On This Day: Christmas Day 1983

Only six years on from The Greatest Christmas TV Schedule In History (TM) and already it wasn't as good as it used to be. The BBC was actually in something of a crisis of popularity at the time, as only The Two Ronnies were regularly breaking a commercial stranglehold on the weekly ratings top tens by December, the big historical drama By The Sword Divided had failed and Nationwide replacement Sixty Minutes was getting pelters. "There may be scarcely a new idea in the whole thing" the Times wrote about their festive package in words that will burn the ears of any DigitalSpy forum poster, "though that is not necessarily bad for the ratings, but one wonders if this desperate recycling stands much chance of success." What was new was ninety minute specials of two of its biggest hits, one below, one Last Of The Summer Wine on the 27th, which a different Times article reckoned "could herald a new direction for BBC drama... there is a move to make film productions for showing through cinemas, cable and satellite outlets as well as conventional television". Imagine Getting Sam Home on the big screen. Imagine if it had let to a Don't Wait Up film.

As breakfast television had come into being during the course of the year the big two are more than used by now to warming the transmitters up earlier, but despite that BBC1 still chooses to start at 8.35am, which in previous years had comfortably made them the first to rise but now seemed positively tardy. By that time ITV has already passed a special on TV-am's early weekend show via Anne Wood for primary and pre-schoolers Rub-a-Dub-Tub, which over its year and change on air featured everyone from Stratford Johns via Dick King-Smith to Ivor Cutler, this one giving space to Bonnie Langford, Edward Woodward and Michelle Dotrice.

The actual hour of Christmas with TV-am followed from 8am, with Cardinal Basil Hume's Thought for Christmas and Chris Tarrant reviving the already once traditional children's hospital visit. If that doesn't grab the kids, then when BBC1 finally rises they have the UK premiere of The Christmas Raccoons, in which Cyril Sneer cuts out the middleman and tries to cut down the entire forest, featuring songs by Rita Coolidge and Rupert Holmes, who also cameos as the voice of the forest ranger. It probably has the theme at the end too, yes. The kids' entertainment swaps back round at 9am as while BBC1 takes fifty minutes of Carols from Newby Hall in Ripon, fronted by Ian Carmichael with Grace Kennedy joining in TV-am ends by collecting the recent Alpine adventures of Roland's Winter Wonderland together, followed by a repeat of 1970 animated Jesus birth story The Night The Animals Talked. That's except for viewers in Scotland, who have their own Moderator's Christmas Message followed by something called The Sound Of Christmas.

So if you've got a captive audience of excitable young children, what better to do than dangle something they'll love the look of in front of them even if it isn't very festive to then snatch it away? Actually The Fraggles Are Coming aired the previous morning as well, which if nothing else shows the commitment of Children's ITV in plugging the new Hensonalia that began two weeks later. Those five minutes you'd imagine captured more adolescent imaginations than the following Messengers To Earth, a "musical fantasy recorded at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Crediton" put on by the Sheldon Theatre Company of Devon. Over on BBC1 Away In A Manger delivered half an hour of similarly cutesy "children's stories, songs, pictures and thoughts about the Nativity."

Interestingly, both BBC1 and ITV went to their major religious services at 10.20am, BBC1's Christmas Morning Family Service traipsing off to the Mint Methodist Church in Exeter while Christmas Morning Worship went to St Molua's Church, Belfast. But hold hard, because in Scotland there was one more surprise for the kiddies - Glen Michael's Christmas Cavalcade! Who needs organised religion when you've got a scraggy dog puppet and some second tier carttons? It's during this time that Channel 4 starts up, though they immediately disappear to Austria's Cloister Church of Wauldhausen for 160 minutes for a performance of Bach's Christmas Oratorio.

