Only the opening titles will be festooned with tinsel
Hullo there!
And welcome to the 23rd annual Christmas Creamguide. As in previous years we’re coming at you in two parts over two days, and we’re pleased to be joined again by the gentlemen from the Filmguide fireplace. And look, it’s already Christmas Eve, so we’d better get a shift on.
CHRISTMAS EVE
BBC1
01.00 La La Land
Young Hercules and Gwen Stacy’s coffee and jazz-fuelled romance hits the rocks as they start arguing about who asks the most pointless hypothetical questions on Roobarb’s DVD Forum while a load of people in the background keep jumping out of their cars and going full tilt THEYYYY GOT THE MUS-TARD OUUUUUUUUT!. Ideal spinning-your-date-around-during-the-closing-credits cinema fodder, but you might want to clear a bit of space in the front room first. No cameo by Lee Mavers and ‘Cammy’ either.
BBC2
09.15 King of Kings
‘J Christ, joiner and handyman. Chairs fixed while you wait.’ For maximum effect, get a class of seven-year-olds to sing the first word of this film’s title, leaving the final two to be awkwardly stammered out by the smallest, most nervous child in the group. There, isn’t that a festive noise?
13.40 North By Northwest
Time for some classic Ian Hitchcock not actually that mild but not in the sense that they mean mild nowadays mild peril as Cary Grant flees an approaching plane in glorious VistaVision – essentially just a slightly wider screen version of regular movie format – like some kind of crazy reverse version of Fantasy Island only with slightly less embarrassingly tailored suits. Which is as good a moment as any to ask whatever happened to Just Ask For Diamond, a late eighties hit Brit family movie that wasn’t starring Dursley McLinden and some kid who didn’t really do much else as a pair of teenage private detectives caught up in some kind of shenanigans involving the ‘Maltesers Falcon’ and which later spun off into the Children’s ITV series The Diamond Brothers: South By Southeast, which did even include some variety of ‘Hitchcock cameo’ gag but unfortunately nobody can now remember what it was.
20.10 Dad’s Army
21.40 The Fast Show
Two nice bits of classic comedy to sandwich the new Mortimer and Whitehouse special on a night when you’ll probably be searching for the least objectionable shows for everyone to watch. Turkey Dinner is all present and correct and then it’s back to Christmas 1996 for The Fast Show. In recent years this series doesn’t seem to have got the credit it deserves with people suggesting it heralded a new era of comedy where catchphrases took the place of jokes, but it was always a million times cleverer than that and as well as the recurring characters there were umpteen wonderfully daft one-shot sketches in each episode as well, and when it began we were blown away by its invention. The biggest surprise now is how hugely expensive it clearly was.
22.40 Top of the Pops
Well, who’d have thought the two longest continually running fixtures on Christmas Day would end the same year? Because, as our fun fact always had it, as The Queen took a year off in 1969, Pops had actually been on the big day for longer, not missing a Christmas Day engagement since 1967… until now! To be honest, it had been drifting back towards the morning for a few years, and if they wanted to axe it they could have done it years ago, but this is a real jolt, now in the old Val Doonican slot on Christmas Eve and on a different channel to boot. Looks like as well the model for this one is Noel in the office in 1978, Clara Amfo and Jack Saunders spending much of the show linking pre-recorded performances with just a couple of acts popping in for some small-scale acoustic sets. So all change, but doubtless it’ll reflect the year’s pop in no-nonsense fashion, and if you’re that devastated you can always watch it on iPlayer before your dinner tomorrow.
ITV
14.35 Santa Claus: the Movie
What with the Christmas ‘ish’ starting so close to the bone, we’re robbed of the chance to recommend present-wrapping movies – those ideal flicks to have on in the background while you make with the tags and tape. So, if we may, we’d like to draw your attention to the two Paddington films that are on BBC1 slap bang in the middle of the afternoon on the 22nd and 23rd – the perfect time for, and the perfect accompaniment to, a two-stage bout of preparatory festive object concealment. Leave the wrapping until Christmas eve, however, and you’ll be enrobing that Lynx Africa gift set to the beat of this film, which we doubt Asda will be filleting for an ad campaign any time soon.
CHANNEL 4
17.25 Home Alone
Kevin Something Or Other But It’s Definitely Not Arnold enlists the aid of a Dutch gabber slash hardcore techno duo to repel a pair of comedy wiseguy burglars apparently intent on pilfering some empty Coke bottles and the July 1989 issue of Playboy as well as leaving the taps running, presumably in a bid to enrage Martin Shaw in the TV-am ad breaks in 1986. Wildly amusingly energetic holiday fun for all the family in a movie where nobody ever seems to be able to work out whether it’s ‘problematic’ or not but they’re not entirely sure of what the reason for that is either. Honestly, have none of you noticed the almost literal elephant in the room in the second one?
22.40 Four Weddings And A Funeral
Hugh Grant does the I Gets Me Brain Medicines From The National ‘Ealth-inspiring higgledy-piggledy chatup line about how At Number Sixteen Is A Record By Wings while Andie MacDowell sort of allegedly half smiles a bit and a career that began with Radio 3’s The Atkinson People reaches a pivot point and commences the slow but relentless slide towards that one about going back in time to go to a slightly more expensive restaurant and The Boat That Bastard Bastarding Bastard Bastard Rocked. It’s good, but it’s no Bernard And The Genie.
