From Bad To Worse (Christmas TV)

Member Name: meah

Product:	Christmas TV
Date:	30/12/03 (367 review reads)
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Who stole good Christmas TV? I'm sure it wasn't really as good as I remember it being when I was younger - my memory has filtered out all of the rubbish we must have got back then - but I can still recall enough to know that this year's offering has been terrible by comparison. BBC and ITV are locked in a game of chase the tail; it doesn't matter if something is good or bad anymore, just as long as it's cheap and somebody else has made some money out of it before. How else can you explain all those celebrity quiz shows, five heats of The World?s Strongest Man and New You've Been Framed?

Take out The Office, which stood head and shoulders above everything else, and there has hardly been anything original, let alone halfway decent, on the main two channels this Christmas. When Out Take TV and repeats of Airline get primetime 7.30 slots at this time of year then something is very, very wrong. Dragging Only Fools and Horses out again wasn't much better; the only laughs came from Trigger's trademark stupidity. Funny, but we were laughing at the same jokes ten years ago, about the same time as John Sullivan lost the ability to develop his characters. What was the point of Damien? Didn't Boycie use to be funny?

True, there have been some good films on over the past week: Amelie was a great choice for Christmas Day and I could happily watch Kes and Billy Elliot every single year (unlike The Great Escape), but where's the great comedy and original drama? Mayor of Casterbridge on ITV and The Office aside, everything else has been shunted on to BBC 2 or late night Channel 4. Most people have seen new films long before they get to terrestrial TV nowadays so surely the TV companies should be spending more time developing their own original programmes?


Part of the problem is the senseless rivalry between BBC1 and ITV1 over the Christmas viewing figures. They're so caught up in who got the top spot on C
hristmas Day that they don't seem to have noticed the millions who are switching off - even the top two or three programmes this year barely scraped past fifteen million viewers. As much as I hate to admit it, there was a time when I used to look forward to seeing the Christmas TV schedules, when it was an essential part of the festivities. Now I'd sooner sit through the Queen's Speech than the average evening?s entertainment.

The papers complain about repeats but they're nowhere near the worst of it. The TV executives obviously think that if you can't get away with putting the exact same show on time and time again then you just need to reheat it by making a celebrity / reality version, getting people who used to be famous to talk about it or adding it to some list or other. We had the 100 top film heroes and villains, the 100 greatest TV treats of 2003, the world's greatest bridges, best of programmes every other night, the 100 greatest musicals and anything else that could be stretched out over half a dozen commercial breaks, most featuring the same talking heads saying the same things between clips of the same programmes you've seen every Christmas since your first colour television.

Nothing beats reality TV though. We've done the format to death now - the normal people who replaced the professional actors are so boring that they've brought back the boring professional actors to impersonate normal people. So we get lots of once famous people who can't get any other work anymore appearing on programmes alongside 'real' people who can't get any other work anymore. It's surely only a matter of time before we get 'Animal Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?', 'Teenage Probation Officer Swap' or 'Sink Estate Mastermind'.

Short of asking Antony Worrall Thompson or Jim Davidson to write a celebrity dooyoo opinion, the only fitting way to end this is with a top five
list of the top ten Christmas
programmes. At least it won't take me long to whittle the choices down.

1. The Office

2. Amelie

3. Kes

4. Billy Elliot

5. Arena: Alec Guinness

If it's any consolation, digital TV wasn't much better. Thank goodness for sleep, alcohol and DVD players.

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