Remember me
It’s Christmas Eve and I’m watching BBC News at Five. There is Turner-esque fire and fog from Kyiv; shots of Soviet apartment blocks; Volodymyr Zelenskyy giving his Christmas address from a candle-strewn hallway that looks the way you might imagine the ballrooms in War and Peace. A reporter stands in front of an onion dome. A young British man has been stabbed in Portugal. A policeman in beret stands on guard; a stone cross looms in the background. The new flu is running rampant through NHS hospitals; multicoloured fairy lights twinkle on a bedframe. England’s cricketers are in Australia, drinking to excess. “They should be discreet about it,” says a fan. A Scotrail advert has been found misleading. While thousands queue for a Christmas service in Bethlehem, an agency in America uses satellites to track Santa Claus. “Santa’s very cooperative with us” says a man in a khaki jumpsuit. “Remember,” says the voiceover, “he’ll only stop if you’re asleep.” Santa, reports the BBC, is on his way to Tajikistan.
I brace myself. Viewers have been complaining about Britain’s Christmas lineup for over a month. Too many rebranded gameshows and chat shows, barely any film premieres, and little original programming: the BBC and ITV have broken a covenant forged during many childhood Christmases. “There’s been some shite on in recent times,” said one X user when the schedule was released, “but this is by far the worst.” In the Telegraph, Jon Peake takes himself on a nostalgia trip, reviewing the entire 1977 BBC Christmas schedule. Top of the Pops has “something for everyone”; he claims he could watch the dire-sounding Bruce Forsyth and the Generation Game “all day.” “As a ghost of Christmas past, [the 1977 schedule is] holding BBC One’s miserly present day to account,” he concludes.
Will 2025 really be that bad? Calamity Jane’s on BBC2, which means Doris Day going sidesaddle in a Colonel Sanders costume and singing to a daffodil; later on Christmas Eve there will be a showing of Doris Day: I Don’t Even Like Apple Pie, a rare interview first recorded in 1989. One searches for centenaries and half-centenaries and finds nothing. Maybe the BBC is trying to engineer Doris-Day-as-national-tradition; maybe in a few years’ time we’ll go uniquely mad for her, the way Japan goes mad for Avril Lavigne. Meanwhile there is Carols From Kings, with a Twin Peaks-patterned floor and a man in the audience dressed like a Canadian lumberjack. You’ve got to scan a QR code to work out the order of service. The title card looks like a parody from a late-night sketch show, but the higher registers of the King’s College Choir are so lovely they make you long for the return of the castrato.
Richard Osman’s cosy crime capers have practically made him High Priest of Christmas, and on Channel 4 he’s busy presiding over the festive edition of television’s quietest quiz show, Richard Osman’s House of Games. Three-quarters of the contestants are comedians, and you wonder whether their talents are wasted. There’s no time for improv; House of Games feels basically like watching golf, with prolonged silences and questions that provoke barely a giggle. But Mel Giedroyc, used to Bake-Off, is in her element. She cracks wise about tea towels (hers are wrecked), and Eurovision, which she calls “Eurovizh.” There are semi-metric riddles about Mr Blobby, Blackpool Tower, and Eric Carle’s A Very Hungry Caterpillar. Casualty regular Charles Venn thinks A Clockwork Orange is based on a book by William Makepeace Thackeray. Love Actually will eventually clash with An Indecent Proposal.
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I turn over to BBC2, where Paul Whitehouse and Bob Mortimer have Gone Christmas Fishing. It’s a solid bit of programming for the sort of man psychiatrists might consider a festive risk. Mortimer talks openly and kindly about a deceased relative; there is a Joni Mitchell needle drop, and a shot of a robin descending onto a bush. The show gets most exciting when the two men spot “a massive trout.” But this isn’t blood-and-guts fishing: a bit of open-air fondling and the majestic beast is back in, free to explore the sun-flecked waterways of Cornwall. At one point a Men’s Health practitioner winds up in the forest to work out whether the duo are at risk of falling and going into a home. You hope it’ll at least be the same home. The two comedians are good at exclaiming in gentle wonder, like a reverse Beavis and Butthead. We run into Dawn French, who livens up the programme once she admits she would sleep with either Mortimer or Whitehouse.