CHANNEL 5
11.30 Scrooge
13.25 Planes, Trains and Automobiles
15.15 Pearl Harbor
Three films in descending order of Christmassiness and, perhaps not coincidentally, quality. First up, it’s A Sim (you can tell by the way the lips look all funny when he speaks) in the best ever adaptation of Dickens, and yes, that includes the Muppet one and whatever modernised one they’re doing this year, where Scrooge is a social media platform owner whose electric car breaks down in the middle of Utah and is visited by three GIFs or something. Then it’s the best of those ‘it’s really dark when you think about it actually’ ’80s festive comedies, as we document in the special Christmas edition of our podcast, Some Candy Talking. Then… well, Pearl Harbor happened in the run-up to Christmas. You could say it was the John Lewis advert of its time.
BBC4
19.30 Christmas with Val Doonican
Delighted to see this show get its first repeat for a couple of years, and in pretty much the perfect slot, albeit probably a few hours too early. As regular readers will know (yeah, we do this every week for some reason), Val’s Christmas Eve shows in the eighties were the most perfect pre-bedtime shows with his good humour and warm personality making for a wonderful atmosphere, light entertainment at its absolute lightest. This is the one from 1986 that’s been on a couple of times before, but it’s got pretty much everything you’d want, including a bit of comic business with Dennis Taylor, a guest appearance from Jan Leeming serenaded on stage by the BBC News theme and of course the wonderful opening sequence in Val’s actual house. ‘Tonight for me is no jaunt or spree, as I’m off to work at the BBC!’
Talking Pictures TV
01.15 Confessions of a Driving Instructor
Here’s something that gave us pause. We’ve been – as we believe the children say – riffing on the Confessions films since 1998. Which means our earliest bon mots on the subject are as far in the past today as the first film in the series was from the point we started writing about it. Nearly a quarter of a century each way. Shudder. And in that time, my, have we gone round the houses. From early, easy sniggers over the dated sexism, to a sort of semi-reappraisal of the early films and books as a more authentic working class comic voice than the Carry Ons, through wistful poetics about the hypernostalgic hues of the drab Eastmancolor film stock, to the social media-fuelled discovery that Robin Askwith is a sound bloke – if there’s a half-digested piece of media studies mulch that can be thrown at the Confessions films, we’ve thrown it. So, rather than musing on this film’s historic value as a hauntological gazetteer of pre-Thatcherite Borehamwood, or offering an Afrofuturist interpretation of Antony Booth’s relationship with Nicola Blackman, we think the time has come to let Tim, Sid, and, er, unidentified John Junkin character coast out the remainder of their pop-cultural dotage undisturbed. Just let them be. Although Bill Maynard and Doris Hare’s junk-strewn abode does present an interesting deconstruction of the conservative working class pop-cultural historicist…
BBC Radio 2
13.00 Pick of the Pops
Happily we’re not getting any kind of special here that requires Gambo to play album tracks or, even worse, US hits, even though it’s Christmas Eve, and just a double bill of regular charts. Not that we want to plan out your entire holiday for you, but we reckon this first hour will be pretty great accompaniment for anyone driving home for Christmas this afternoon, as it’s an entertaining 1983 which we reckon is great fun for all the family. Then it’s 1995, the most excited we’ve ever got about the Christmas number one to the extent we binned off Wallace and Gromit on Christmas Eve to listen to the reveal of the chart, only for Mike Flowers, despite Kevin Greening’s enthusiastic patronage, to stall at number two behind what we think is the last example of a Christmas number one being a record that just happened to still be at number one at Christmas rather than expressly released for the purpose.
BBC Radio 4
10.30 Soul Music
A suitable song for the last in this series, I Believe in Father Christmas. One of the best things to come out of prog rock, we reckon, and Pete Sinfield, who co-wrote it with Greg Lake, is on hand to discuss it, as well as Bob Harris who thinks it’s fantastic and other people who find it hugely evocative.
CHRISTMAS DAY
BBC1
15.00 The King
New monarch, new festive traditions – not just a new face on screen at three o’clock for the first time since the fifties, but he’s not on after Top of the Pops either. No doubt Charles has had a lot on since he took on the job three months ago, but given when his mum started doing these she did them live, we’re sure he’ll manage. In the last few years the Queen’s message was the most watched thing on Christmas Day just on BBC1, never mind adding together all the other channels, which possibly says more about the rest of the schedule than any special interest in what she had to say, so no doubt the press will be wondering if the new host will keep ratings buoyant. There is one other innovation this year, as for the first time in a long time it’s simultaneously broadcast on BBC2 as well as ITV, because this is the first time it’ll be shown with signing at the same time rather than a few hours later, which is a pleasing step forward we think.
