I love Christmas television, the linear kind, and I don’t know if that’s because it’s not prone to fast evolution – fast anything – or despite that.
For sure, broadcasters are taking the Casablanca approach to this year’s selection, in that they’re showing Casablanca (RTÉ One, Christmas Eve, 1.50am, and BBC Two, St Stephen’s Day, at the more sensible hour of 12.45pm) and just generally rounding up the usual suspects.
I don’t ask for much. In recent years, as I’ve settled into the festive fold of communal television viewing, the first saviour of the schedule for me tends to be Christmas University Challenge. There isn’t a show in the history of broadcasting more reassuring than Christmas University Challenge.
The annual string of specials featuring high-achieving, fame-adjacent graduates — “distinguished alumni” — brings certainty to an unpredictable world, not least because at the end of each episode, cheerful presenter Amol Rajan can be guaranteed to ask the sheepish losers, “did you enjoy yourselves?”
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The delight and relief of Christmas University Challenge is that the questions are so much easier than they are on the non-festive editions. No tumbleweed here. No feeling of utter stupidity. If you don’t know the answers you can guess, the confidence boost of alcohol kicking in before its memory-dulling effects can take hold.
Quizzes are the opposite of the daily predicament of journalism, which is — or should be — much more about being curious about the things you don’t know than showing off what you do.
But taking out a small bank loan for a research copy of the Radio Times (€9.08) has raised a whole raft of tricky starters for ten about Christmas television
This can, however, prompt constant self-doubt. By the time I get to Christmas Eve, I can barely assert my own name with 100 per cent conviction. Seeing these luminaries struggle to recall the Christmas number one from 1996, I realise some of the important stuff is still in there.
But taking out a small bank loan for a research copy of the Radio Times (€9.08) has raised a whole raft of tricky starters for ten about Christmas television, the main one being this: if there’s a dearth of new television hits from year to year, what will audiences get to be nostalgic about in decades to come?
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll definitely be watching the new festive special of BBC comedy Outnumbered, but erstwhile toddler-wranglers Pete and Sue are grandparents now? I feel so old.
Both this year’s Christmas Day tentpole Gavin and Stacey — definitely the last one, they say — and the less hyped Outnumbered were first on air in 2007, which makes Mrs Brown’s Boys (2011-) a relatively fresh face on the block and The Young Offenders (2018-) positively pubescent.
Speaking of The Young Offenders, RTÉ One is showing the new special on Christmas Day, just five days after it goes out on BBC One, which is nice, and if it’s a touch confusing for Irish viewers who haven’t watched the preceding fourth series — which is on RTÉ Player but hasn’t yet aired on a linear Irish channel — then not to worry. Not everything makes sense at this time of year.
In 2012, under the headline ‘Festive TV schedules haunted by Ghost of Christmas Past’, I noted that old analogue heavyweights BBC and ITV were serving up their most-watched dramas
Like a budget-light commissioning executive, I’m going to do some rehashing now. In 2016, charting the collapse of festive TV ratings, I wrote that splintered audiences might not be coming together for Christmas with quite the same groggy enthusiasm any more. The linear landscape had already turned frosty.
In 2012, under the headline “Festive TV schedules haunted by Ghost of Christmas Past”, I noted that old analogue heavyweights BBC and ITV were serving up their most-watched dramas — Call the Midwife and Doctor Who for the BBC, Downton Abbey for ITV — as Christmas Day centrepieces. This wasn’t a complaint.
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But 12 years later, what’s on? Um, on BBC One, that would be Call the Midwife and Doctor Who (starring Irish actors Megan Cusack and Nicola Coughlan respectively), while ITV — remember ITV? — has got the 2022 film Downton Abbey: A New Era.
The only thing that feels new about the present era is that there’s no multipart BBC mystery series debuting on St Stephen’s Day. Instead, there’s a second episode of Call the Midwife. Again, I love this much-misunderstood show. But it all feels a touch threadbare. It seems ominous that the big British beasts have pulled back from debuting starry prestige dramas at Christmas, once regarded as the perfect time for rolling them out to the Milk-Trayed masses. Come back over-egged takes on Agatha Christie with daft new endings, all is forgiven.
It’s old news now, too, that the streamers are going all in. Netflix, riding high through December thanks to fabulously Christmassy spy entertainment Black Doves, has chosen December 26th as the launch date for the second run of its biggest ever global series, Squid Game — because nothing says dystopian survival thriller, after all, quite like Christmas.
The cloak-swept reality show — a blissfully novel-seeming format compared to most of the rest clashes with Christmas University Challenge, which makes me grateful for the fact I possess a set-top box with a recording function
The New Year’s Eve linear schedule, meanwhile, carries traces of last Christmas’s streaming success, the Prime Video film Saltburn, with its soundtrack winner, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, wisely invited to do the musical honours for BBC One.
The next day, there’s the third series of The Traitors to start devouring on BBC One. The cloak-swept reality show — a blissfully novel-seeming format compared to most of the rest — clashes with Christmas University Challenge, which makes me grateful for the fact I possess a set-top box with a recording function and not one of the new “streaming TV” products that ironically give Irish viewers less choice over how they watch.
But Christmas is not the time for dwelling on stressful industry developments and the false promises of technology. It’s a time for keeping your head held high, avoiding the news (there isn’t any) and remembering that if, for some wild reason, the questions on Christmas University Challenge didn’t suit you, you still enjoyed yourself.
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