What do you think of the Christmas TV line-up this year then? No — wait — let me hazard a guess. You think that it’s a load of old crap with too many repeats, films that are hopelessly last year, and why can’t it be like the good old days when it was worth paying the licence fee. Yes? Thought so.
Slagging off the Christmas telly is as predictable a festive ritual as mince pies, family punch-ups and dressing your dog in tinsel antlers. We know this because the Liberal Democrats have now leapt aboard the bandwagon. Yes, the party has conducted some “research”, which indicates that the number of repeats, such as Porridge and the Two Ronnies, to be shown on the main terrestrial channels between Christmas Eve and Boxing Day will be up by 42 per cent on last year. “This is just a cheap and lazy way of filling the schedule,” says Don Foster, who is apparently the party’s culture spokesman. Strewth! I knew the Lib Dems were short on policies but has it really come to this?
This national tendency to think that “it was all so much better when we were nippers” is faintly ridiculous because the sepia-tinted view usually fails to bear scrutiny. How would you feel, for example, to be sitting down on Christmas Day to A Merry Morning with Jimmy Tarbuck? Or Tarzan and the Leopard Woman? Or with zero alternative to the Queen’s Christmas Message?
I have here, you see, the Christmas TV schedules from 1976, exactly 30 years ago, and they don’t make pretty reading. If this was served up today there may well be street riots. Yes, there are the BBC classics: Bruce Forsyth’s Generation Game, The Morecambe and Wise Show, and The Parkinson Magic Show. But the main, juicy film offering from the BBC is Oliver! with Ron Moody, which, fabulous though it is, even then was nine years old. A bit like them making Titanic the top festive offering today. But of course we didn’t have video recorders or movie channels then. There was only BBC1, BBC2 and ITV so we all tended to watch more or less the same thing and even an old film was a treat. It is not the quality of the programmes that has faded, but the sense of occasion.
Michael Grade, who recently defected from the BBC to ITV, might need a stiff drink if he sat down and studied LWT’s offerings for Christmas Day 1976. The director of programmes for LWT then was one Michael Grade. Aside from Sale of the Century with Nicholas Parsons and the film Doctor Dolittle (also nine years old) the headline show is — wait for it — The John Curry Ice Spectacular with guests Millicent Martin and Rod Hull and Emu. Not something, pray God, that Mr Grade would wish us to return to.
Look, by contrast, at what the mainstream channels are offering this year: six film premieres between Christmas Eve and Boxing Day alone ranging from Chicken Run to Pirates of the Caribbean, a Christmas Day menu that includes Little Britain, Strictly Come Dancing, The Vicar of Dibley Special, Doctorr Who, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. This is before we start on the soaps (there was, of course, no EastEnders in 1976), which effortlessly win the ratings war every year.
What is so weird about people getting all misty-eyed over the cosy Seventies days of Brucie, the Two Ronnies and Noel Edmonds is that none of them ever went away anyway. Over Christmas this year we get The Two Ronnies Christmas Sketchbook, Strictly Come Dancing hosted by Bruce Forsyth and Deal or No Deal presented by — Noel Edmonds.
We have a distorted perception of yesteryear TV because the viewing community is more dispersed now. Too much choice means that we take for granted how much television — discounting the rise of some shockingly awful reality TV shows — has actually improved, so that we no longer treat it like a national event.
As for repeats, well ’twas ever thus. And actually, people want and expect The Snowman to be on. They’d complain if it wasn’t. Just as people say they don’t like turkey but would feel short-changed if they didn’t get it served up for Christmas lunch with cranberry sauce. Gill Hudson, the editor of Radio Times, has a good theory about repeats. “No one criticises anyone for re-reading Shakespeare, so why shouldn’t very very good television be shown again?” she says. “It makes sense. People might moan about Christmas television but if it wasn’t what people wanted it wouldn’t be put on.”
Yes, no matter how much we splutter and rage, the facts are there in a Radio Times survey conducted last Christmas in which people were asked what were their favourite festive shows. The result was so obvious that you could have almost bet the house on it: Only Fools and Horses, Morecambe and Wise, the Vicar of Dibley, The Office, The Two Ronnies, Noel’s Christmas Presents, Coronation Street and so on.
Like an old pair of slippers, we may as well admit that we like the comfortable and familiar at this time of year. But possibly not as much as we enjoy a good whinge. I knew the Lib Dems were short on policies, but has it really come to ‘researching’ the fact that repeats will be up by 42 per cent on last year?
Shop the internet herd to their bosses
Only the heartless or the very smug could fail to sympathise with those last-minute parents who logged on to Hamleys website this week to find the cyber cupboard bare. Thousands of opportunists had pounced on an internet error to fill their boots with mistakenly discounted toys, which left stock temporarily depleted and parents empty-handed. I know how they felt. Having left my shopping until the last week I have been hyperventilating while trying to track down a Happy Feet Dancing Penguin, the main request from my daughter and which she speaks of constantly.
Obviously everywhere has sold out and I am a crap, tardy parent. Every toy store has shaken its head at my inquiries; other earwigging parents have said: “You’ll be lucky! We got ours in November.” The internet has drawn a blank. It looks as if a friend living 200 miles away may have bailed me out, but this has not abated my unfestive bitterness at the meticulousness of early Christmas shoppers and those who spend their lives like prowling panthers, alert to the slightest internet glitch. Do they ever get any work done? If you know any of these people do me a favour — grass them up to the boss.
Cheeky howler
Tip for the MP Lembit Öpik, who, after breaking up with Sian Lloyd, 48, and dating Gabriela Irimia, 24, one half of the Cheeky Girls, released this statement: “I continue to regard Sian as one of the brightest, most outgoing, hard-working and generous people I’ve had the privilege to know.” Lembit, Lembit. When you have been replaced by a hotpants-clad woman half your age whose catchphrase is “Touch My Bum” , the tributes “hard-working” and “generous” just add insult to injury.