00.05 When Harry Met Sally
Meg Ryan and Harry Connick Jnr join forces for an MTV Unplugged-presaging cover of French Kiss by Li’l Louis in a textbook example of one of those movies that felt much more taboo and racy in those more innocent pre-Internet days than it could possibly ever do now. File alongside Cosmopolitan, Kentucky Fried Movie, Barbara Windsor’s Book Of Boobs (but definitely not Robert Morley’s Book Of Bricks), the underwear pages in the Grattan Catalogue, that Girlschool album where they were in PVC gear on the cover, ‘counts as one choice’ book club ad titles with warnings about explicit content and Richard Herring trying to get his grubby teenage rocks off to Adolescent Sex by Japan. Except that this is actually well worth revisiting. Well, we can’t speak for Richard there.
BBC2
11.35 White Christmas
Time for the seasonal uncancellation of Bing, although of course we’ll be standing out in the kitchen while this is on, snootily huffing that the original Holiday Inn is the far superior film. Next week, incidentally, sees the 80th anniversary of the most threadbare piece of BBC Crosbiana, when the Home Service broadcast a specially edited-for-radio version of Bob ‘n’ Bing’s Road to Morocco, with the visual business explained by bridging narration from Eric ‘Crossroads’ Fawcett. We can only imagine the awkwardness. ‘And then, ladies and gentlemen, a camel turns to the camera and vouchsafes to the audience that this is, and I quote, ‘the screwiest picture I was ever in’. The listener will appreciate that this is most unlikely behaviour for a camel and it is from thence that humour arises.’ Well, there was a war on.
18.35 Dad’s Army
19.15 The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show
As required, though while Dad’s Army is a familiar edition from 1976, it’s a bit of a lesser-spotted Eric and Ern, from 1972, which doesn’t appear to have been shown on the Beeb for absolutely ages. Seemingly it’s not seen very often as it’s not written by Eddie Braben – that said, he didn’t write 1976 either – and the big guest is Glenda Jackson who’d already been on the show before to much acclaim. So it’s not quite vintage Morecambe and Wise, but that probably makes it all the more interesting as there’ll likely be some stuff here you won’t have seen for a long time.
20.25 Tina Turner at the BBC
21.25 When Tina Turner Came To Britain
22.25 Tina Live!
Christmas night is Tina night, a new doc sandwiched between two repeats. Should be quite an interesting doc, as it happens, highlighting her strong links with the UK. Indeed, her hugely successful comeback in the eighties, which has long been cited as a model for a veteran star looking to reinvent themselves, was absolutely made in Britain with Martyn Ware and the British Electric Foundation on production duties. That wasn’t her only link with the UK, though, and in this programme we’ll also explore her first visits in the sixties and the world premiere of her musical in London in recent years, with contributors including regular collaborators PP Arnold and Arlene Phillips.
ITV
22.45 Love Actually
Presumably plonked here as some variety of ‘heartwarming’ token concession to the ongoing debate over whether the Happy Christmas Ange-esque overlong tribute to the 1981 Grange Hill Christmas Extra actually legitimately constitutes a Christmas Film or not, although they don’t seem quite so keen to afford this degree of passive-aggressive side-of-fence-coming-down-on to Iron Man 3, Die Hard or Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2, which you will only ever find crammed in last thing at night after Graham Norton, lobbed around digital channels like that episode of Friends where they can’t stop playing catch or Chandler might fall over or something, and on a torrent site uploaded by some bloke with a weird Policeman Alien In Sunglasses emoji that makes you feel too uneasy to download it respectively. And does this have a battle for control of a flying suit of armour? No it does not, although it does have a joke about not being able to tell which is which out of Ant and Dec. A joke that only works if you are completely unable to understand that they look entirely different to each other and always have done. Honestly, if you want to guffaw about Byker Grove graduates being indistinguishable from each other, Gill, Winston and Frew are RIGHT THERE.
Sky Arts
20.15 Elvis: That’s the Way It Is
Who’s the most Christmassy of the Big Names in Pop? The Beatles, with their festive fan club renditions of Can You Wash Your Father’s Shirt? Bowie, of Snowman intro fame? Dylan, with that festive LP a couple of years back? Slade, for obvious reasons? We submit it’s the Big Man himself, as he’s been integral to festive telly for as long as we can remember. From Boxing Day screenings of the Comeback Special to mini-seasons of the very worst of his films draped across the perineum when Channel Four’s rights to the Godzilla sequels expired, and this grand look at the much-derided Vegas era providing a soundtrack to hectic Big Day preparations round the in-laws’ house, it’s always been A Very Pelvic Christmas as far as we’re concerned. Sadly, nobody’s seen fit this year to schedule Double Trouble, our fave Elvis movie, being the one where he ‘goes’ to ‘England’ and gets chased about by The Wiere Brothers, who were to The Ritz Brothers what the Ritz Brothers were to The Marx Brothers. Uh, thankyounotverymuch.
Talking Pictures TV
13.45 Christmas with Cliff
17.00 The Footage Detectives
Mike’s been such a good boy this year that he’s been allowed to bring a friend along for Christmas, and of course it’s his old mate Cliff, for a suitably chummy chat about his life and presumably his film career. Then Mike’s back later as not even Christmas Day can stop this show, though good luck getting the rest of your family to bin off Strictly so you can watch clips of the making of the Carry Ons at Christmas.