Back from church at 11.20am both channels have something dazzling and international for us. For ITV it's The Magic Planet, a fantasy spectacular on ice about an astronaut falling in love with an alien queen. On BBC1 it's the premiere of The Little Convict, starring Rolf Har... oh. Oh no. *cough* Made in 1979, Harris, as an artist who is also Jake The Peg because why wouldn't he be, bisects a part-animated hybrid tale of the early convict settlers in Australia, fictional but based on fact and authentic enough to be shown in schools. That's followed by another imported cartoon making its UK debut, in this case one that would be shown four more times on the 25th (1987, 1989, 1991, 1993) Ziggy's Gift, a version of a long running US newspaper cartoon strip, was brought to life by the great Richard Williams as director, with Disney and Dreamworks animation emerituses Eric Goldberg and Tom Sito drawing and Harry Nilsson providing an original song for the soundtrack. Aired on ABC the previous December, it won the Outstanding Animated Program Emmy. Although the unfortunate blob isn't everyone's favourite it's likely better than the made for TV film ITV stuck on to cover an hour and three quarters, The Capture Of Grizzly Adams, aired the previous year as a three years on finale to the TV series in which the hirsute backwoodsman is shot, has his daughter taken away from him and is found guilty of murder. Merry Christmas!

Mind you, if you thought that was filler leading up to 2pm so as not to distract mum from the cooking (1983, that's how it operated then), BBC1 were after a Bugs Bunny five minutes (Abominable Snow Rabbit) offering a Children's Film Foundation cut, The Glitterball, in which two kids stumble across an alien being in the shape of a small silver ball with an appetite and a whole host of people after it, which offset its budget (the sphere was often a painted ping-pong ball) with technical skill - effects man Brian Johnson had worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey and Space 1999. In 2010 it was aired at an Edinburgh film festival event for 'lost and forgotten films", reportedly "rediscovered after more than a year's detective work", which is a bit weird as it was shown on BBC1 twice more over the next four years. Channel 4 finally returned from Vienna just after it started with its own TV first, Busby Berkeley's biggest spectacular and the film that popularised Carmen Miranda's fruit hat, The Gang's All Here.

It's 2pm, so it must be Top Of The Pops, but cutbacks have struck as the usual mob-handed assortment of DJs is cut down to four, namely Simon Bates, Janice Long, Mr Light Entertainment Andy Peebles and, so you won't have seen it, Mike Smith introducing studio performances from Freeez, Shakin' Stevens, Eurythmics, Adam Ant, Bucks Fizz, Heaven 17, UB40 and your festive chart topper the Flying Pickets. And what is the natural antithesis to pop music? Royalty, of course! But while ITV trotted out Alistair Burnet's personal scrapbook for The Royal Year - which got the TV Times cover, the periodical being very much in love with the family - BBC2 kicked off its day quite lazily (where's your Play School mid-morning break-in, lads?) with Nobody Minded the Rain: Impressions Of Coronation Day, reminiscences of that day in 1953 that were first seen on the actual thirtieth anniversary back in June. And yet they wouldn't even air the Queen's speech until 9.50pm, not like the big two, instead opting for The Book Game, one of a series of four literary panel shows across the period in which Anthony Burgess, Germaine Greer, Susan Hill and Adam Mars-Jones "try to identify recited extracts and then give vent to their literary likes and dislikes."

Another big occasion followed the royal message, namely Terry Wogan's final Blankety Blank, seen off with a panel of at least semi-regulars, namely Sabina Franklyn, Roy Kinnear, Ruth Madoc, Patrick Moore, Beryl Reid and Freddie Starr. And yet a twist would emerge much later as one contestant is Captain Tom Moore, far from Sir, and also far from the prizes as he loses his round. An auspicious, and auspiciously placed, occasion for a programme Tel dropped out of as he felt it was running fast out of steam, but not one that people were going to engage with in large numbers.



Not when at the same time ITV was premiering Superman, which while only fourth in the day's ratings battle was ITV's big winner by some distance with 11.3 million viewers. Actually once Wogan and his wand had been dealt with BBC1 had its own film premiere for the family lazing around afternoon, and one that had been held off telly for longer than Clark and co. Yes, that'll be a Disney film, then, namely their first fully live action film, the 1950 version of Treasure Island. BBC2 and Channel 4 gamely stepped out of the way, the former with a repeat of the week's final part of The Great Palace: The Story Of Parliament, a festive first run Henry's Cat in which the titular drawling moggy helps Chris Rabbit prepare Christmas dinner for everyone until a pot of glue gets in the way, and the reliable standby of a classic black and white film in Meet Me In St Louis, the latter with Robert Llewellyn-voiced alien fantasy animated short Skywhales first aired in November, an episode of Fragile Earth dealing with the fauna and flora of Alaska and yet another TV premiere, Monsieur Hulot's Holiday.

