On This Day: Christmas Day 1982

(OK, that's from nowhere near Christmas Day but it's still that year's ident)

Welcome to the first 25th December of the four channel era. Obviously Channel 4, having been extant for just 53 days, wasn't expected to be fully up to speed with the traditions and tidings of the others, but they added to it anyway in one memorable respect... but not until the following day. While the previews were more interested in the following night's 1950s repeats marathon, The Snowman debuted at 6.15pm on Boxing Day, just before Sleeping Beauty Wakes Up At The 10th Street Car Wash. They also had Treasure Hunt beginning on the 28th, but all that was affected by the Equity dispute, which one of the big ITV companies estimated had cost them £900,000 in its first two months. Additionally there was what was still seen as the threat of video recorders, numbers in use having risen by seven-eights over the course of the year to 10.2 percent of all households (58% VHS, 27% Betamax, a fast rising 15% Video 2000), and that was just to the end of November. When the BARB figures were published they showed a drop of up to six or seven million viewers year on year, which the BBC put down to the increased use of VCRs. Throw in that as the 25th was a Saturday the penultimate Morecambe & Wise Christmas Show, being a Thames property, had to go out on the 27th and this was not looking a good day for the commercial channels. So let's dive in and see what transpired...


As always in these pre-breakfast show days it was BBC1 who rose first at 8.40am with a homily to an animal not like rhinocerouses, tigers, cats and mink, The All-New Pink Panther Show, an episode last shown as recently as 2011 featuring Supermarket Pink, String Along In Pink and in between, bad news, Crazylegs Crane. That was followed at 9am by, stand by in Glasgow, Carols From Buckfast. The Devonian Benedictine monastery of self-sufficiency wino supply fame was celebrating its centenary in the only way it knew how, by inviting Paul Daniels down. He brought with him Stephanie Lawrence, Cambridge University Chamber Choir and some work for the abbey choir and their monks. As for the abbey the infamy of the name didn't stop the Beeb going back there for Midnight Mass as recently as 2018.

ITV starts up at 9am (belatedly in Tyne Tees' case) with Journey Back To Oz, the 1972 animated sort of Wizard Of Oz successor that died in cinemas but became a TV hit in America in which Liza Minelli took the voice version of her mother's role with Mickey Rooney as the scarecrow, Milton Berle as the lion and Ethel Merman as the Wicked Witch. Bill Cosby recorded a festive live action introduction but a contractual dispute meant Berle re-recorded it for an all year round airing syndicated version. No idea which version we got. Halfway through BBC1 relocated to Hyde Park Barracks for the Christmas Parade, where Simon Bates and Floella Benjamin watched the Queen's Life Guard prepare for Christmas Day ceremonial duties and "The Scots Guards enjoy a special television request party with visits from favourite personalities". Yes, yes, Falklands year, but it's not exactly a Great Ormond Street visit, is it.

With both main channels off to morning service at 10.30am - BBC1 at St Chad's Church, Lichfield, ITV the Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady, St John's Wood - Channel 4 takes its opportunity to get going with the first production from the Children's Film Unit, a production company formed by former Avengers writer Colin Finbow with the new channel's backing to give 10 to 16 year olds the chance to learn about and take part in filmmaking which lasted until 1998, Sir Richard Attenborough and Steven Spielberg among its patrons. Their bow was with Captain Stirrick, a musical based on an 1840 murder cast involving a Fagin-like teenage leader of a child pickpocket gang. The titular Stirrick was played by Jules Sylvester, who became a well known Hollywood animal wrangler for everything from Bond to Jackass, with Freddie Jones and Roger Sloman among the supporting adults.

The grown-ups return from church around 11.30am and slip into their own junior entertainments, ITV offering a version of Enid Blyton's The Island Of Adventure only released to cinemas the previous year, starring Wilfrid Brambell, Norman Bowler (between Softly Softly and Emmerdale) and John Rhys-Davies. That's for all except TSW, who not for the last time today go their own way with The Adventures Of Gulliver and a Saturday Show half hour special of unknown provenance. BBC1 for their part... oh god, it's Raccoons On Ice. Debuting here in the same year as in the US it doesn't even feature Run With Us, instead laying its chips in with voices and new songs by Leo Sayer and Rita Coolidge. What gets us back on terra firma is another TV premiere, Mister Quilp, a musical based on The Old Curiosity Shop. Yeah, they centred the villain of the book, played by Anthony Newley, with support from David Hemmings, Michael Hordern, David Warner, Windsor Davies, Peter Duncan, Brian Glover, Ronald Lacey, Bryan Pringle, Rosalind Knight and Britain's tallest man Chris Greener (as "Giant").