BBC Radio 2
07.00 Cliff Richard’s Hits Playlist
10.00 Junior Choice
16.00 Most Streamed Number One Christmas Records
The usual eccentric selection of festive shows on the Light Programme, albeit this year without Paul O’Grady who flounced off in a rather sour fashion a few months back. You’d think that if you could hear the majestic Little Town, as we’re now seemingly contractually obliged to call it, anywhere this Christmas it’ll be on the first show, then later on it’s Anneka returning with another baffling Junior Choice special, like the annual for a long-folded comic. And then after lunch it’s Steve Wright counting down some pretty familiar fare, though it’s Christmas number ones of all kinds and not just Christmas songs, so we’ll get The Human League and the PSBs in there too.
BOXING DAY
BBC1
16.40 Ghostbusters
GOWFT-BUFFTHRZ – HAK HAK HAK HAK HARHHHHHHHHHGMFH. Although it’s always fun to big up the all-female reboot – partly on account of the fact that it instantly touches a very raw nerve with a small but vocal faction of men who are at great pains to tell you at great length that they didn’t like it because they just didn’t like it and that it doesn’t have anything to do with them being women it’s just because they just didn’t like it see, and partly because it really was really really good and it’s a genuine shame that they didn’t get to make more (and we’re now looking forward to the responses to THIS generously pointing out that you didn’t like it because you didn’t like it) – it was still interesting to see the Ghostbusting that started it all on cinematic re-release earlier this year, apparently taken from an upgraded version of the original UK release print with a couple of very slightly different edits in some scenes and a rougher earlier mix of the theme song, neither of which anyone apparently even noticed. Unless they did and they just don’t like them because they don’t like them.
BBC2
12.25 Escape to Athena
14.20 The Heroes of Telemark
Nazi Roger Moore sends David Niven out to buy some tasteful black-and-white posters of shirtless men cradling babies, but Telly Savalas and Claudia Cardinale divert him into Woolies instead, and he comes back with a brace of chimpanzee-on-a-potty two-sheeters. Then we’re off to Norway, as Richard Harris persuades Kirk Douglas to stop the Nazis getting their hands on his game-changing new technology: a TV information service comprised of large, blocky graphics offering cheap holidays in Sharm-El-Sheikh. Featuring Roy Dotrice as The Man With the Long Chin.
CHANNEL 5
09.35 Breakfast At Tiffany’s
Something of an early slot for a movie that you once had to beg to be allowed to stay up to watch ‘the first five minutes’ of, and how much of Mickey Rooney’s audition for the Ross Home Takeaways advert will remain intact in any timeslot anyway is open to question, but nevertheless this was always a well-deserved festive season staple and your heart cannot help but melt when Paul and Holly’s plan finally comes together in the belting rain, presumably with Oran ‘Juice’ Jones just out of shot. Though what they did with that Hong Kong Phooey mask is anyone’s guess. Tim-berrrrrrrrrrrr!
11.50 My Fair Lady
Shouty spoken-sung polite flirting with added grammar in one of those musicals with Quality Street people that were always on in the background when you were being nagged to ‘give everyone else a turn’ on Big Trak on Boxing Day. Not to be confused – as so many did – with TV’s Foxy Lady starring Lorraine Chase, which in turn was not to be confused with TV’s Flying Lady starring Frank Windsor, which in turn was not to be confused with TV’s Full Stretch starring Kevin McNally, which featured a cameo from David Bowie, who was clearly watching one Boxing Day while waiting for Big Trak to bring him his Oblique Strategies cards as he later adopted the lyrics of Get Me To The Church On Time for… well, it wasn’t Baal’s Hymn, was it.
BBC4
21.00 Robbie Coltrane at the BBC
For all his exceptional work, Robbie did have one unfortunate encounter with festive television, where on New Year’s Eve 1989 he was invited to perform on the Beeb’s Hogmanay show live from the centre of Glasgow, doing some new stand-up material in the build-up to the bells. Unfortunately he’d written ten minutes but went on late and ended up still doing it at midnight, to much criticism in the Scottish press (‘BUNGLING BEEB MISS MIDNIGHT’), but he was doing it right next to a bloody big clock and you’d think he’d have the wit to have stopped. We don’t suppose we’ll see that here, but there’s plenty more to celebrate the wonderful career of one of our most versatile performers. We first saw him in the early eighties when he got mixed up with the new wave of alternative comedy and made memorable appearances on the likes of The Comic Strip, before a reinvention in the nineties as one of our most celebrated straight actors, winning awards by the truckload. He was great value on chat shows too, as he talks us through his career in his own words.
21.45 Richard Wilson Remembers… Tutti Frutti
22.00 Tutti Frutti
For a long time, this was a series that was hugely fondly remembered but was seemingly terminally unrepeatable and unreleasable as it was stuffed full of commercial music, but those issues have been ironed out in recent years and now it’s been out on DVD and had a couple of repeat runs, and here’s another one over the next three nights. Robbie Coltrane very much the star, of course, but loads more of the cast went on to do great things, most obviously Richard Wilson who still reckons it’s one of the best things he’s ever done on telly and reflects on it here.