As we enter the evening, BBC1 follows the news, Jan Leeming's turn on the roster, with Jim'll Fix It promising "an 11 year old Hi-de-Hi! Yellowcoat, two pupils of a school for the blind riding at the Horse of the Year Show, an 8 year old Father Christmas and how to crack Christmas walnuts." And how do ITV ride off the back of their enormous film premiere? With Bullseye, of course! Kenneth Kendall, Anne Diamond and Judith Hann do the answering, Eric Bristow does the charity throwing and Anne Aston does the scoring. Channel 4 slings the Queen on at 6pm and follows it with those markers of everything innovative and alternative that early Channel 4 stood for, the Barron Knights. What's more, Twice Knightly was their second special for the channel that year, producing a series of videos for their most recent songs. Carol Lee Scott makes an undignified cameo, like there could be any other kind here. For its part BBC2 is reminding its viewers that it's a bitter world out there with Winter Days, an edition of The Natural World voiced by Robert Powell about how wildlife cope with the cold. Actually you'd have thought both would have made the effort in the 6pm onwards slot as Christmas Day fell on a Sunday and the God Slot still applied, so BBC1 goes to Peterborough Cathedral for a traditional Songs Of Praise Special and ITV follows the Prince and Princess of Wales - obsessed, we're telling you, to A Royal Concert of Carols, a hospital choir joined by with Marti Webb and classical pianist Peter Donohoe in aid of the Malcolm Sargent Cancer Fund for Children.

As if ordained that the day's televisual victors would be a comedy double act, the third Christmas Day Two Ronnies followed the example of the previous year by being the day's most watched non-Queen programme. This was the lowest rating Christmas Day of the decade, BBC1 in a slump that would lead to the Michael Grade era and ITV maybe complacent with their big film, so that meant all of 12.3 million tuning in for Elton John, two singing Welsh train operatives, a taxidermist, a judo demonstration and the annual big closing sketch The Adventures of Archie, in which the titular Corbett character is transported to a desert island by a genie with only Carol Hawkins for company and is rescued by a Tardis piloted by Worzel Gummidge. See what they've done there?

So why were RonnieSquared so popular? Perhaps because, also for the second year running, ITV countered it with a bog standard episode of Play Your Cards Right and followed it with Jimmy Tarbuck's Christmas All Stars, a studio based variety spectacular as she is spoken, meaning Brucie appears again this time in music hall pianist mode alongside Cannon & Ball, Max Bygraves' song about the year, a mini-Game For A Laugh, Yarwood, Barrymore, Shaky and via satellite the Temptations, Andy Williams and the stars of Hart To Hart, Freeway inclusive. BBC2's form of entertainment is Rossini's comic opera version of Cinderella recorded at Glyndebourne over the summer, while Channel 4 put out an unwisely commissioned Christmas Special of Father's Day, a John Alderton family sitcom that seemed to be forgotten while it was on. Hey, one of its time failed comedy not good enough for your Christmas day evening? Good, because that's followed by a regular episode of Struggle, a local government satire of polarised politics in the GLC/Militant era starring Tim Piggot-Smith and written by Guardian political commentator Peter Jenkins, who wouldn't write anything else for TV but his daughter Amy created This Life. We're all for alternatives, but what the hell, Channel 4?

Taking third place in the viewership chart for the day was the extended special we referred to back in the first paragraph, a ninety minute All Creatures Great And Small (part two), three years after the third series, four before the fourth and rather splendidly getting a follow-up episode two years to the day later. The war has ended so the call-ups that ended matters in 1980 have been demobbed and James, Tristan and Siegfried have to readjust to civilian and vetenary life. Despite its undoubted popularity, it was maybe over on Four that the big event of the night was airing as remarkably, despite being released to British cinemas less than six months earlier and in the US in February, Channel 4 were able to premiere The King Of Comedy, mostly because it bombed at the box office and this was seen as the best way that the distributors could get some money back, which even given its blackness feels a very odd thing to think about the Scorsese/De Niro/Lewis modern acknowledged classic. Look, even now it's been freely available on YouTube for four years!

Had enough film premieres? Tough, there's two more to come, the first being The Revenge Of The Pink Panther, Sellers' last during his lifetime, on ITV at 9.10pm. But if a glut of new movies to TV is one regular from this era of the schedules on the 25th, a greater one was being established 25 minutes later on BBC1. Thicker Than Water was the third Only Fools And Horses Christmas special, which finished fifth in the ratings chart, but the first of fourteen to go out on the day itself. John Sullivan is finally getting to grips with the special form and it advances the family story and the "men without women" angle of the set-up, something it wouldn't come back to at Christmas for some time, as Del's dad Reg Trotter, played by the voice of Pigsy from Monkey Peter Woodthorpe, briefly retuns. It would turn out to be Grandad's final appearance, Lennard Pierce dying ten days short of a full year later while filming the next series.

