THE GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS TELLY PAST (part twenty)

“Dear Jim… Could you please fix it for me to finish this ridiculous series of articles before Christmas so that everyone can finally get on with their lives?” On Christmas Eve 1976, “Jim” was indeed “fixing it” for someone to meet John Inman, someone else to meet Rod Hull and Emu, and someone else to be a pantomime horse. It takes all sorts. The Christmas Radio Times that year featured “Good King Wenceslas” (twice!), as painted by Peter Brookes, and would have set you back a tidy 22p.

Christmas Eve morning included “The Great Grape Ape”, “Flash Gordon” (episode seven: “Shattering Doom”) and Tarzan and the Leopard Woman before a trip to Birmingham for the “Pebble Mill Christmas Special” featuring Acker Bilk, Dick Chipperfield and his Lions (in a TV studio???) and Roger De Courcey and Nookie Bear. After the story of the Danish cobbler “Hans Christian Andersen” starring Danny Kaye, “Barbar” went to America narrated by Peter Ustinov and Roy Castle Scrooged up for “The All Star Record Breakers”. After Jim did all that fixing we talked about earlier, Disney’s “Million Dollar Duck” quacked us on towards “The Father Christmas Affair” on “Are You Being Served?” before “Porridge”, “Kojak” and the “Mastermind” final kept everyone awake for “André Previn’s Christmas Music Night” and the Christmas Midnight Communion. BBC2, on the other hand (or should that be “on the other channel…?”) presented a film about the creator of Winnie the Pooh, A. A. Milne, “A Night at the Opera” with the Marx Brothers and a night at the (Australian) Ballet starring Rudolf Nureyev as Basilio in “Don Quixote”. This was followed by “A Visit from St Nicholas” (A poetry reading! In primetime!), some “Rutland Weekend Television”, “The Old Grey Whistle Test” featuring “The Rod Stewart Group” and another in that year’s “Christmas with Cagney” film season, “Love Me or Leave Me.”

Christmas Day started with “Sing Noël” (as opposed to “Avoid Noel” which was still a few years away, but, be warned, Noel is never far away...) and the day included such delights as a look at the celluloid careers of “Four Clowns”, Laurel and Hardy, Charley Chase and Buster Keaton. Brian Matthew introduced a “Holiday on Ice” and Noel Edmonds (told you!) and Dave Lee Travis presented the Christmas “Top of the Pops”. “Billy Smart’s Christmas Circus’ followed fifteen minutes of “The Queen” and then “Oliver!” filled the rest of the afternoon until Bruce Forsyth and another “Generation Game”, another “Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show” (the one with John Thaw and Dennis Waterman that led to a return match on “The Sweeney”) and the huge Christmas Night movie “Airport”. After that, there was only “The Parkinson Magic Show” and another Christmas Day was all but over on BBC1. The other BBC channel served up an afternoon of fairytales and Queens with “The Snow Queen” straight after the real Queen, and “Alice in Wonderland” facing up to the Queen of Hearts. After that they raided the archives of BBC television to celebrate “Forty Years” of British television and, after a story of “Survival in Limbo” (or rather in South Georgia, soon to become far less uninhabited and far more familiar in the early 1980s) and some carol singing, Cagney took over again to finish the evening as a “Yankee Doodle Dandy”.

Two days later, after another “Christmas Sunday”, an out of place Boxing Day brought us the usual morning programmes including “Flash Gordon” episode 9 (“Fighting the Fire Dragon”) and “Tarzan and the Mermaids” before a “Swap of the Pops” with Noel Edmonds (again!), some “Holiday Grandstand” with Frank Bough, and Disney’s “Babes in Toyland” before John Conteh on “The Superstars” and “Disney Time” introduced by the Goodies. After that, the gap between two movies at extreme ends of the scale, “Carry On at Your Convenience” and “Tora! Tora! Tora!” was filled by that year’s “Mike Yarwood Christmas Show”, still finding its way towards being on Christmas Day itself. “Parkinson’s Music” ended the day on BBC1, whilst BBC2 ended theirs as “Angels with Dirty Faces” after a three hour stint of “Moll Flanders” as played by Julia Foster, Englebert Humperdinck’s fairytale opera “Hansel and Gretel”, Peter O’Toole in “Goodbye Mister Chips” and a look at “The World of Blaster Bates”.

New Year’s Eve brought more Peter O’Toole to BBC2 in “Rogue Male” following John Wayne in “Stagecoach”, and ended its year with an “entertainment” by The Half Moon Theatre Company entitled “Vintage 76?” whilst the main channel made do with “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” and “Welcome 1977” featuring greetings from Kojak, Starsky and Hutch, and Petula Clark. Before all that, though, we had been exposed to “Tarzan’s Savage Fury”, Vincent Price as “Master of the World”, a repeat of “The Goodies and the Beanstalk” and “The Freddie Starr Show”.

Despite a look back upon the Coronation Day as an introduction to the Silver Jubilee year, New Year’s Day will I’m sure be chiefly remembered as being the day which introduced Leela to “Doctor Who” and somehow, chamois leather would never seem quite the same again.