Advent Calendar 2021 Day 17: Blue Peter - Back In Time For Christmas

The most recent show we've ever featured but it's worth it. Blue Peter just didn't know where to stop with festive programming in 1998. The actual Christmas show, the traditional and never changing setup from drawings soup to gold ship logo nuts happened on the 23rd, with Charlotte Church joining the usual battalion of school choirs and Chalk Farm Salvation Army Band members. However this special the previous Friday was where everyone got to let their hair down in the kind of celebratory song, dance and loose narrative fantasia that has imperial phase producer Richard Marson's fingerprints all over it. Partly devised to celebrate the show's just passed fortieth anniversary with cameos by several former presenters, including for the last time on the show the recently deceased Christopher Wenner, we join the Huq/Hill/Miles team wrapping up for the season and Stuart dreaming of inviting the others to see his time machine, only for Mark Curry - a late rewrite replacement for the recently fired Richard Bacon - to appear as a mad scientist obsessed with Christmas decorations, in something of a nod to Doctor Who. The rest we could try and describe in detail but round about the Stock Aitken Waterman-inspired version of Last Christmas we gave up, and that was after trying to parse Curry getting the band (Yvette Fielding and Caron Keating) back together with the aid of Santa Duncan for a Little Saint Nick routine. We didn't even notice at first that an uncredited Steps are part of the big finish doing next to nothing, though once you've seen Lizo Mzimba dancing you can understand how that would slip our mind.