On This Day: Christmas Day 1984

Maybe, despite all the effort, people just weren't as keen as they were on reciprocating in 1984. Call it due to weather, the miner's strike or whatever, but the most watched programme all week was a repeat of the ten year old festive special of Porridge on the 27th, attracting 19.4 million viewers, while Kramer vs Kramer (BBC1, 30th) and Airplane! (ITV, Boxing Day) both topped eighteen million, which only one programme on the 25th would do.

You know how nowadays Christmas morning ITV is pretty much the same as every other morning until they remember there should be a cooking element and get James Martin in to pretend it's Saturday? Well, something similar happens here as Good Morning Britain takes up its usual three hours up to 9.25am in the year it became solidly profitable and was regularly beating Breakfast Time with its solid presenting team, solidly amusing features and very unstable Roland Rat, whose Countdown To Christmas was the de facto centrepiece of TV-am's festivities with the likes of Thumbs Aloft Macca involved. Because of that success they can go live, the morning seeing a message from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Roland phoning children in hospital and the conclusion of the Caring Christmas Campaign, which three years down the line will be the cause of the walkout that changes its fortunes and in some ways that of television and the unions irrevocably.

Frank and Selina were of course too precious to be working on the 25th so BBC1 lies in until 8am, gets up to stick on some Pages From Ceefax and has another forty minutes' kip before being roused for Carol Chell and Brian Jameson reading the nativity story and telling the origin story of glow-worms for some reason, as part of Play School. It's actually the first of three consecutive programmes, four if you count the traditional morning service, to recount all that star/inn/manger business, as it's followed by Christopher Lillicrap's storyteller identity Busker telling the Christmas Story and then fifty minutes of a not yet nationally famous Aled Jones leading the BBC Welsh Chorus in carols, with Isla Blair and Martin Jarvis filling in the details, under the title Born In Bethlehem - which had been shown on BBC2 the previous night!

Once ITV has wrested control of the third channel they offer earthier children's fare (except for viewers in Scotland who have their own Moderator's Christmas Message), starting with a Danger Mouse double bill of Aztec shenanigans The Long Lost Crown Affair and, excitingly, a new episode, Once Upon A Timeslip, the one where the narrator accidentally takes over the story and the cast have to become Robin Hood cosplayers. Better than that, Thomas The Tank Engine And Friends offers two new episodes, one thematic - Thomas's Christmas Party - and one not, Dirty Objects, in which arrogant James pushes about some trucks and gets covered in tar. Then it's Emu At Christmas, in which King Boggle and his cortege escape from barely registered side Pink Windmill characters to save Rod and the gang from Grotbags' latest plans only to get captured instead, all while the kids sing Kool and the Gang's Celebration.

As usual it's ITV that get the Royal service with Alastair Burnet forelock tugging a step behind, still down south in St George's Chapel, Windsor, whilst the BBC's Morning Family Service is from Fisherwick Presbyterian Church, Belfast. Its accompaniment to putting the turkey in is Fritz Freleng compilation The Looney Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie, unless you're watching Scottish in which case it's baffling to non-Americans Our Gang animated variant The Little Rascals Christmas Special followed by that man again, Glen Michael's Christmas Cavalcade.

ITV would of course be right to get as far out of the way as possible, because for the first time BBC1 was heading up the Telecom Tower at 11.05am. Obviously church services and hospital wards had been providing live Christmas Day broadcasts for years but The Noel Edmonds Live Live Christmas Breakfast Show was something else entirely, a big live overarching spectacle supposedly the first show live from a BBC studio (even though it wasn't) on the day for twenty years, beginning five years of memorably ambitious live broadcasting and earnest pronouncements about whatever breakthrough is being planned for that year. While a helicopter traverses much of London, from a tower block to Gerry Cottle's Circus with all his employees gathered outside performing in a cold and wet concrete car park to nobody else until the confetti cannon breaks, and finally to Tony Blackburn exchanging quips in Richmond Park while flanked by women holding balloons and wearing a T-shirt that we're far too far away to see the source of, Noel links repeatedly to the Falklands for long distance reunions and a shaving that the subject clearly cannot recall agreeing to and which we never see the outcome of. Meanwhile Mike Smith is at Charing Cross Hospital with Kim Wilde and also Howard Jones with his band walking through and gladhanding in seemingly every ward, the Whirly Wheeler scales as much of the Tower as he's allowed, Michael Fish is on the roof of TVC, and the Thompson Twins and Strawberry Switchblade - who, it should be pointed out, had not reached the top 40 yet - join the throng. Controlled chaotic, partially unnecessary, and entirely magnificent, and there'd be four more in the years to come before Michael Leggo got bored and told Noel to just do the earned surprises instead, the sourpuss.



