THE GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS TELLY PAST (part fourteen)

As they used to say, “Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be” so I’m wondering whether this wander through the archives of yesteryear which is proving so fascinating for me isn’t necessarily all that interesting for anyone else. Not so much the “Ah yes, I remember that” as “Will you just shut up?” Nevertheless, I am nothing if not persistent (if not belligerent) and today we are going to revisit the Christmas of 1982 when your Christmas and New Year Double Issue of the Radio Times would set you back exactly 50p which included, absolutely free, a cover illustration by Mark Reddy featuring a Christmas galleon.

This was one of those rare years where Christmas Eve landed on a Friday so, not only were we straight in with the Christmas TV listings without the days of preamble, but the holiday weekend stretched right through to the following Tuesday. Do not worry, oh faithful long-suffering reader, I’m not going to go and change the format this late in the game. We’ve been only considering Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day in our endeavours so far, alongside New Year’s Eve and Day of course, and so it will continue. Even I know that there are limits to people’s endurance, including my own.

Happily, because of this anomaly of the calendar, this particular Radio Times included an extra day’s listings, so we can still see that Christmas Eve included a “Tarzan” film with Johnny Weissmuller and “The Fall of the Roman Empire” and such old favourites as “Jackanory”, “Hong Kong Phooey” and “Crackerjack” were still there to entertain us, and that year it was the BBC’s turn to show “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”. After that we shared “Christmas with Terry and June” before a documentary about pantomime dames got a timely showing, leading nicely into “Carry On… Don’t Lose Your Head”. BBC2 repeated “K9 and Company” (a slight pause to remember our lovely lost Lis), showed us how they raised the “Mary Rose” that year, “Carols from King’s” and a dramatisation of “The Lost Voyage” of naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace before the Whistle Test which remained steadfastly Old and Grey at that point presented Elton John live from the Hammersmith Odeon before we travelled over to Russell Harty’s house in Yorkshire for a little party.

In those pre-Noel Edmonds years, Christmas morning was all carols, church services, parades in Hyde Park and, er, Raccoons on ice. There was a “Top of the Pops” Christmas Party at 2.00 PM and Jim was indeed still fixing it. The daytime movies were “Mister Quilp” and “International Velvet” and whilst BBC2 didn’t even start up until 2.10 PM (presumably because of being round at Russell Harty’s until all hours), it still had time for a “Horizon” special on “25 Years in Space” and Peter Sellers in “The Millionairess”.

Those of you who are following these tales of Christmas telly long gone might notice by now that the BBC1 Christmas Night schedule has a very familiar ring to it as “Jim’ll Fix It” is followed by “The Paul Daniels Magic Christmas Show”, “Last of the Summer Wine” (6.55 Christmas Day!), “The Two Ronnies Christmas Show”, Peter Ustinov in “Death on the Nile” and “Perry Como”. Heck, even “The Signalman” and “Christmas Night with the Spinners” get another airing. I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with this kind of cosy familiarity, but I did have to check that I hadn’t picked up the wrong copy of the magazine by mistake.

BBC2 meanwhile spent Christmas Night on the tracks of the wild otter in “The World About Us” before exploring “The World of James Joyce”, watching “Richard Baker’s Christmas Dozen” and presenting the first showing on British Television of Billy Wilder’s “Fedora”.

Because of the strangeness of the calendar that year, we have to skip a day to come to Boxing Day, which was on Monday the 27th and was mostly taken up by “Ben-Hur” and the 1976 version of “King Kong”. Stretching out the holiday to four days had obviously also stretched out the budget as much of the rest of the evening consisted of  the obvious filler material “The Funny Side of Christmas” and the feature film “Convoy” before ending the day with a Status Quo concert. BBC2  followed the Cricket highlights from Australia (sigh!) with the documentary about Werner Herzog “Burden of Dreams”, the “Marti Caine” show, the true story behind “Whisky Galore!” and Polanski’s “Dance of the Vampires”.

New Year’s Eve included a play for children “Ghost in the Water” which may or may not have traumatised a generation, “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”, which probably didn’t, “The Keith Harris Show” (no comment), “Dallas”, the feature film version of “Porridge” and “The Good Old Days” before John Craven and Paul McDowell had a Dickensian New Year party at St Katherine’s Dock in London. After “Paper Moon” and a look back at the operatic year of Janet Baker, BBC2 crossed the boundary of the years with “Hands of the Ripper” starring Eric Porter.

New Year’s Day saw another primetime outing for “The Magnificent Seven” after “Rod and Emu’s Saturday Special” started its New Series. Lenny Henry, Tracey Ullman and David Copperfield were still being “Three of a Kind” before Val Doonican popped up to “Ring in the New” having been moved from his more traditional Christmas slot. Then a new series of “Dynasty” began its run and then Dickie (Sir Richard to you...) Attenborough got to talk about making “Gandhi”. BBC2, meanwhile consisted mostly of its adaptation of the “Jane” newspaper strip, “The Royal Opera presents Falstaff” and another in a Kirk Douglas film season, “The Arrangement”, Even thirty years ago, the man was already legendary enough to have a BBC2 Christmas film season.

A Star! A veritable Christmas Star!