That final first showing on British television follows the BBC1 news at 10.15pm and interestingly it's another film released to cinemas that very year, though you might argue Better Late Than Never doesn't quite have the reputation of The King Of Comedy. Directed by Bryan Forbes, it stars David Niven, who was long since suffering from motor neurone disease when he filmed it and died that July, as a faded entertainer who meets a ten year old claimed to be his granddaughter and heir, only for Art Carney to show up and claim to the the real thing and that they shared a partner when she was born. Lionel Jeffries as the attorney and Maggie Smith as the governess show up. It was never released in Britain and despite this elevated scheduling you can kind of see why. Over on BBC2 the comic chat of The Bob Monkhouse Show ended its first series with Bob feeding Norman Wisdom, Yakov Smirnoff - in Soviet Russia entertainment lights you! - and Bertice Reading, while Channel 4 classed up the joint with Tadada: Peter Brook's Paris Cabaret, his Bouffes du Nord theatre company doing cabaret songs.

As this of all days heads towards its end BBC2 switch off with the kind of thing you'd see slipped onto the screen quite often over the festive period, the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup. ITV hire the King's Singers and send them to Harewood House to declaim The King's Christmas before launching into a variety of overnight repeats, bottom of the basket films and spare festive messages, including everywhere A Different Christmas wherein "Gillian Reynolds chats to Jimmy Savile at Stoke Mandeville Hospital". Urgh. Channel 4 signs off with Peace On Earth, a gathering in Jerusalem Manger Square with Laurence Olivier reading and Dame Flora Robson narrating, while an earthier kind of singing closes BBC1's day, The Spinners at York. How come the Spinners always seemed to get the last thing on Christmas night slot around then?

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Radio choice

Radio 1, once Mark Page has done the early shift, once more turns to Tony Blackburn for his traditional Great Ormond Street-bound morning show, accompanied by Keith Chegwin taking "flying visit to Belfast, Aberdeen, Liverpool and Norwich", so they're persisting with the idea they're making all those journeys in real time. Peter Powell does the mid-morning before the oven gloves of supposedly serving up Christmas dinner to his colleages are handed over from DLT to Mike Read. Steve Wright hangs on to the afternoon with "Steve's characters in festive mood, with the Afternoon Boys unashamedly bawling carols... and will Damian enjoy his soya bean turkey?" Nothing as hilarious as the concept of vegetarianism, eh. But then Radio 1 remembers that it's Sunday - you'll notice that a lot of regular Sunday programming remains, and far from just the religious stuff - so Tommy Vance announces the chart and Annie Nightingale does a festive request show as per, leading to 10pm and The Adrian Juste Christmas Morning Show. Yes, wacky funster, we see what you've done there.

Don Maclean gets up for 5am on Radio 2 and he's waking up kids unnecessarily at The Children's Hospital, Birmingham alongside usual Sunday early jock George Ferguson. Presumably it's that early because the religious requirement means the actual breakfast show is a god slot, with usual Sunday morning contributor Bishop Bill Westwood - yes, Tim's dad - and St Paul's Cathedral School Choir. Most of the day is actually much like any other Sunday at the time, what with David Jacobs' usual Melodies For You and Desmond Carrington's Rainbow Connection, in which Jim Henson puppeteers the lifeless body of... oh, no, just two hours of his usual All Time Greats playlist on a colours theme. Lunchtime is home to Chris Emmett's annual panto, this year Sleeping Beauty starring Stacy Dorning from Black Beauty, who at the time would have been coming off Thames sitcom Keep It In The Family, with Kenneth Connor, Frank Thornton, June Whitfield, Nerys Hughes, Maureen Lipman, and obviously Tel'n'JY. Ed Stewart takes some annual dedications from the forces overseas at 2pm and the Cliff Adams Singers pop in for their usual 4pm Sing Something Simple half hour leading up to the last in the series, half an hour earlier than usual just to catch people out, of The Fosdyke Saga, a reversioning of Bill Tidy's Daily Mirror strip with Miriam Margolyes, David Threlfall and Enn Reitel among the cast. That's done with in fifteen minutes before Charlie Chester, Christmas At The Dome (no idea), Christmas Night with Hinge & Bracket, then back to normal from 7.30pm with Max Jaffa and the Palm Court Orchestra's Grand Hotel, god slot Sunday Half-Hour and Your Hundred Best Tunes. The hour before Pete Murray's Late Show at 11pm lets its hair down in the way only Eighties Radio 2 could, with easy listening piano duo Rostal & Schaefer and the BBC radio orchestra commandeering Mantovani Magic.