Channel 4, sensing they cannot compete, stick on the short film Il Poverello: the Story Of St. Francis of Assisi followed by undistinguished Children's Film Unit wartime countryside evacuee film The Custard Boys, the horrible sounding short The World Of Children ("full of images and ideas and this film plays with some of them. Parents, authority and racism are highlighted but slugs, snails and puppy dogs' tails are not excluded") and, just to ensure the whole day doesn't pass with a zero rating, Jacques Tati's Jour de Fête.

There's no way BBC1 can come down easily from Noel, or indeed get Noel down easily - the lift must have been on multiple pulleys and it's surely a skeleton maintenance staff - so they stick on Blue Murder At St Trinians. That means they can get to one of the great immovables (at the time) of Christmas Day telly, except being a great non-royal immovable means it's there to be shot at, which is what ITV attempt at 1.15pm with Top Pop Videos Of '84. In future they would do something with the format but for now it's a mere compilation of videos, including the laser version of Relax, and thus not really competition at all. Were they man enough they'd have put it on three quarters of an hour later; instead the 2pm slot is essentially a topical clip show, Jayne Torvill And Christopher Dean Special.

BBC2 finally rouses itself at 1.55pm and puts on A Dog's Life, a Charlie Chaplin from 1918 involving a mutt just as mangy as The Tramp, and the first film Chaplin made after being signed to a million dollar contract with First National Pictures that gave him free production rein, a contract so open and giving performer freedom that a year later he co-founded United Artists instead. And talking of United Artists... it's the Top of the Pops Christmas Special! The one show every year that the whole presenting roster jostled and politicked their way towards being picked for, except this was the one year Michael Hurll basically went "sod the lot of yers" and had the artists introduce each other in a loose chain. That's Frankie doing Relax for the first time on BBC TV since the first Pops of the year, Howard Jones, Duran Duran, Nik Kershaw, Culture Club, the Thompson Twins, Jim Diamond, Paul Young, Wham! and George Michael separately on video, and ending with a gang mimealong to Do They Know It's Christmas? including Paul Weller lipsyncing Bono's big line and Slade and Black Lace, both there to appear on the Lenny Henry-fronted second show on the 27th, casually inserting themselves into the climactic chorus group.

A message, your majesty? Sure, and some clips of Harry's christening too.



After which everyone is in filmic mood, and some greater than others. Tell kids of today and they'll laugh but the big family films used to be guarded jealously from prying home viewing eyes, partially leading to a slump over the decade so far in movie premiere quality and viewing figures. Yet both main sides would have their huge deal premieres to correct the slump this time around, ITV's coming later, but for BBC1 Mary Poppins made perfect post-lunch, post-Queen undemanding family fare as it leapt after twenty years from Disney Time perennial to airing in full for the first time. 17.35 million agreed, the Beeb's biggest audience of the day. Almost as reliable was ITV going into 3.10pm opposition with a Bond film and this year's was The Man With The Golden Gun, four years to the day after its own small screen debut.

Ten minutes in, and linking the two with Canadian ice melting/mammal wandering documentary Polar Bear Alert, BBC2 joined the fray with another Chaplin but from thirty four years after the earlier one, Limelight the self-penned and partially autobiographical story of a washed up music hall comedian who takes suicidal dancer Claire Bloom as his protégé, released in his Commie conspiracy days - it was while promoting it in Britain that he found his re-entry visa had been refused - but when reissued in 1972 won Chaplin his only competitive Oscar, albeit Best Original Dramatic Score. And that was shared. Channel 4 for their part choose this moment to launch a new made for TV adaptation of Victorian era bestseller The Young Visiters (which the BBC made a big deal version of in 2003), starring Tracey Ullman and future Victoria Wood sideman and Benidorm star Kenny Ireland. After a Queen repeat at 5pm the Kirov Ballet performing Giselle fills another awkward couple of hours.