Yet more animation from Canada starts the pre-lunch jollity on Channel 4, Oscar-nominated The Tender Tale of Cinderella Penguin, for which the Wikipedia entry does the synopsis job for us: "Cinderella has to stay home while her evil stepsisters go to the ball. You know the rest except everyone here is a penguin". That's followed by a jolt out of kid-friendly territory, Caesar And Cleopatra, a 1945 George Bernard Shaw play adaptation that was reputedly the most expensive film ever made, got halted in production after star Vivien Leigh miscarried during filming and had a breakdown as a result of which her bipolar disorder was discovered, and didn't come close to making even half the money back.

It's interesting and perhaps telling that Channel 4 should choose that time to go highbrow with a jolly musical on BBC1, especially as once out of Blyton at 1pm ITV went into the many Derek Griffithses of Film Fun At Christmas. That took us to 2pm and two very different musical extravaganzas. ITV bought in that year's Andy Williams' Christmas Special, which was actually Andy Williams' Early New England Christmas, the eleventh of his fifteen festive hootenannies, featuring guests Aileen Quinn who had just been the lead in Annie, James Galway, former Olympic champion skater Dorothy Hamill and Dick van Patten from the recently cancelled Eight Is Enough. If your Christmas day wasn't set up for hollered homilies by stars of ABC comedy-dramas based on syndicated American newspaper columns, there was the refuge of the Top of the Pops Christmas Party. In 1981 the entireity of Radio 1 had been thrown at it but this year it's just all the usual rota at once - Powell, Read, Wright, Peebles, Smith Travis, Peel (in the 'SHEENA BARMY ARMY' jumper), Vance and Skinner fighting over dressing room space and airtime the better to introduce Spandau Ballet, Shakin' Stevens, a spectacularly costumed Bucks Fizz, Duran Duran, Dexys Midnight Runners, Captain Sensible with Dolly Mixture and mechanical seagull, Culture Club, Soft Cell, Haircut 100 (Nick Heyward's final appearance with the band having already been quit-fired), Musical Youth, Cliff, Zoo dancing to the Steve Miller Band with a very pre-Secret Cabaret Simon Drake, and Dionne Warwick via satellite.

While normally they'd at least rouse themselves for an 11am telling of the Christmas story, BBC2 has slept right through the morning and lunchtime and come out in no mood to try to make up for it, instead starting at 2.10pm with the second part of The Islanders, a weeklong series of programmes about people who make their living by the island sea, followed by a repeat of the previous year's Gold From The Deep, Robert Powell narrating a deep dive for a cache of gold bullion, 4.5 kilos' worth, stuck in the hull of a ship sunk off the Russian coast by German torpedos forty years earlier. Enthralling, but at least Channel 4's twenty minute holiday viewing preview at the same time was new.

Which brings us to 3pm. Remember the old days, back when the Queen was still alive? Acting family ingenues appear to be the theme of the post-Message films with the TV premiere of International Velvet on BBC1 against The Parent Trap on ITV. As Channel 4 will get to that later, they're covering the time with Magic Of China, in which illusionist and US TV regular Mark Wilson goes the other side of what was still known as the Bamboo Curtain, followed from 4pm by Buster Keaton classic The Navigator and - happy Christmas! - the Brookside omnibus. Once back from underwater at 3.40pm BBC2, still on their own game, sticks on an episode of another series running over the season, literary panel show The Book Game, invariably hosted by Robert Robinson with guests Anthony Burgess, Susan Hill, Frederic Raphael and Gillian Reynolds, followed by a Horizon special, 25 Years In Space, which was only here because it had been postponed in October and had to go somewhere.

Jan Leeming is in charge of BBC news as the buffer between family filled daytime and flopping-on-couch prime-time, which starts with, yes, alright, Jim'll Fix It, with Ken Dodd and Val Doonican among those granting wishes. The ITN news meanwhile is followed by fast-fingered fuzzy fictioned fun in 3-2-1 with star guests Henry McGee, Joan Sims, David Yip, Patti Gold, the debut of the Brian Rogers Connection hoofing it to Eye Of The Tiger and - christ, there's one of 'em! - Bernie Winters. While that's all going on BBC2 continue a Peter Sellers season with Sophia Loren co-starring The Millionairess, the film for which Goodness Gracious Me was recorded but wasn't included.