TUESDAY 27th DECEMBER
BBC1
10.00 Missing Link
Ooh, we got excited for a moment. This is a decent-enough stop-motion family thing from a few years ago, but it shares a title with a bonkers pseudo-documentary about the titular man-ape having misadventures and getting off his box on fermenting berries, played by a bloke in a gorilla suit and narrated by Michael Gambon. It’s scientifically accurate, but that doesn’t stop it being daft. Anyway, this isn’t that, so stand down.
11.30 The Never Ending Story
One of those ‘charming’ youngsters in epic sword and sorcery quest type stories that adults always insisted children liked even though they didn’t, only beefed up with state of the art but not quite as state of the art as The Box Of Delights ‘video effects’ for a post-Return Of The Jedi world yet somehow coming across as even more twee than Caravan Of Courage. It does, however, come equipped with a mighty theme song from the Now That’s What I Call Music 1-straddling Limahl, provoking many a you had to make your entertainment in those days-conscious youngster to hold their noses and go ‘schWSSSSsss’ in a sort of budget-free emulation of the phasing while listening to the Top Forty – because, let’s be honest, nobody ever actually ‘played’ The Never Ending Story. They didn’t get Ellis, Beggs And Howard in to do the sequel though.
15.45 Ghostbusters II
The streams are well and truly crossed in a sequel that for once everybody asked for but nobody involved seemed to have given any thought to before the cameras started rolling, once universally recognised as not as good as the first one but now partially rehabilitated thanks the rise of box set culture and the associated near impossibility of getting one without the other. Theme song by Bobby Brown at peak That Photo Of The Bloke Who Took His Forage Cap Off And His Hair Had Stayed The Same Shape In Going Live’s Scare Cuts coiffured humourless Smash Hits-spoiling irritance, and if you thought that was bad, get a load of the whining satchel of processed cheese who makes a cameo in the video.
BBC2
13.30 Hello, Dolly!
15.50 Funny Girl
Double Babs! Technically these are being shown in the wrong order, but that’s exactly what we’re here to help with. First up, Streidjjsand plays a character several decades older than her physical age, Michael Crawford flails about, Walter Matthau does the Manly Dance, Louis Armstrong turns up for literally an afternoon’s work, and the lavish sets find themselves repurposed for use in Butch Cassidy, The Towering Inferno and, er, Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Oh, and 20th Century Fox go and spend a whopping 25 million on the thing, thus making any kind of profit generation all but impossible, thus hastening the end of the movie musical gold-rush sparked by The Sound of Music. After that, or rather a year before that, the relatively modest Funny Girl was the film that famously got Streisand her first Best Actress Oscar, in a very rare tie with Katherine Hepburn’s turn as Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter. You can see the Academy’s quandary. Babs doing Don’t Rain On My Parade in purple tights, or Katy riding bare-breasted to Damascus in a white snood? You can’t legislate for that sort of thing.
CHANNEL 5
09.20 Murder At The Gallop
Ham Ahoy! Yes, it’s the rip-roaring opening instalment from Margaret Rutherford’s Marple Cinematic Universe – which also incorporated a couple of lesser-seen Hercule Poirot efforts – with THAT franchise-straddling theme tune fully intact, which for once really do stand up to how unexpectedly bonkersly verge-of-bursting-out-of-the-television brilliant they seemed when you saw one of them in that weird gap between See Saw and the afternoon news round-up when BBC1 ‘officially’ didn’t show any programmes. Expect thrillingly knowing overacting, exuberant breakage-adjacent party scenes and postmodern references to ‘a Miss Agatha Christie’. Stitch that, Ken Loach!
ITV3
09.50 Carry On… Don’t Lose Your Head
11.40 Carry On Doctor
13.30 Carry On Behind
15.20 Carry On Up the Jungle
17.10 Carry On at Your Convenience
Well, if the chuffing Coca-Cola lorries now count as a beloved Christmas tradition, let’s raise a tiny cheer for the glorious festive frolic that is ITV3’s Carry On marathon. This year they’ve chunked them off into blocks of five, naturally skipping the grim and dirty ones right at the end of the run, but also the early black and white ones, presumably in case someone under the age of forty happens to switch on and undergo a catastrophic neurological collapse as a result. (It’s a crying shame that the seven monochrome episodes, easily among the best of the bunch, have fallen victim to modern day greyscaleophobia, but be honest, can you imagine the pure horror of a colourised Cabby? Eurgh.) To help you decide whether to devote your precious holiday time to them, we’ll adopt the established scoring system of Par for the Course, Rotten and Actually a Good Film. So this afternoon’s tranche runs: good, OK, OK, terrible, and rounds off with… well, we’re under no illusion that Convenience is anything less than top drawer entertainment, especially Sid and Hattie’s domestic interlude, but in the current climate, the fact that it’s the cinematic equivalent of those ‘Cards on the table, I’m a train driver on £545,000 a month’ Twitter accounts does tell against it a tad. So let’s split the difference and call Head the best. Although… doesn’t that have more or less the same message? In this essay we will…
BBC Radio 2
21.00 Radio 2 All-Stars
The Beeb’s centenary celebrations were all good fun, we think, and for giving us Tony Adams dancing a Charleston to the Grandstand theme tune on Strictly it was absolutely worth doing. One of the lower-key commemorative shows was here on the light programme where Dermot O’Leary got together three generations of Radio 2 presenters to reminisce about their careers and compare and contrast the way they’ve worked over the years. You can hear the first of those, with Tony Blackburn, Zoe Ball and Rylan, again on Boxing Day, and over the next three nights are some more, tonight with the dream team of Ken Bruce, Claudia Winkleman and Trevor Nelson, then tomorrow it’s Jo Whiley, Bob Harris and Elaine Paige, and on Thursday Jeremy Vine, Sara Cox and Michael Ball.