It just so happens that not only have BBC1 and ITV's big afternoon films started at the same time, they also finish simultaneously and are followed by five minute news bulletins, Jan Leeming and Pamela Armstrong taking the respective rosters, followed by star-packed versions of their most reliable word or phrase based panel parlour games. 15.35 million chose Blankety Blank, with Les Dawson in his first year in charge dressed as a fairy (for the first couple of minutes) engendering an appropriately frosty relationship with Russell Harty, Ruth Madoc, Derek Nimmo, Suzanne Danielle, Ken Dodd and Lorraine Chase. Brilliantly, neither contestant scores anything on the Supermatch Game. Over on ITV Give Us A Clue is coping less well with a change of master of ceremonies, Michael Parkinson all stentorian and forgetting to ring the bell, and it doesn't have the rushed namechecks in the theme tune yet. Una Stubbs is joined by Julia McKenzie, Nicola Pagett and Julie Walters, Lionel Blair by Spike Milligan, Wayne Sleep and - christ, there's one of 'em! - Bernie Winters. BBC2 have a quiz show as well, but it's a right oddity, Telly Quiz running stripped across Christmas and New Year weeks with club comic and short spell Lennie Bennett straight man Jerry Stevens asking, well, questions about telly, not really a kind of Telly Addicts (which began nine months later) proof of concept given the easy, medium or hard question tiering and the potential of asking a very small cross-section of the audience for help.

This was of course the first Christmas following Eric Morecambe's passing and ITV's joint centrepiece for the evening was Bring Me Sunshine, a tribute variety gala at the Palladium filmed the previous month raising money for the British Heart Foundation and in the presence of their patron Prince Philip. The line-up is if not often in the Eric mode a showbiz Royal Variety Performance in itself, treated like one too including the national anthem and a Michael Parkinson introduction. Ernie Wise opens the show with a song before leading on, in chronological order and with a deep breath... Max Bygraves, the Tiller Girls, Roy Castle with unexpected hair accompanying Eli Woods and James Casey in that same Jimmy James routine they always did together, comedy tumblers The Halfwits, Jim Davidson not even getting two minutes in before introducing the Chalky voice, Leslie Crowther, Bruce Forsyth at the piano and threatening to revive Sunday Night At The London Palladium, Petula Clark, Bertice Reading with Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen, a parade of special guests from the Morecambe & Wise Show's history featuring an Arthur Tolcher run-in, Lionel Blair and Suzanne Danielle duetting on All That Jazz, Jimmy Tarbuck, Benny Hill making a rare stage appearance, Dickie Henderson, Wayne Sleep and Cherry Gillespie from the Hot Shoe Show, Cannon & Ball, Bonnie Langford involved in a song and dance routine with Ernie, Mike Yarwood, Des O'Connor and Elaine Paige. It even ends with a joke about Ern's parsimoniousness.

How do BBC1 react? After all, despite being a Thames property people even then regarded the BBC Christmas shows as Eric's high water mark. Wisely they continue on their own course with a pretty regular episode of Hi-De-Hi! set in spring, albeit the end of the sixth series where Ted seemingly raffles Clive's car, and watched by 14.85 million. It's followed by something that as we always point out is the great hardy perennial of this era of Christmas Day viewing, The Paul Daniels Magic Christmas Show being his fourth on the 25th in five years. It feels like classic Paul too - wig, "man who exhales" theme, Debbie established by name but not yet overexposed. The opener involves a series of boxes, Paul with a big bag over his head and the involvement of yachtswoman Clare Francis, Bonnie Langford, Anneka Rice (whose forename Paul pronounces as it's spelt), Val Doonican and Larry Grayson. There's a classic trick in memory of Tommy Cooper using his own prop. The special guests are appropriately exotic, juggler Kris Kremo and the astonishing veteran clown George Carl. The closer is one of Daniels' best remembered big tricks as he moves a million pounds in cash from now empty box to safe, something which takes nearly twenty minutes to do. One of the witnesses is the similarly inclined "man of integrity" Robert Maxwell, who seems to want to be very tactile with the money. BBC2 meanwhile venture a Scottish Ballet version of The Nutcracker.

In two years' time Just Good Friends will make its own mark on Christmas Day viewing, which would have been a surprise at this time to John Sullivan, Paul Nicholas, Jan Harvey and co because this ninety minute special (preceding Sullivan's first extended Only Fools And Horses by a year, so again it's possible that as he turned his thoughts back towards Peckham he was using this as practice) starting at 7.25pm was intended as a coda following Penny moving to Paris at the end of the second series a month earlier. Coda and indeed prequel, showing the pair's first meeting, the story of their affair and the eventual wedding day jilting. Surprisingly it became one of the day's biggest hits with 15.2 million tuned in, which is presumably what led to the recommission, although the episode itself is what people on the internet call Lost Media as it's never appeared on streaming or DVD (or in all likelihood YouTube unedited) in its original form due to a large amount of unclearable music.