We've marvelled before at how often Paul Daniels bestrode the festive period and the Magic Christmas Show was the third of his fourteen festive favourites but the third of only four on the day itself. Daniels has celebrated by doing up his living room and inviting celebrities to form the jury of observers. Daniels covers Lorraine Chase's ring in glass and takes photos through Rolf Harris, Tim Rice and Jill Gascoine' fingertips Under Laboratory Conditions, Floella Benjamin is assisted in a new career by puppeteer Philippe Genty, Kenneth Williams dons silly hats in the name of narrating a basic trick, Billy Dainty forms a card locating triangle with Benjamin and Nerys Hughes and Debbie joins the space race with the help of Barry Took, Barbara Kelly and naturally Patrick Moore. The guests are acrobatic duo Los Rios, "first lady of hula hoops" Luisa and motorcyclists The Trocaderos, who obligingly drown Paul's introduction out ahead of a wall of death ride with McGee, wearing a dreadlock wig for no good reason, as centrepiece. With ITV still banking on the Chris Emmett dollar Channel 4 do their royal duty against it followed by St Mark's Gospel, all of it, delivered as an acclaimed, Tony-nominated near two hour virtuoso one-man show by stage actor Alec McCowen.

A year earlier after just the one series ITV had chanced on a Christmas Day edition of their runaway new hit Game For A Laugh and reaped viewership rewards, so obviously they were going to try it again from 6.35pm, though there weren't any more festive specials after this so presumably we weren't watching them watching... them? Hold on. Er... BBC2 returned from dubious Sellersdom at 6.45pm with the Queen and Jan Leeming, not together, followed by The World About Us On The Tracks Of The Wild Otter, a three year labour of slithery love by wildlife cameraman Hugh Miles in the Shetlands following one specific otter and their family, his narration later sampled by Boards Of Canada. Speaking of unknowable yet loveable characters in rough terrain, Last Of The Summer Wine from 6.55pm was the fourth of 23 - TWENTY THREE - Christmas specials, but this was the second and last to actually go out on the 25th. This may seem odd if you recall the 1981 episode was been the most watched programme that day, but not so much once you realise it was watched by seven million fewer people by comparison. That all said, aside from All Mod Conned being one of the few episodes in its thousand year run not to take place in Holmfirth, it's pretty by-numbers stuff as Foggy suggests abandoning Christmas spirit and hiring a caravan.

We're deep into the evening by now and it's time for entertainment heavy hitters to face off. In the commercial corner, with a five minute head start at 7.25pm, it's what seems to be a standard episode not counting the set dressing of what is still grandly titled Bruce Forsyth's Play Your Cards Right. In the licence fee corner, with the second of six straight Christmas Day shows and winning the day's ratings battle (but only the week's ninth most watched programme, with a four million drop year on year), it's The Two Ronnies Christmas Show, featuring as the big budget closing sketch The Tree, a time travelling sci-fi take on the It's A Wonderful Life story with Brigit Forsyth. There's also a spoof of Chas & Dave. Keep that in mind. BBC2 wanders off to The World Of James Joyce: Is There One Who Understands Me?, an Emmy winning film about the writer's life complete with unseen interviews.

At 8pm ITV get to their big film. Kind of. The Black Hole was a divisive outlier in the Disney catalogue, a dark space exploration thriller starring Ernest Borgnine, Anthony Perkins, Maximilian Schell, Yvette Mimieux and the voice of Roddy McDowall, intended to attract the Star Wars audience what with its robots, sentries and laser battles, spectacular for the time CGI held back by clunky dialogue, an incomprehensible ending (there wasn't even one on the script) and barely making its money back. So that was ITV's big gamble for all the family - unless you lived within the TSW region - a franchise, remember, in its first year of Christmas broadcasting and therefore maybe looking to make a name for their out-of-the-way selves - who replaced it with Peter Falk action comedy The In-Laws after their chief executive Kevin Goldstein-Jackson called the film "rubbish" and blamed the Big Five companies for forcing it on everyone else. (TSW burned it off on January 11th) No such options for opting out on BBC1, where everyone got the TV premiere of the 1978 adaptation of Agatha Christie's Death On The Nile, Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot investigating the death of Lois Chiles (Holly Goodhead in Moonraker)' heiress, suspects including Bette Davis, Mia Farrow, David Niven, Maggie Smith, Angela Lansbury, Jane Birkin, Olivia Hussey, George Kennedy and Jon Finch but likely not an uncredited Saeed Jaffrey and Celia Imrie. Channel 4, after the news, are meanwhile ploughing through a repeat of a standard episode from the first series of Upstairs Downstairs before at 9pm unleashing the full three hour weight of Laurence Olivier as Richard III, what many regard as his Shakespearian masterpiece, with such a high level of operation that Olivier was one of four cast members to be knighted (John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson and Cedric Hardwicke the others)

We're past the watershed now so you have a staggered choice of music. At 9.35pm on BBC2, Richard Baker's Christmas Dozen introduces the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Andrew Davis with soloists Margaret Marshall and John Rawnsley and the choristers of Westminster Abbey. At 9.50pm on ITV, Chas & Dave's Christmas Knees-Up introduces the Rockney trio with soloists Eric Clapton, Lennie Peters (from Peters & Lee), Jimmy Cricket and Albert Lee. LWT obligingly did a studio up as a working pub, brought in what seems to be the inhabitants of all the local hostelries and then forgot to put any toilets in. The whole thing ends in a conga line, as nature intended. Nancy Banks-Smith's sole comment in the Guardian: "which one is Chas and which one is Dave?" Forty years later they're still doing the same about Ant and Dec.