WEDNESDAY 28th DECEMBER
BBC2
09.35 The Third Man
Here, under protest, is beefburgers. Great big giant of the cinema Horson Welles tries to invent The Prisoner two decades before Patrick McGoohan with a wild tale of expressionist Cold War intrigue and a zither-twanging main title theme that never fails to have someone repeatedly asking if you’re ‘absolutely sure’ when you immediately and correctly identify it in a pub quiz. What’s more, having made it, the cuckoo clock-decrier resolutely refused to become involved in the cash-in spinoff television series and left it to Michael Rennie and Dr Smith off Lost In Space to do the That Was The Week That Was-curtailing honours. Even Steve Guttenberg stuck around for four Police Academy films before bailing!
13.30 South Pacific
It doesn’t look like they’re showing the full three-hour edit, unless it’s due to that thing to do with film running faster on television despite actually running slower which John Craven was forever trying to explain to Noel Edmonds in response to some smartarse who had written in to say R2D2’s bleeps had been a semitone lower or something, but this is a veritable one-musical Jane McDonald Boxing Day Spectacular of belt-out-while-dancing-backwards-in-the-kitchen standards including Some Enchanted Evening, There Is Nothing Like A Dame, Younger Than Springtime, I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out Of My Hair and Happy Talk, which is as good a moment as any to mention the absolutely CORKING Bluray of The Young Ones masterminded by BBC archive-delving megastar Richard Latto which includes, alongside some actual literal deleted scenes and associated studio footage scraped from manky old VHS tapes – not to mention the cast’s earlier in-character appearances on shows like Boom Boom Out Go The Lights and Fundamental Frolics – new cast and crew commentaries that include more than a few allusions to Captain Sensible having a bit of a dust-up with the rest of The Damned over his Rogers And Hammerstein-reviving chart-topper. Anyway South Pacific is brilliant and you should watch it. And then they went to Thames at the end.
CHANNEL 4
15.05 Dad’s Army
We do like the way the mainstream of online archive TV discourse has evolved (those mind-numbing Spangle-picturing numbers accounts aside) from ‘tee hee, wasn’t all old telly rubbish?’ through ‘actually, all old telly is wonderful, no need to criticise it in the normal sense, sentimental soppiness will suffice,’ to ‘it had many strengths, but my God, Dad’s Army didn’t half have some weak endings for a lot of their episodes. Some didn’t even finish on a gag. They just stopped.’ And here’s the film to prove that whatever a BBC half-hour can fail to do, ninety-five Columbia minutes can’t quite manage either. Yes, it’s a nicely downbeat note of ‘there’s still a war on, you know, and much worse is to come,’ but… well, maybe British film comedy wasn’t ready for such a paranoid ellipsis on top of a cliff.
18.50 Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle
They’ve got fun and games! Bit of a throw of a dice to reboot a much-loved classic family comedy movie as a putative blockbuster action franchise, but for once this actually worked, with the gameplay cunningly updated to an outdated Cybo Razor Cut-era console rather than bang up to the minute techbro app alienation and a cast who delight in ridiculousing it up as video game characters made real or is it the other way round, and we’re honestly not just saying all that because of Karen Gillan as Ruby Roundhouse. No supporting short called Mr Brownstone, sadly.
ITV3
10.05 Carry On Girls
11.50 Carry On Cowboy
13.40 Carry On Henry
15.25 Carry On Matron
17.10 Carry On Camping
Nobody likes Girls, but it does have Robin Askwith. Cowboy is well-regarded, but not by us. Henry is pure cobblers, but it does have that weird Guy Fawkes bit. Matron is the fag-end of the hospital cycle, but it does have a pregnant Bernard Bresslaw. And of course, Camping has *that* scene and the oddly malevolent hippie-baiting finale, but on the plus side you’ve got Butterworth’s immortal Joshua Fiddler and the divine Betty Marsden. So… it’s a draw.
More4
21.00 Best Year Ever
Not much of a clue what this will entail, but we’ll stumble through a billing for it anyway. Remarkably I Love The Seventies is now older than all of the years they featured when they made it, so it’s OK to get nostalgic about it and all the other shows in the great nostalgia boom at the turn of the century like Top Ten. There probably were too many of them, but when they were good they were really good and we saw so much great stuff on them for the first time. Sadly the rise of YouTube in recent years means that wonderfully researched programmes like those – there are still a few, like Guy Garvey’s From The Vaults – are now rather crowded out by shows flinging together YouTube clips in the most appalling quality, which we could do ourselves. Hard to know as yet what camp this will fall in, the first of four shows seemingly promising a bit of an I Love-style romp through the fads and fashions of a particular year, starting with 1978.