Channel 4 for their part, after the news at 7.10pm, air in what sounds like a return offering for that Freddie Frinton New Year's Eve thing a showcase for the sketches and cartoons of huge name German comedian Loriot, with Andrew Sachs swallowing his pride to provide translated voiceovers, followed by a regular Brookside. This is listed everywhere including the STV on-demand archive and this very YouTube upload as going out on Boxing Day for some reason but we've checked back to contemporary reports and they're all wrong so there. "Marie is depressed about George and refuses to let the twins keep a donkey they find", while Sheila is confined to bed and Harry fears he's having a heart attack. A regular soap opera episode going out on this date is still a rare thing, though a set of divorce papers will soon enough sort that out. But then so even in these much more cultured climes is BBC2 giving over 65 minutes on Christmas evening to The Master Of Mouton, Russell Harty recalling his Aquarius days in visiting Baron Philippe de Rothschild at Chateau Mouton.

The other big Christmas film? That'll be Raiders Of The Lost Ark, from 8.30pm on ITV and getting the day's biggest audience of 19.35 million when no other show on this day made its weekly top ten. That overlaps with the last half hour of Just Good Friends, which BBC1 followed with the latest The Two Ronnies Christmas Special, the fourth of only six on the big day (discounting Christmas Night With The Stars contributions) and featuring a big song and dance routine by "stereo Santas", Patrick Troughton as judge in a courtroom that becomes a game show set and as this year's long closing film The Ballad of Snivelling And Grudge, starring Peter Wyngarde in a Gerald Wiley-penned medieval tale. For what might be the only time the final headlines are replaced by a warmly comforting and mostly straight seasonal song with Ronnie C "at" the piano. Also, "the lovely Elaine Paige".

The lovely Queen gets her BBC2 outing at 8.40pm followed by a 188 minute film taking the second channel all the way to closedown. Saves on energy, we suppose. It's a film released that year too, Kaos, an Italian anthology of four Sicilian short stories written by Luigi Pirandello. A little before that starts Channel 4 at 8.30pm offers a very British dramatic alternative, a small screen version (as opposed to the classic 1955 film version) of West End hit revival farce See How They Run featuring the stage cast of Michael Denison, Liza Goddard, Maureen Lipman, Derek Nimmo, Christopher Timothy, Peter Blake, Carol Hawkins and Bill Pertwee.

Leeming returns just before ten, leaving the night open to a respectful pilgrimage to the holy studios at verdant Shepherd's Bush Green and a special Wogan, the fine mist of thrice weekly hovering in the horizon. This festive sally features Freddie Starr singing and swapping shoes, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and Elton John both doing the same one of those things, and an almost too knowing rematch with recent icy interviewee Victoria Principal via satellite. At the same time Channel 4, committed to the brief to the last, offers a two part documentary about Jean Sibelius. Indiana has saved the day for ITV by 10.40pm so it's back to ITN and then to Des O'Connor Tonight but by comparison it's all a bit too LE with Shakin' Stevens with Hank Marvin, Chas & Dave, Russell Grant and French singer Mireille Mathieu, who had duetted with Des on telly back in 1970.

Now we're into the witching hours, the paper has filled the dustbin, the kids are pretending to sleep and the adult conversation can come out. To wit: BBC1 closes the day with the classic Some Like It Hot sixteen years after it premiered on the same day and channel, which ITV counter with, of course, a slasher film from 1972, Sally Field starring in the made for ABC Home For The Holidays, which they attempt to take the edge off by jamming in Peace, Gill Nevill meeting the societal bridge builders, before closedown, which Channel 4 do with the Christmas Diary of "the poor man's thinker", fine artist Ian Breakwell supplying eight provocatively all too realistic seasonal tableaux across the week before bed. And peace be with you.

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Radio choice

Wake Up To Christmas is the logical way Radio 1 wakes up, with Keith Chegwin and Maggie Philbin who had been contributing to Saturday morning shows all year between Superstore and Tony Blackburn. Then it's Peter Powell, who takes the Queen's message at 9.30am as all BBC radio does and "talks to children who won't be at home for Christmas", Simon Bates's All Gold, Mike Read overseeing the pretend Christmas dinner wackiness, Jonathan King ("favourite records in his own inimitable style"), Bruno Brookes who had only been granted his own show in September, Janice Long and John Peel with the mid-section of the year's Festive 50.

