular character, and apparently one of the few adaptations of his work that Roald Dahl liked, it surely would have done better but for... well, for having a virtually mute first ten minutes, but primarily being against not only the Boswell clan but after that a quite separate big David Jason character.
The Jolly Boys' Outing, which drew 20.1 million, might be the only major festive show to be set at August bank holiday weekend and is comfortably this day's most remembered hit. Indeed, by the time it ends ITV feels like it's given up as it puts on a regular episode of Home And Away, which had debuted that February and was only four weeks behind Australia. "Steven returns from his mission in the city, convinced that Carly is on a path of self-destruction. Bobby makes an unfounded accusation."
Channel 4 had filled the previous couple of hours with Birthday, in which Judi Dench read the poetry of The Rev Alan Ecclestone "whose message is that the greatest birthday of all is really the birthday of us all" - right you are, then - and then An Evening For Armenia, highlights of a Royal Opera House fundraiser for the country stricken a year before by an earthquake involving international opera and ballet companies including the Bolshoi, Kirov and Sadler's Wells ballets. More opera on BBC2 from 5pm with Aida From The Met, a new production of Verdi's work with Placido Domingo.
Oddly both BBC1 and ITV scheduled news bulletins at 5.30pm but ITV nipped in five minutes early - Jill Dando was on BBC duty (preceded here by Chas & Dave's Margate rewrite for the OFAH end theme) with a bulletin two stories long, not featuring the Queen's speech, and the major part of one of those stories isn't quite public yet. For their part Channel 4 got the Queen out of the way right then and got on with The Snowman ("Walking Through The Air"?) Strike It Lucky's Christmas Special followed the news on the major commercial channel with guest Frank Bruno while BBC1 were in Russ Abbot mode, with "the Phantom of the Opera as you've never seen it before", and Channel 4 returned to the opera house at 6pm with a production of Benjamin Britten's The Little Sweep - the end of which was followed by a newsflash of one of the few genuinely big stories to break on the 25th. Then, as ITV reached for the comforting familiarity of classic comedy clips linked by Jim Davidson in Christmas Comedy Box, BBC1 won the day's overall ratings battle comprehensively, the TV premiere of Crocodile Dundee watched by 21.8 million people, still a record for Christmas Day.
As the day approaches 8pm a strange sense of normality encroaches. BBC2 finally get round to relaying the royal message, with signing and subtitles, at 7.35pm, followed by Denmark's 1988 Best Foreign Language Oscar winner Babette's Feast. At 7pm Channel 4 brings us Circus Of The Sun, more specific details about which aren't forthcoming but as you'll have seen in that newsflash continuity the title being the English translation of Cirque du Soleil is a pretty hefty clue. That was followed by Brookside ("Terry and Sue end up with more dinner guests than they are expecting... Jimmy and Sinbad's present for Billy results in a cold, dark Christmas for Katie") and the first in a repeat run of the 1987 series of Cheers. Coronation Street is on ITV at 8, a regular length episode but setting up Deirdre throwing Ken out four days later and watched by 20.9m viewers (including the repeat), followed by a festive episode of surprisingly popular generation gap gentle sitcom After Henry. BBC1 then drew out the reliable big gun of Miss Marple, with Donald Pleasence in the cast - A Caribbean Mystery was meant to be both the last in the Beeb's existing agreement with Agatha Christie's estate over the Marple books and Joan Hickson's last as the titular amateur detective, though both came back in 1991. Thing is, as Richard Curtis noted in Radio Times a couple of years later, "my family and I sat down happy on Christmas Day, and during the course of a Christie two people were stabbed and one was forcibly injected with heroin. By the end of it we were totally miserable."
ITV's big movie premiere, starting on the dot of the watershed, was Down And Out In Beverly Hills, a successful film but surely not typical family fare for the day. You may as well turn to Channel 4 at the same time as they return to their Olivier tribute with his Richard III, and ending at five to midnight be damned, it's Christmas. On BBC2 at 9.30pm is something that was highlighted in a lot of Choice columns for the day, Plum, a documentary on PG Wodehouse as part of the Bookmark strand and prominently telling the story of his internment in a German camp in 1940. A different kind of Englishman on BBC1 at 9.40pm as Alf Garnett attempts to recover a Christmas hamper from a raffle in In Sickness And In Health.
And from then on it's largely films all round, though that's not to say there aren't attractions as BBC1 follows the news at 10.20pm with the first TV showing of John Cleese comedy Clockwise, followed by the prologue to St John's Gospel as the Christmas Epilogue and Bogart and Bacall's Key Largo at midnight. ITV waits until 11.10pm, after a similarly two-story news bulletin with Nicholas Owen (and what wonderful BBC1-like effects and Night Club studio HTV had that season), before unleashing 1984's big Christmas Day premiere Raiders Of The Lost Ark and then running into the early hours with Gene Hackman and Barbra Streisand in All Night Long and Jan-Michael Vincent and Kim Basinger in Hard Country. Henry Fonda's My Name Is Nobody is BBC2's final offering while Channel 4 returns to its loose musical strand with a performance of Messiaen's organ piece La Nativité du Seigneur and a repeat of the Prince's Trust '88 Rock Gala.
And then onto Boxing Day, where you could watch either Blackadder's Christmas Carol, the TV premiere of Paul McCartney's Give My Regards To Broad Street in the prime slot of 3.20am, or on Channel 4 The Fabulous Singlettes, where "an outrageous Australian group recreate the songs of the Supremes and others"...
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