BBC Radio 4
11.30 Oti Mabuse’s Dancing Legends
Dancing on the radio still seems a pretty bizarre concept, but Oti’s now midway through her second series where she’s joined by performers to pay tribute to their hoofing influences. In this one she’s joined by Patti Boulaye to celebrate the career of Dougie Squires, a familiar face on the credits to some of the most famous Christmas shows as choreographer of The Young Generation. It’s true to say some of their routines look pretty comic these days thanks to their wild wigging out, mostly delivered at thunderous speed, and they’re often dug out to laugh at the excesses of seventies television, but it’s worth remembering they were a breath of fresh air compared to the rather staid and formal dancing that had previously dominated TV, and he deserves credit for making dances involving two dozen or more performers work on the small screen. About time he got his due, then,
THURSDAY 29th DECEMBER
BBC1
20.00 Antiques Roadshow
25 years ago or so this time of year would see the annual Antiques Roadshow kids’ specials, very much the equivalent of last day of term as everyone brought in games and the experts got to wear their play clothes. Now here’s another special about kids’ toys, but it’s adults only as people bring their childhood items to London’s Museum of the Home to explain why they’re still so special and the experts trace the history of a century of kids’ crazes. Also joining them is Jonathan Ross, who can be a bit wearing on telly but is certainly more tolerable when he’s talking about something he’s actually interested in, which is the case here as he shows off his enormous toy and comic collection, which is one of, if not the, biggest in Britain.
BBC2
22.55 Desperately Seeking Susan
Always a bit of a baffler to remember that when this originally came out, Madonna still hadn’t quite got her feet under the table as a pop phenomenon and the majority of her hits were the Gambler slash Angel ones we don’t mention now for some reason, while everyone at school affected to fancy Rosanna Arquette to be ‘different’, little realising that they all actually did fancy her more instead. It may not have been quite the movie that you were imagining back when you were too young to get in to see a ’15’, but both it and Madonna’s acting chops were vastly better than anyone expected, which does not explain why she promptly went on to make Shanghai Surprise and Bloodhounds Of Broadway. Oh well, there was better to come. Also, that doesn’t look like any jacket either Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin ever wore. One of Iron Butterfly, at a push. Maybe.
00.35 Truth Or Dare
Let’s have the proper title please – In Bed With Madonna, football, Truth Or Dare, muggy bonehead. By this time, Madonna hadn’t just got her feet under the table but her arse out on every single other item of furniture imaginable, but even so this racy fly on the wall mockumentary expose of the Blond Ambition World Tour of Smash Hits Giant Size Poster confiscated at school notoriety was like a spectacularly dull edition of Play Chess compared to what was to come the following year. Scandal aside, its most significant legacy – aside from inspiring Bob Mills to shrug at some local news footage at a million o’clock in the morning on ITV – was that it somehow convinced Blur that what the world needed was a tour film all about them drunkenly pissing on their own feet and very very slowly writing Colin Zeal.
CHANNEL 5
11.20 You’ve Got Mail
Or ‘You’ve Got M-at-il’, as everyone on a first date nervously trying to make their prospective paramour chuckle called it back in the days of dial-up modems and Netscape 4.5, when TV Cream was still called the ArkHive and was just a handful of Fred Harris jpegs and a list of entries calling Joe 90 a ‘specky twat’, even when it was one about Afternoon Plus or something. There are legends that if you click aimlessly on a dark and moonless night, you can still end up alighting on Steve Berry’s ‘Awaiting Shipping’ Page. A fascinating glimpse into the long lost prehistory of cyber-dating, when there was scant risk of someone matching with you on Bumble, getting you to pay for dinner and drinks all night and then mysteriously disappearing into the post-digital ether. Thanks, Tom Hanks. Thanks.
ITV3
10.20 Carry On Loving
12.05 Carry On Dick
13.50 Carry On Cruising
15.35 Carry On Again, Doctor
17.15 Carry On Abroad
Chances are you’ve never seen Loving in its entirety. It’s probably the least shown of the colour Ons, with the exception of Emmannuelle. And it’s a total mess. Sid James attempts to play against type as a mild-mannered marriage bureau consultant, but gives up halfway through. Terry Scott gives less a performance than a ninety-minute ‘phwoooooargh!’ All the men have their trousers pulled down to reveal outsize comedy underwear. It ends with a custard pie fight, which is more than Dr Strangelove did. You chicken, Kubrick! As for the rest, Dick stinks; Cruising is absolutely lovely and almost too classy for the series and Esma Cannon is a delight; Again, Doctor is what it is and Abroad is probably the most clipped and quoted of them all. You can come late to this one, you won’t have missed much.