Ray Moore is up at 5.30am to start Radio 2 off as Paul McDowell is on at breakfast hours direct from Bethlehem visiting holy sites and hospitals. Terry Wogan does a couple of hours' shift before Hannah Gordon explores the festive customs of other countries. What those other countries' learned folk would have made of The Grumbleweeds' Wilf In Santaland at midday we can only speculate. The News Huddlines of the year follow as best they can up to a revival of Forces' Favourites, the armed forces abroad request show that later became Family Favourites, with original host Jean Metcalfe returning after it being part of Ed Stewart's show of later years. Nanette Newman then looks Through A Child's Eyes at the season, after which Broadway star Stubby Kaye gets an hour and a half to talk about his career and the stars he rubbed shoulders with. The Cliff Adams Singers reconvene in tinsel for Sing Something Seasonal at 5pm, after which Cliff, Dana, Roy Castle, Dora Bryan and company indulge in the annual A Celebration Of Christmas... repeated from the 22nd! Cheap BBC! Part ten of The American Popular Song, Hubert Gregg celebrating fifty years on the wireless in binaural stereo and The Impressionists At Christmas get the station through the evening and up to Brian Matthew Round Midnight.

Radio 3 spend the first part of the day criss-crossing Europe, taking the traditional Vienna Christmas Day concert from 7.05am, including Bach's Christmas Oratorio - best time for it - and then masses from Metz and Rheims Cathedrals before retreating to the safe home ground of A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College Chapel, Cambridge. Beethoven and Debussy take up most of the evening, interspersed with a commentary from the Bishop Of London entitled Being Born in the Likeness of Man and finding time for 27 year old Nigel Kennedy, who made his TV debut twenty years to the month earlier, taking up with the BBC Philharmonic to play Elgar's Violin Concerto.

James Fox's Nativity Reading starts off Radio 4 at 6.50am and carries on throughout the morning, in between Kathy Staff introducing traditional Yorkshire song in A People's Carol, the dream team of Brian Johnston, Martin Jarvis, Tony Slattery and Alison Steadman in The Rest Of The Day's Your Own, and a Christmas Day Eucharist from St Albans Abbey. An adaptation of Pride And Prejudice continues its merry way in mid-morning before the real modern literary classic, Stilgoe's Around, in which Richard has Sandi Toksvig - while still being Ethel, remember - in his team for some light comic song about education. That's followed by Quote... Unquote, which certainly taught us a lesson. After the news, The Archers and a 1957 Round The Horne, the afternoon play slot is The Prisoner of Zenda, adapted for the telly only a couple of months earlier and already being given a second go in audio form with Hannah Gordon, Martin Jarvis and Julian Glover amongst the cast. The rest of the afternoon feels pretty second hand too - a tribute to Sir John Betjeman extracted from Kaleidoscope, highlights of Down Your Way, another reading of Winnie the Pooh and Asterix - though non-Christians talking about their experiences of the festive season in Christmas Present would have been a summary jolt. Victorian Christmas Miscellany has been running after the evening news across the week in the slot 15 Minute Musical does now but this is of a higher calling, based on choral and piano recitals with words about aspects of late 19th century Christmas delivered by Richard Briers, Martin Jarvis and Miriam Margolyes amongst others. Can't imagine modern Radio 4 investing in an adaptation of Jeffrey Archer's Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less, mind. Alan Coren on party games links the Archers repeat to a reading of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan with Judi Dench and Michael Williams as leads. A Blast On The Old Coach Horn is intriguing in word alone, the memoirs of "gentleman coachman" Charles Birch Reynardson with, it says here, songs by Dragonsfire, presumably not the German metal band. "Every Boxing Day traditional sword-dance teams take to the streets of Sheffield" according to late fifteen minute documentary Crossing Swords, which via a 10.30pm news bulletin leads into a repeat from two days earlier of Every Man's Guide to Mornington Crescent, author Esther de Waal on The Meaning Of Christmas, Emlyn Williams presenting his own Dickens sketches adaptations, and Radio Brynsiencyn, the long running Radio Wales spoof local station given a national berth for a week. Don't forget to switch off your set.