In fact there's a lot of music all the way to the end of the day, with BBC1 following the news with Perry Como, in the fifteenth of his twenty holiday happenings, extending an invitation to join him, Angie Dickinson and Pierre Cardin in Paris (that's except for viewers in Wales who have something called Grand Slam, which can't be rugby related as they didn't win the Five Nations that year) Later the second and last Christmas Night with The Spinners takes their folky show to Bradford's Alhambra Theatre, the two song specials sandwiched somewhat less joyously by A Ghost Story for Christmas, the 1976 classic The Signalman. BBC2 sticks on another first showing on British television, the 1978 Billy Wilder directed melodrama Fedora. With Channel 4 having already gone to bed, unsteadily stumbling over its words as it goes, Sandy Gall is coming to town as ITN News is followed by a Cleo Laine and Johnny Dankworth special, Cleo And John talking, singing and introducing Rowan Atkinson, Julian Lloyd Webber and whatever Dougie Squires' latest dance troupe were called, followed before letting the valves cool down overnight (apart from Granada, who risked an airing of 1972 Glenda Jackson/Oliver Reed wartime farmland drma The Triple Echo) with a ten minute look at Great Ormond Street's radio station. There'll be plenty of meat left for tomorrow, don't worry about that for tonight. And remember, BBC radio carries on...

Radio choice

As traditional, Tony Blackburn returns to Radio 1 breakfast duty, where while based at Great Ormond Street he "takes a magic carpet ride around the British Isles". Guys, we know satellite communications exist. Christmas Dinner with DLT makes the toes curl as a prospect but after that it's an afternoon and evening for the aesthete with Gambaccini, Peebles, Long and, er, Davies.

Jimmy Tarbuck is the unexpected Radio 2 host first thing, but only for an hour due to Once In Royal David's City, "well-known carols with familiar voices". Chris Emmett's annual panto at midday is Dick Whittington and his Wonderful Cat, starring Anita Harris, Percy Edwards as the cat, Kenneth Connor, Frank Thornton, Bob Todd, Bernie Winters, Julie Dawn Cole and Michael Robbins. The Magic of Geoff Love kicks off the afternoon in about as cliched an 80s Radio 2 way as possible before the dangerously cutting edge Ed Stewart takes seasonal messages from those stationed in the Falklands. A tape gets put in for the afternoon of the Boston Pops' Christmas Party, Dame Vera Lynn is in Star Choice, Wally Whyton visits Nashville to pay tribute to Jim Reeves, and Pete Murray does the late show at 11om "in party mood with some of his favourite music and special guests, including Val Doonican, Rolf Harris and Lorraine Chase."

Radio 3 starts a series of the Bach Christmas Oratorio - best time for it, we say. The afternoon is spent with a series of European works from the 1840s. Once A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols have been taken from King's College Chapel, Cambridge, Barrie Illffe chairs a Christmas Quiz, and from 11.55am we go to Melbourne and Test Match Special for the first day of the fourth Ashes test, though all the excitement was at the other end of the five days as England won by three runs.

Peter Barkworth is your super soaraway Radio 4 breakfast show host introducing seasonal music and stories, then after 9 Robert Hudson introduces a selection of Christmas bellringing from across the country. The Countryside at Christmas, in which Wynford Vaughan-Thomas meets the only female lighthouse keeper in the UK, is followed by The Falklands At Christmas and Christmas 42, "a nostalgic medley of radio from 40 years ago". Can you begin to imagine such an exercise in cultural retrogressiveness? Things do perk up after that with part two of News Quiz of the Year and as most years at this time Margaret Howard choosing her Pick Of The Week. To Sing Is To Live, in the playlet slot of 2pm, celebrates soprano Kirsten Flagstad, who passed on 26 years to the month earlier (wait, what? 26 to the month?) Lord Denning does With Great Pleasure, Broadway singer Mary Ellis is the Desert Island Discs castaway, and after *another* two sets of seasonal poetry and prose we get to... a repeat from 1968 of an adaptation of Lady Windermere's Fan. Extraordinarily, all this relegates The Ambridge Christmas Revue to 10.55pm, where the cast do their party pieces slipping in and out of character. Why is this not on BBC Sounds? They don't need to use *all* the space on true crime documentaries, surely?