The night’s piece de resistance is Channel 5’s The Christmas Treats We Loved and Lost, which runs to a ball-busting 90 minutes. Viewers will have this programme to chew on during the intolerable wait for the channel’s heavily advertised Boxing Day offering, Abba vs Queen: Who Are the Greatest? (“Abba,” says one talking head in the trailer. “Queen,” says another. “Abba,” says one. “Queen,” says another.) For now, we’re setting off on a “nostalgic Christmas journey,” with special attention paid to “the seventies and eighties.”
“It was honestly the high point of the year,” says DJ Bobby Friction, of Christmas. “Christmas Eve set an expectation. You were excited for what was about to come,” remarks another panellist. They’re all here, probably stopping by on their way to film other Christmas specials: Katy Hill and Susan Calman and Cheryl Baker and Kaye Adams and Mark Watson and Jeremy Vine, all interspersed with barrel-aged footage of London lights, and Christmas choirs, and families sitting down to eat in wallpapered homes.
Here we remember rituals that still take place in households up and down the country, weep for objects still available in almost every local branch of every supermarket. Watch Christmas Treats and mourn the following: midnight mass, Christmas crackers with bad jokes inside, paper chains, advent calendars, the Christmas lights down Oxford Street, school nativity plays, Christmas carols, children meeting Santa Claus, children writing letters to Santa Claus, Christmas parties, Christmas puddings, Christmas stockings and turkey.
The panel of Christmas Treats might be old, but they’re not old enough to provide any sort of interesting history. Here are all the things your over-fifties parents bring up to make a point about the lives they’ve lived: Woolworth’s, Blue-Peter-without-health-and-safety, cassette players, The Royle Family, Babycham, space hoppers, and Fanny Craddock, whose Goodbye to Berlin makeup provides the only genuine jolt of the evening. “How do you explain Fanny Craddock to a new generation?” asks Lucy Porter, who must have been misled at some point about the audience of Christmas Treats. The rest have some novel observations. The Christmas season is magical, but it never started this early, which is a bad thing. Dates used to have stones in, which is both good and bad. We used to have more snow. The egg-based Snowball cocktail used to be sweeter, like almost everything. Britain’s elderly deserve better than this.
Christmas Day. The Sugar Plum Fairy is on BBC2 and the Loose Women are on ITV, doing a Christmas special with advertising support from the Canal and River Trust. If you get confused about who’s talking you can check out the ITV website, which comes with the sort of headshot gallery more typically found in the external communications of the Chinese Central Politburo. The Loose Women, too, are “taking a trip down memory lane,” which means posing practice questions from a beginner’s course in a conversational foreign language. They hover at the bottom of the screen: “Our Christmas Day traditions.” (For the third time in the past 24 hours, Judi Love talks about her dinner plans on terrestrial television; a woman explains that it is her daughter’s birthday “every Christmas Day.”). “Are you a stickler for Christmas traditions?” Eventually, pleasant host Christine Lampard starts listing traditions and asking if they “ring a bell.”
Channel 5, still reeling from the excitement of Christmas Treats, does Britain’s Favourite 80s Hits, then Britain’s Favourite Christmas Songs. BBC1 is showing White Christmas. It’s one in a cohort of 1950s musicals made for audiences nostalgic for 1930s musicals; the 1930s musicals were made for audiences nostalgic for vaudeville. It’s surprisingly difficult to keep track of the plot when you’re channel-hopping between showings of James Martin’s sombre, awkward cooking show, Christmas Day (ITV1), the sequel to Sister Act (BBC2) and a selection of music videos you forgot existed. The dance sequences, in lurid 1950s colour, work either way.
Finally it’s time for the King, who wafts onto our screens after a wind salute out of a Disney film. He’s got a montage of royal outings and a British Sign Language interpreter, who is charmingly wearing a matching tie. It’s the usual stuff. He tells us about his trip to meet Pope Leo at the Vatican, which was a “historic moment of spiritual unity;” the days of World War II, when “communities came together.” (The word “communities” is strangely absent from the books, films and periodicals of the time). Queen Camilla and William and George are helping at a food bank. “Journeying,” he says, “is a constant theme in our Christmas story.” A Ukrainian choir sings us to the end; the King’s BSL interpreter might be the only person in the world who knows the lyrics to Carol of the Bells.
