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.

Advent Calendar 2020 Day 21: Tomorrow's World Christmas Quiz, 1986

We've featured Tomorrow's World Christmas Quizzes on here before but never before the very first of the seven straight contests that replaced the usual format and allowed Howard Stableford to don an appropriate jumper. You should know the rigmarole by now - a mystery item is revealed, the regular presenters and the odd guest give conflicting explanations of what it's for, the audience use their proto-early You've Been Framed! multiple choice pads to vote for what they think it is, a guest panel give their verdict. This year the panel are Colin Baker in his Who outfit, Heather Couper and the director of the Science Museum. One of the potential answers involves a horse so RELEASE THE BOWNESS, alongside Kenny Everett with a model cow, Roland Rat with some things that vibrate, Ian McCaskill dropped from the heavens and Ray Reardon doing the machine gun trick shot, because he was a snooker player on a LE show that had room for a table so not to do it would have been against the law.

THE FUTURE OF THE CHRISTMAS QUIZ: 1987; 1988; 1989

#76: Saturday Superstore, 1982

A full 79 minutes of the Christmas week show. While Cheggers is out in Durham with such kid-friendly features as handbell ringers and Lindisfarne, Dexys and Torvill & Dean are in the studio. Tony Hart designs Christmas cards, All Star Record Breakers is previewed, John Craven links with Brian Hanrahan in the Falklands and Mike Read pops into the gallery, as all live shows do when short of proper content. Inevitably, Read has invited his band in too.

#14: Rainbow's first Christmas

1972 was Rainbow's first year, with a cast including David Cook (who went on to write the acclaimed novel and Channel 4 adaptation Walter) as house human, cutaways featuring intended early stars Sunshine and Moony, Telltale as the house band, no George and the nightmare fuel of original Bungle, with John 'K9' Leeson inside. A week of festive fun alights on food, singing, Christmas post and trees, including appearances by semi-regular characters that have not a single online reference, Zippy's gruff dog Duffy and stop-motion aided storytellers Bramble and Logan. There's also a couple of storytellers, and in the first programme Zippy does his own zip up at one point, which begs the question of why he was later never able to unzip himself when Geoffrey forced his mouth shut.

2018 EDIT: These disappeared from YouTube at some point this year but we found these three elsewhere. Not sure if the self-zipping is in any of them, but it definitely existed.