Memories of Christmases on the box… part one
 |
| 'Mellowing over a yuletide noggin with your mate'… Bob and Terry get festive, but not very, in 1974. Bob will, eventually, make it home on Terry's forklift truck... |
You know it's getting near Christmas when the BBC start dusting off their festive idents. What was it last year? The anthropomorphic sprout? (Can you anthropomorphise a vegetable, anyway?) Either way, the appearance of pirouetting penguins between programmes – or whatever else auntie's graphics department can come up with – has become one of telly's festive traditions, even if they have tended of late to use the same ones several years running (a sure sign that belts are being tightened within the corporation). But when did it all start? Well, my diaries offer us a clue.
'BBC world is a Christmas pud' says my entry for Christmas
Eve 1977, proving that the tradition goes back
at least that far. In fact, this may well have been the first time it
happened, as my earlier diaries make no mention of such a thing, and
it’s exactly the kind of trivial observation I would have been sure
to note down for posterity. Anyway, here we are in posterity and what's changed? Well, the graphics are of a standard that would have left us speechless back in the 70s, and are starting to appear weeks before the day itself. Back in
the 1970s, however, as in so many other aspects of life in general and
Christmas in particular, we favoured a more ascetic approach: the
festive ident appeared on Christmas Eve and rarely made it past
Boxing Day, when normal service was resumed and Newcastle play
Carlisle… (sorry, just lapsing into a bit of festive Terry Collier there). It’s
like every other aspect of Christmas... it just gets earlier every
year. And... perhaps a little less imaginative? Or is that just my
Scrooge cynicism showing through?
1978’s diary reports that auntie’s
jolly new festive tradition was being upheld and indeed, arrived a
day early, on the 23rd, in the form of a ‘silly Santa
face.’ I’ve no record of 1979’s offering, but by the following
year, with VHS at my disposal, I captured the festive ident ahead of
repeats of Fawlty Towers and the above mentioned episode of
The Likely Lads (lacking its Whatever prefix for this
seasonal outing). The idea of stuffy old auntie dropping its formal emblematic globe in favour of a pudding, bauble or whatever was a corporate nod of goodwill to all mankind, and these early attempts were of crude and unsophisticated design, taking the form of three-dimensional models, not unlike the kind of tat that the Blue Peter
team were given to knocking up at this time of year. They were
filmed in real time, rotating, dangling or whatever, since TV graphics and computers as
we now know them simply did not exist. This was a world of rub-down
lettering, cardboard cut-outs and advent crown knock-offs.
As to the programmes themselves,
barring Christmas night itself when the big guns were all rolled out,
the schedules of the 70s exhibit an almost Dickensian austerity. A
few choice movies would be peppered across the evenings between
Christmas and New Year – The French Connection was always a
safe bet, with its wintry New York setting (and a sighting of a
street corner Santa), and I still have a VHS recording of Midnight
Cowboy from its broadcast on December 21st 1980; but
festive trimmings could be thin on the ground. I still remember the
dismal BBC 1 schedule from Christmas Eve 1975, dominated as it was by
Disney’s The Great Locomotive Chase. What’s Christmassy
about that? Prior to that, we had Blank’ll Fix It (name now
excised from history), and later in the evening, a festive stir of
Porridge, but all told it was a dreary line-up. There can’t
have been anything better on ITV, either, or I’d have switched
over. Bob Ferris sums it all up in that Christmas edition of The
Likely Lads when he’s trying to remember last year’s
festivities: ‘the Great Escape was on, wasn’t it? It usually is.’
1976’s diary entry (written in
multicoloured felt-tip pen... don’t ask) informs us that Christmas
Eve’s big viewing events again all came courtesy of auntie: an Are
You Being Served Christmas special , Porridge (The
Desperate Hours – the festive spirit scarcely lifted by the
austere prison interiors) and that year’s Mastermind Final
(it had started so it finished). For me, the most interesting aspect
of that year’s Christmas programming was the inclusion in the
morning schedules of the original Flash Gordon serial from the
1930s, which my dad had frequently told me about. Now, at last, I was
able to see it in all its fizzing, low-tech
sparklers-up-the-arse-of-rocketships splendour: ‘Give him
everything he wants except his freedom,’ orders Emperor Ming as Dr.
Zarkov is forced to work in his laboratories. He might have added:
‘or his trousers’ since, for reasons unexplored, the unfortunate
Doctor was required to perform his duties wearing what looked like an
oversized black nappy and no strides, showing off Frank Shannon’s
hairy legs to terrifying effect.
Flash Gordon serves as a good
illustration of a televisual tradition that is now in terminal decline... that
of wheeling out a bunch of nostalgic good stuff for the duration of
Christmas and the New Year. A season of Laurel and Hardy movies, for
instance, or, best of all, the definitive Beatles extravaganza, as
presented by BBC2 in 1979 – the only occasion on which all the
available movies have been shown in a single season on British
television. Even Magical Mystery Tour and the Shea Stadium
concert were present, as was Let it Be... for what would prove
to be its penultimate televised outing (it has not been seen on
British TV since Saturday 8th May, 1982). Beginning in
1974, episodes of Star Trek began to appear in morning and
lunchtime slots at Christmas under the banner Holiday Star
Trek (the title being a Radio Times conceit, as there were
no festive trappings accompanying the broadcasts). For the record,
the first of these was the classic The Enemy Within, and its
screening on December 23rd of that year was my first look
at Star Trek in colour – a rented colour set having arrived
in our house that November.
What else went to make up a typical 70s
Christmas on the box? Well, you could always rely on Top of the
Pops to present a compliation of the year’s hits on Christmas
Day afternoon, usually with a second installment before New Year.
1971 saw the first in what would become a seasonal tradition of
presenting one of the year’s Doctor Who stories in a single,
complete episode. The Daemons was the first story given this
festive refit, with the five-part story neatly condensed into ninety
minutes, losing some of the often extraneous padding from which Dr.
Who invariably suffered. Mercifully, the idea of doing a bona
fide Christmas episode had been shelved after an experiment generally
regarded as a misfire – 1965’s The Feast of Stephen (a
comic interlude in the middle of the epic Daleks Master Plan).
When William Hartnell turned to camera to salute everyone watching at
home, he more or less guaranteed that there would be no more
Christmas Who for another forty years. And a good thing too, if you
ask me…
End of part one…
Now watch a Christmas commercial for Woolies (you need to skim over the uploader's rubbish intro):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSFWDh9n96c
No comments:
Post a Comment