The Scarecrow’s Wedding (BBC1) is a charming animated adaptation of one of the Julia Donaldson books that came out after The Gruffalo. If you’re a child it’s like getting tucked into bed at 3:10pm; if you’re an adult it’s like getting tucked into bed at 3:10pm by beloved prestige drama actors Jessie Buckley and Domhnall Gleeson. Two scarecrows want to wed; their animal friends help them gather the requisite clothes and decorations. (Plot hole: the crows are scared of the scarecrows, but the geese aren’t, which opens up interesting questions about avian psychology). The he-scarecrow is led on a search for water by a very slow snail; a Sinatra-esque replacement tries to woo his fiancee and accidentally sets a few bales of hay on fire. A fitting climax for this West Country Western. Oklahoma, the best of the BBC’s repertoire of 1950s Christmas musicals, did it first.
Two of the contestants on BBC1’s Gladiators Christmas special are podcasters. A third is Joe Wicks, who has “never really been in a fight,” and falls off his podium right away. BBC2 tries to lure back the Christmas Treats crowd from Channel 5 with an hour and a half of Dad’s Army-related programming; Channel 4 does The Snowman, which gets sadder the older you get. Lidl, attempting to make a Christmas advert, fires on all bases: child narrator, charity cause, unwelcome incursion from Wouldn’t It Be Nice. On BBC1 it’s Strictly Come Dancing, with a selection of retro routines and one stray man in the studio audience. Motsi Mabuse shouts every fourth word; Shirley Ballas thinks the word “umbrella” is four syllables. Brian McFadden says Westlife was one of the best parts of his life.
ITV1 shows It’ll Be Alright on the Night, which is like You’ve Been Framed for the medium of television itself. Hello, Fellini; hello, 8 ½. Gemma Collins watches as her husband crashes a campervan. Narrator Tom Allen plays himself, saying things like “I’d have stormed off for a restorative lapsang souchong” and “I’d forgive her if she was buying another fabulous blouse.” The night’s festive programming comes to a toothy head on BBC2 with a double bill of Jaws and a documentary about Jaws. This is another blast from the past – a commemorative effort for the film’s fiftieth anniversary – but it’s more fun to start thinking about Jaws as a Christmas film, the Three Wise Men clinging to their boat in divine pursuit of a shark-shaped star. The best fact from the documentary is that Jaws was nearly called Anthropophagus.
Katharine Hepburn screeches us awake on Boxing Day with Bringing Up Baby, which hits the right screwball tone for the cold winter but is too black-and-white for Christmas primetime. Channel 5, perhaps struggling with licensing issues, manages to fill up the entirety of a two-film morning slot with Cecil B. DeMille’s 222-minute-long Ten Commandments. Nostalgia on all sides: it’s a remake of a film from 1923, it features a motley cast of actors you’ll recognise from other genre pictures of the 1950s, and the events in it happen about a millennium and a half before the birth of Christ. (“Stone tablets,” croak the panel of Christmas Treats We Loved and Lost, who are still waiting in the ITN building. “We remember how sturdy they were.”) A day of talking animals, property shows, Christmas quizzes, and replays of things from Thursday.
On Channel 4 there is The Festive Pottery Throw Down. One imagines an argument in every television studio at least six months ahead of time: where will the Christmassy noun or adjective go? After undergoing militant-sounding “basic pottery training,” a collection of celebrities must construct the North Pole from clay. “Normally when I talk about pottery people glaze over!” says Tim Vine. The programme is peaceful with a very mild element of peril; you’re supposed to watch it while uploading unwanted Christmas gifts to Vinted, or recycling leftovers into a stew. You could be fooled into thinking you were still in 1977, waiting for Basil Brush to pop onto the tube as you digest slices of now-extinct turkey. Miranda’s Sarah Hadland sheepishly describes both her clay house and the present state of terrestrial Christmas television. “I started doing very detailed work,” she says. “And then it slipped into slapping it on in a slightly hurried fashion.”
[Further reading: Bridget Bardot did not ask to be forgiven]
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