It’s fashionable to mock the Christmas TV specials of the past – so why can’t our broadcasters let go of them?
I took a look at the Christmas Day schedules on terrestrial TV around a week ago and as a curmudgeonly, grumpy middle-aged male, I couldn’t but help indulging myself in the familiar clichéd vernacular of “It isn’t like what it used to be.”
It’s a regular complaint amongst those of us of a certain age. The belief that the past was always better. But perhaps this time the point is all too valid. I can barely bring myself to explain in any kind of detail the parade of banal, hackneyed programmes and films that seem to indicate that the programmers from the big TV channels now seem to have literally given up the (Christmas) ghost. Normally, this might not seem important – after all, you probably don’t care very much about broadcast TV anymore in a world of streaming and physical media. But Christmas is the one time when you might have no choice – stuck at Christmas family events with people who tune in lazily to one of the three channels that were there in their youth and which they rarely venture past in the EPG even now.
BBC One – still the ‘main’ TV channel and most likely the one that you’ll find yourself stuck with at family gatherings – has a line-up of the usual bland suspects that have been interminably, lazily scheduled for years now on Christmas Day: Strictly, Doctor Who, Michael McIntyre, Call The Midwife, EastEnders and Mrs Brown’s Boys, with ITV’s lineup being even more unimaginative, clinging to a collective viewing past that no longer exists. I’ve been rather astonished to see Christmas viewing figures for EastEnders and Coronation Street in recent years; at their peak in the 1970s and 1980s, viewing figures of 20-30 million were not uncommon for soaps and other top shows, but now they are lucky if they can squeeze 5-6 million.
As if in admittance that the past was a better time and in the hope of recapturing former glories, on BBC 2 during the evening we have an old episode of Dad’s Army starting at 5.25pm, with Morecambe and Wise following with three programmes, starting with their 1971 Xmas Show, going on until 9pm. To think that someone earns a tidy sum for this sort of imaginative scheduling on the biggest day of the year. This lazy and nostalgic scheduling indicates that however much the Beeb wants to move on from the classic days of Xmas TV lore, they simply can’t. Will old episodes of Mrs Brown’s Boys still be watched in 50 years time? It seems unlikely. Ironically, these old shows are perhaps the only ones worth watching if you’re looking for a bit of festive cheer; and with a new generation of parents, if not grandparents, who are not old enough to remember these communal viewing experiences from the first time around, it’ll be intriguing what the viewing figures will be in comparison to BBC1’s repetitive lineup, one no more original despite being made up of new productions. Will younger viewers, forced away from the options of streaming for the day, be persuaded that this is what Christmas TV should really be about, despite the fact that virtually all the stars of said classic shows died two, three or more generations ago?
The state of modern TV – something emphasised at Christmas but a year-long problem -may be down to a paucity of talent, or simply that any available talent is now too thinly spread in these days of multichannel mass media. It may be down to broadcasters obsessing over demographics rather than viewing figures, or simply having never been a part of the world when the nation would stop to all watch the same thing on Christmas Day. Arguably, the last example of a truly communal Christmas TV viewing experience was the three Only Fools and Horses episodes in 1996, with massive viewing figures in the 20-30 million bracket watching the central characters finally become millionaires. It would’ve been an apt way to finish both the long-running series and the departing vestiges of analogue TV, but the show became part of the lazy scheduling itself, being brought back a few Christmases later after the Beeb suffered from disappointing viewing figures for other shows in the years after. It was something of an anticlimax, vainly attempting to revive past glories, with the Trotters losing said millions – a desperate plot shift and a downer that killed off any festive cheer.
The Christmas of 1977 may have represented the peak point for the ‘golden age’ of mass-viewership TV, with Bruce Forsyth and The Generation Game, followed by The Mike Yarwood Christmas Show, concluding with The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show, the last show they made for the BBC. The Radio Times had one page devoted to said shows in its Christmas edition that year, augmented by large photos of the main participants, perhaps unconsciously signalling that this was the end of an era for family-orientated mass entertainment programmes. Shortly after this, the highlight of Christmas Day schedules would shift from light entertainment to especially shouty and hate-driven episodes of the major soaps – one of the supposed classic moments of Christmas Day broadcasts is some petty criminal handing divorce papers to his wife. Tra-la-la-la-la.
46 years on, the viewing figures of these family shows have become a matter of conjecture: the claims of 27-28 million for Morecambe and Wise have been revised down to around 21-22 million in recent years, with Mike Yarwood thought to have had a slightly higher viewing figure beforehand. I’m rather cynical at such revisions; how can anyone be so certain that viewing figures for a particular programme were higher or lower on a particular evening many decades after they were broadcast? It feels more like a curiously determined attempt to belittle the significance of these shows in a world where such viewing figures are unimaginable – though 21 million is still a staggering number of people that Call the Midwife or Michael McIntyre will never come close to matching.
I remember watching that night’s entertainment myself, as a young boy still at primary school having and having a lovely family Christmas with my parents and grandparents; these shows were the icing on the Christmas Cake. Yet it was probably the last really happy Christmas get-together I experienced on a family and television level; Eric and Ernie departed the BBC just a few weeks later, with their work at Thames TV showing signs of repetition and creative exhaustion, and being increasingly affected by Eric’s declining health (he passed away far too young in 1984 after a third heart attack). Both Forsyth and Yarwood also defected to ITV, and for them too, the glory days were over.
On a personal level, my grandfather was diagnosed with cancer the following year and died in the spring of 1980. It was the end of an era in many ways – in a weirdly symbolic moment, Charlie Chaplin died on Christmas Day 1977. The past is a golden time for everyone, a period without the concerns of adulthood or the horrors of the modern world (though the 1970s were hardly years of innocence for anyone who wasn’t a kid) and it is one that the BBC keeps harking back to in a way they never do for other decades – there was certainly something about the 1970s that lingers as the peak of Christmas TV entertainment, no matter how many modern fly-by-night comedians mock it on TV shows that no one watches. As much as broadcasters and critics like to claim that we are in a new Golden Age of quality TV while sneering at the past for politically incorrect at a time when the sensibilities were very different or for having lower production values by not using technology that didn’t exist at the time, the BBC seems haunted by the 1970s at this time of year, perhaps acknowledging the Xmas TV of the present will never again be able to compare with its past in terms of mass appeal or – dare we say -cultural staying power.
JONATHAN HAYWARD
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