Highlights through the decades on the ultimate Christmas box
Date Published: 19-Dec-2012
There’s no way that every childhood Christmas could have been spent gathered round the single-channel telly, once again watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang after a big dinner – it just seems that way.For that matter, it might have been ET phoning home at a later stage or Willie Wonka drowning in a vat of chocolate or, as innocence gave way to acne, whatever was new from the James Bond stable.
Television gave us the chance to experience other people’s Christmases – Joe Dolan’s, Val Doonican’s, Tony Kenny’s, Dustin the turkey’s – on the understanding that their Christmases involved choirs of schoolchildren and fake snow in a show that was almost certainly recorded in early November.
Undoubtedly the Riordans featured in the evening time, with Benjy up to his old tricks and Tom accepting his fate as Mary poured out his dinner. Then we lost the plot and spent a portion of December 2008 watching Podge and Rodge’s Christmas Craic.
These days, it’s Coronation Street or Eastenders, where someone is murdered every year and the dinner for the entire Street or square either ends in tears or a massive fire.
There’s a children’s movie around tea-time – or what we tend to call the hour they get violently sick from eating sweets non-stop for a solid 24 hours – before you try to get them out of the way for an hour so that the older people can watch Gavin and Stacey or the Royle Family in relative peace.
Whatever was actually on the box, the reality is that television has always played as big a part in the events of Christmas Day as Brussels sprouts and the turkey.
For a while, Donnybrook was dominated by puppets, as Zig and Zag headed out of the Den to visit the North Pole – looking suspiciously like a backdrop rather than a shoot in a cold climate – or Dustin steering us through an excruciating Top ten of something.
Back in the day, if you were lucky enough to have relatives in multi-channel land – in other words, up North or in Dublin – you might get to enjoy Morecambe and Wise, Mike Yarwood or the Two Ronnies.
A few years on from that it was those Christmas specials of Only Fools and Horses, One Foot in the Grave, Last of the Summer Wine, the Office, Vicar of Dibley or Wallace and Gromit.
As soon as the double-issue RTE Guide came out, someone went through the festive season with a pen to mark all of their scheduled viewing, knowing deep down that they’d be lucky to get to see a quarter of it.These days, with the help of Sky+, you just have to look up the programme guide and record everything to your heart’s content, so that – even if you don’t get to enjoy the shows at the same time as the rest of the world – you can celebrate Christmas on the telly in your own time in the New Year.
And you’ll have plenty of time as well, because once St Stephen’s Day is out of the way, television land goes into hibernation – and you’ll spend the last week of this year and the start of 2013 watching ‘highlights of the year’.
That’s a euphemism for what we used to call either repeats or ‘cut and paste’ television, where you repackage the Olympics or the sports events of the year, so that those who work in live television can have the Christmas off too.
This year, RTE fans can look forward to spending the New Year in the company of Miriam O’Callaghan – now officially the woman who welcomes everyone and everything onto the telly, including 2013 – in the company of a feast of Irish talent.
For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.