Radio 3 is taking it easy and at first obvious, with Your Christmas Choice at 9am, Christmas Music at 10.30am. After that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Sir George Solti play two Mozart piano concertos, followed by an old Schubert recital, Spanish Songs and Arias by the Austrian Radio Symphony Orchestra plus Placido Domingo, a Beethoven piano sonata, the BBC Symphony lot doing Haydn, A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in case you forgot what day it was, a reading of the play Sir Thomas More that even the billing admits is only here because Shakespeare did some punching up work on it, Brahms from Salzburg conducted by Herbert von Karajan with a sermon by Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie in the interval, and finally Bach on the ol' joanna, as we're sure the continuity announcer would have called it.

As usual Peter Barkworth opens up Radio 4 with a nativity reading for a bit before self-explanatory Sunday, "which takes a seasonal look at the Christian Church" and ends with a whole load of festive bells up to the Queen at 9.30am. Morning Service is a Salisbury Cathedral Eucharist; the other side of the Archers omnibus Christmas Briers has Richard of that name unwrap - of course he'd unwrap - some comedy clips. News Review of the Year follows the one o'clock news, and that's evidently too much emotional effort for the time and day as The Countryside at Christmas, which follows, is a repeat from the previous evening, wherein Wynford Vaughan-Thomas tells country tales largely of yore including "the story of a young couple hoping to promote goats' milk". Everyone settled? Good, time for Afternoon Theatre, Christmas At Dingley Dell, a bowdlerism of The Pickwick Papers and some of Dickens' Christmas stories with Helen Atkinson-Wood, who began the year in OTT, the only immediately recognisable name in the cast. Yet more fanciful seasonal readings follow at 4.15pm with A Birthday At Bethlehem, in which "Thora Hird and Peter Goodwright invite you to eavesdrop on some of the likely and unlikely conversations between ordinary folk who may or may not have taken part in the first Christmas story.". Hedging your bets well there. A repeat of a documentary about roses leads into News Quiz of the Year Part 2, Alan Coren, John Wells and Joan Bakewell among Simon Hoggart's extended panel. Christmas 43 looks back at the radio of forty years previously - what a stupid waste of everyone's time that endeavour is - up to the news, Lord Soper visiting a Crisis centre and then Helpston Cracked Pippins Northamptonshire Christmas. The ambassador was found dead that evenin... no, hold on, it's a kind of folk ballad by George Deacon based on the work of Northants poet John Clare. This features the day's second credit for the excellently and seasonally named Clive Panto, this time as Beelzebub. We need to hear this. From 7pm there's the latest part of The Magic Carpet, a serial telling the story of the development of the R101 airship, festive literature celebration All Our Christmasses with Timothy Bateson among the readers, and then... lord, Glyn Worsnip suggests Christmas Isn't What it Was. "In the old days, Christmas was a real festival. Children believed in Santa Claus and valued the modest gifts he brought. After the traditional lunch, everyone enjoyed charades and nobody quarrelled. Today Christmas is a commercial event with children greedy for expensive presents, adults greedy for food and drink and no thought for love and goodwill to men. True or false?" 1983, remember. 9pm brings a radio version of a farce, A Cuckoo In The Nest, starring Joan Hickson, Freddie Jones, Ian Lavender and one of Percy Edwards' voices; the 10.30pm news is followed by Behind The Chalet School, in which Kate O'Mara is among those celebrating the titular endless series of books by Elinor Brent-Dyer about a Nazi-era Austrian international boarding school. The religious quotient of the day concludes with the Bishop of Middlesborough reflecting on The Festival Of Peace and A People's Carol, Kathy Staff presenting the south Yorkshire hymnbook that pre-dates those the Victorians brought us. And not even a Desert Island Discs to be seen.