THE GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS TELLY PAST (part three)

We move today to 1987, a time when the TV listings were still published in separate magazines, and the Radio Times was still using its familiar style of having a very traditionally styled Christmas illustration on its cover, although rampant commercialism has started to creep in with the offer to win a villa in the Algarve being emblazoned across the bottom of the page.

During the Christmas holiday period, children’s morning TV still features “Why Don’t You” and “Paddington”, and a series of ancient “Tarzan” films are being run each day.  Christmas Eve on BBC1 includes the traditional “Blue Peter” carols around the tree (the Mark Curry, Caron Keating & Yvette Fielding years) and “Rolf Harris Cartoon Time” before getting down to the serious business of “Jim’ll Fix It” (still going strong), a seasonal “Question of Sport”, another of the “best Christmases Walford’s ever had…” and “The Lenny Henry Christmas Special” featuring his Michael Jackson “Bad” impression. The big Christmas Eve movie is “High Road to China” and the evening finishes off with Val Doonican and then a first communion. I will have missed all of that as the world is now in the era where this young scamp was out drinking on Christmas Eve, but I’m sure somebody remembers these things.

BBC2, meanwhile followed “Carols from King’s” this year with a very highbrow mix designed to get everyone into the festive mood consisting of the story of a tragic love affair “Paper Kisses”, a wildlife film “Priddy the Hedgehog”, the “Antonio Stradivari Gala Celebration 1737-1987” and “The Bostonians”.

Christmas Day dawns and it is the era, for good or ill, of “Christmas Morning with Noel” and the “Top of the Pops Christmas Party” (which I always missed…) and the main feature film following “The Queen” at 3.00 and more Walford shenanigans was “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom”. Russ Abbot still had a Christmas show in those days, and this played out as a prelude to the almost classic BBC1 Christmas day line-up of “Only Fools and Horses”, “The Two Ronnies” and a brand new Joan Hickson “Miss Marple” adventure “The 4.50 from Paddington”, with new “In Sickness and in Health” and “Terms of Endearment” rounding off the evening.

Again, the BBC2 alternative is very classical: “La Traviata”, “White Nights of Dance” (Lenigrad ballet – no Brucie in sight), and the “Amsterdam Christmas Concert” alongside documentaries on Mother Theresa and Greta Garbo and the jolly little movie “The Story of a Recluse”.

The BBC1 Boxing Day hangover rather naturally includes “The Great Escape” (Huzzah!) but the evening is all “Blankety Blank”, “Hi-de-Hi”, “Bob’s Full House”, “Paul Daniels”, “Bergerac” and Agatha Christie (Peter Ustinov in “Evil Under the Sun”), whilst BBC2 follows “Oliver!” with the ballet “Cinderella” and the J.B. Priestley play “When We Are Married” before starting its Garbo season.

New Year’s Eve still finds Walford in crisis “Fill it up Den, I feel like living dangerously” before a clip show of “Morecambe and Wise Classics” presented by Ernie Wise and more Agatha Christie (Albert Finney in “Murder on the Orient Express”) before the year finishes once more round at Albert Square, “’Appy Noo Year, yoo slaaag!” Dum, Dum, Da-da-da-da Dum!

BBC2 offered five hours of “The Old Grey Whistle Test” to compensate, although I suspect that most of their target demographic was standing around in a house somewhere holding a plastic glass full of cider and wondering where their life went wrong. I know I probably was.

New Year’s Day itself doesn’t appear to be all that memorable as 1988 dawns. Perhaps all the big guns had been fired in the Christmas skirmishes, although amidst the predictable mix of “Blankety Blank”, “The Two Ronnies” and “Wogan” there is the first showing on British television of “The Bounty” and an adaptation of the Ayckbourn Play “Way Upstream”, whilst much of BBC2’s evening is given over to Mozart from Covent Garden, and the movie “The Flamingo Kid”.