Sky Arts
21.30 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony
We always hear about artists being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame but we’ve never been very sure where it is or what happens when they’re in there. It’s in Cleveland, Ohio, and while it seems a bit of a pointless exercise, seemingly it’s a prestigious enough honour for everyone involved to turn up and perform when they get in it. It’s also prestigious enough for this programme to go on for a whopping four and a half hours, as they induct a motley selection of acts this year from Pat Benatar to Eminem, via Dolly Parton, Lionel Richie and Duran Duran, though unfortunately the planned reunion of the classic line-up of the latter was foiled as Andy Taylor isn’t very well.
BBC Radio 4 Extra
06.30 Bernard Who?
One of the saddest deaths of this year was that of Bernard Cribbins, undoubtedly one of the nicest and most versatile performers of all and all the sadder because it felt like he was immortal. He would have been 94 today so that’s a great excuse for this channel to devote the entire day to the many faces of the unfeathered Cribbins, from comic performer in sitcoms like Mind Your Own Business to serious actor in period dramas like Don Quixote, and of course as a wonderful storyteller. Cribbins himself never saw it as a proper job, though, and was never happier when he was off-duty birdwatching or fishing, as also featured here in an episode of the seventies nature series Sounds Natural. And in among all the repeats, Radio 1 DJ turned archive comedy expert Wes Butters will be exploring Cribbins country in locations such as Oakworth station.
FRIDAY 30th DECEMBER
CHANNEL 4
12.30 Bend It Like Beckham
Immensely likeable ultimate evolutionary offshoot of that weird late nineties moment where everyone liked football in a harmoniously democratised just-another-thing fashion – yes, that lasted, didn’t it – in which Dr Rasgotra From ER and Someone Who’s Not The Back Of Natalie Portman’s Head enjoy light-hearted escapades in proving that girls can kick a ball around too, and in a staggeringly unexpected turn of events for a British movie of the era it’s got Atomic by Blondie on the soundtrack. Still, better that than England United.
BBC4
19.00 Top of the Pops
20.00 Top of the Pops
We’ve had some fairly familiar Christmas shows over the past week or so, but here are two less regular repeats (but still no sign of 1979, alas). It was a bit of a shame when they stopped doing two Christmas shows a year, because while the first show on Christmas Day was by its very nature packed with big hits and big names, the second show a few days later could cast its net a bit wider. This second show from 1984, the last year they did it, is the perfect example, as Lenny Lenny Len, who was a Radio 1 DJ at the time, introduces the likes of Bronski Beat, Joe Fagin and Neil. Then it’s the Review of the 80s from 1989, with Gambo and Mike Read swapping stats in between clippage and studio performances, although the latter is a bit limited by who was available, so it suggests some of the most pivotal tracks of the eighties are two sixties covers and A Winter’s Tale by David Essex. Silver Dream Machine we could understand.
ITV3
09.45 Carry On Jack
11.35 Carry On Follow That Camel
13.25 Carry On Screaming
15.20 Carry On Cleo
17.10 Carry On Up the Khyber
Jack has never sat right in the series, has it? Cribbinsed-up to the hilt, which is of course marvellous, but the period trappings are done slightly too well. There’s no feeling that a removals lorry or TV aerial could sneak into shot at any moment, as there is with Henry or Dick. It’s as if Bernard’s innate brilliance has permeated every facet of the film, overriding the default Carry On clumsiness and cheapo corner-cutting. If only Phil Silvers had had the same effect on Camel. Then come the three entries that are most often cited as the best of the series, assuming we’re talking about a pundit who’s at least smart enough to dismiss Camping out of hand. Screaming is, of course, a major divergence from the standard model, but it has the courage of its convictions, and Fenella remains immortal. Cleo has more funny production anecdotes attached to it than funny scenes, but it’s funny enough. And Khyber has Roy Castle, Windsor Davies and Butterworth’s Strawberry Mousse. Ladies, we have a winner. Hang on, what was the point of all this again?
Talking Pictures TV
21.05 Witchcraft
22.45 Bloody New Year
00.40 Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things
Three very cheap horrors of the type that should really only be experienced in the company of several large men from Milwaukee. First, Lon Chaney Jr unearths a coven in a film that was entirely shot in a fortnight and gave away free ‘witch deflector’ badges to patrons. Then Norman J Warren, of – cough – Inseminoid fame, takes the standard gang of hapless kids off to Barry Island Butlins to be picked off by imaginative if cash-strapped hallucinogenic set-pieces soundtracked by the power balladry of Strawbs splinter group Cry No More. Finally, Children… is the sort of full-on anti-budget horror spoof that’s several shades dumber than the material it parodies, a flatly-shot tale of a bunch of insufferably arch theatre students mucking about raising the dead, to the accompaniment of a sub-Radiophonic dirge of a soundtrack composed by one Carl Zittrer, later to provide the memorable soundtracks to, er, the Porky’s franchise.
And that’s that!
… for now at least, but we’ve still got new year to get on with, as we carry on right until 6th January. So join us around this time tomorrow for another week of TV, radio and films, including some real oddities. See you then!
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George White
December 22, 2022 at 4:28 pm
There was only one 60S Poirot movie with Tony Randall plus an unrelated half hour TV pilot with Martin Gabel as Hercule.