Christmas TV 2020

Though the overnights are less and less relevant thanks to non-live viewing, is it surprising that there's been some decline when you can tailor your Christmas day entertainment as much as you can these days?

I particularly liked the section on Channel 5's obsession with Yorkshire and the royals in the latter part of It's Clarkson on TV last night.

I think Channel 5 got cold feet and decided to stick on the 22nd December which TBF was a Tuesday where the first series aired back in September. It did very well for Channel 5.



That would have died a death, it lost viewers over the three nights when it aired last year.

This. And the comparisons between James May’s and Paul Hollywood’s visits to Japan. I could see the format working and potentially coming back.

I didn’t watch any Christmas Day telly, this year had the worst schedules I can remember. BBC1 last year had a couple of decent films - Indiana Jones series I hadn’t watched in years that I enjoyed. This year it’s been Netflix and Disney+

Call The Midwife and Mrs Browns Boys again sir? No thanks.

Epic Gameshow!

I didn't enjoy Blankety Blank as much as I was hoping I would, though I can't tell if that's because of Jimmy Carr talking too much and trying to take over the show. He seems to not like being a guest and wants to present anything he's on. I also though Bradley saying the questions over and over didn't help things either. Especially as there was nothing said in between and the questions themselves were somewhat longwinded and could have been reduced to a simple two line entendre. Not sure about the rule change so there is a head to head at the end if the contestants didn't score the same. Seemed unfair on the one that got the higher score, they should automatically get to the final like before.

On a side note, I was watching the Christmas special of Tenable and Warwick Davis seemed to be off, like he was recovering from an illness or something, he just didn't seem his usual chirpy self. I hope everything is OK with him.

Agreed that Blankety Blank wasn’t as good as I expected. But I liked Jimmy, felt like he was doing the heavy lifting for the panel. Emilia & Amir seemed so out of their depth, it could’ve benefited from some bigger characters really.

Interesting you call out Indiana Jones as a highlight amongst the BBC's repetitive schedule, when in fact this year is the first time since 2012 that that series of films hasn't appeared anywhere on the BBC at Christmas...!

You used to get 20m+ watching BBC1, but that was an era when BBC2 and C4 would show foreign films, religion and the fine arts all night (in 1993, both channels got a zero rating on Christmas Night), ITV could be hit or miss and multichannel was an irrelevance to most of the country. For most of the audience, it was BBC1 or nothing most years.

But now, you have a million or so watching Dad's Army on BBC2, a few million watching Home Alone and Gogglebox on C4, a million watching an old film on C5, a million watching the Bond film on ITV2, and so on, all of whom back in the nineties might have plumped for Birds of a Feather, even if they didn't particularly like it. When Ground Force and Changing Rooms were on Christmas Day BBC1 twenty years ago they got a bigger audience than most of the stuff this year. Were those shows better than Strictly or Midwife?

I'm certain if you looked at the total TV audience for Christmas Day now compared to twenty or thirty years ago, it would be pretty similar. The difference is, it's now split across four hundred channels, not four.

But Gavin & Stacey managed 11.8 million for the overnight ratings last year.

It suggests that there is a sizeable audience who are looking for something 'special' to watch but are being underserved? give the public something genuinely 'special' and the audience is clearly there for it.

Clarkson on TV far more entertaining than I thought it would be.