Christmas 2011 TV Magazine Double Issues

They sometimes include both Christmas and New Year in the Double Issue. It depends on when Christmas falls. If Christmas is towards the start of the week (i.e Monday or Tuesday) they tend to feature Christmas in the first week of listings and New Year in the second week of listings e.g. in 2000 it was a 23rd December-5th January issue. Anything beyond about 5th January wont be featured in the double issue as they cant get it onsale as early as they wait to confirm listings for the first week of Jan and also a lot of the schedules are back to normal and feature new season programmes so some years for example we had Celeb Big Brother featured in the Christmas issue which was a programme starting a few days into the year.

I noticed down here most of the double issues were on sale yesterday (monday). Thats the first year in I don't know how long that they have been available in this area before the Tuesday morning. Perhaps I just went into the right shop who decided to put them out on display as some might get them delivered but hold back until the Tuesday which is the on sale date (if you ignore the "or sooner" bit)

Nice to see TV Easy featuring Corrie Characters on their double issue cover as well, unlike Whats on TV who feature Eastenders for about the 10th year running

It'd be good if they could some how manage to get Christmas & New Year in the same issue at all times by running editions that are longer than 14 days or maybe not running Saturday to Friday, but I'm not sure how this would work.

Xmas & New Year appear together 5/7ths of the time, it's only when Christmas & New Year is at the weekend when it doesn't. In 2012 it'll be Saturday 22nd December to Friday 4th January which might seem odd if new season programmes start on the 2nd. If it wasn't a leap year it would be the 23rd to the 5th which would be a bad date range with hardly any build up and then 4 days of new season programming.

That's right, although as you say it only went up to lunchtime so it wasn't that useful, and I remember some of the other channels' listings were slightly wrong as well. And indeed they did print Friday again in the next issue.

Occasionally at Easter in the monopoly days the magazines would sometimes print an abridged version of Good Friday's listings in the Easter issue in case you only bought that one for the holidays. And I have the 1989 TV Times where they print half a page of listings for Friday 22nd at the start, just so you can have the whole of the holiday period from the second you finished work in one issue.

A few years ago there might have been an argument for a double issue at Easter too when there really were quite a few specials airing - but now apart from the odd thing on Easter Sunday (if you're lucky) it's usually business as usual.