Since when did broadcasting a programme on New Years Day (as opposed to any other day of the year) constitute it being "hidden"? 🤨🤔
Well indeed, New Year's Day is a bloody big telly day as well, given that it's a night virtually nobody goes out (I know that's much difference to any other day this year) and so it's always home to loads of high profile programmes, it's probably a better day than Christmas Day.
TVam used to be live on Christmas morning, I seem to remember it being quite good, with some lots of guests and a bit of a party atmosphere. I think the presenters brought their families in too.
Live TV is lacking on a Christmas day, of course around the time that TVam were live in Xmas day a few hours later so was Noel on the other side
I don't think TV-am was live on Christmas Day very often if at all, because as Morning Glory points out, in the early days there was a union agreement that they wouldn't do live shows on Sundays and public holidays, so Frost on Sunday would be recorded on the Saturday afternoon (which Mike Hollingsworth refers to as "the most apalling union agreement for a live television company"). There was a bit of a notorious example of that backfiring on Sunday 1st April 1984 when they did an April Fool about Albert Tatlock from Coronation Street, and Jack Howarth who played him had actually died overnight. In Morning Glory Mike Hollingsworth said they recorded the Christmas Day 1984 show on the afternoon of 15th December, after much debate with the unions who said they couldn't record a three hour show in three hours, with Hollingsworth saying they did a three hour show in three hours every day, live.
Presumably in later years that union agreement was changed, certainly after Bruce Gyngell rode a coach and horses through it, but in the later years they pretty much just showed cartoons on Christmas Day.
In 1993, the famous ITV Christmas where they put all their big shows out in the weeks before Christmas to get the advertising revenue and just showed back to back films on Christmas night, it was a Saturday and they showed What's Up Doc, The Chart Show and Movies, Games and Videos in the morning like every other Saturday. What's Up Doc was certainly pre-recorded, because Live and Kicking was also on that morning and they both featured Take That, with Live and Kicking repeatedly pointing out they were the only show that was live and the only show with Take That live. The previous year Anne and Nick had been live on BBC1 on Christmas morning.
It's funny that we're all used now to osentensibly live shows like Lorraine and Loose Women regularly being pre-recorded, but back in the eighties and nineties, other than Gone Live which was explicitly billed as such, I think most people just assumed all shows like this would be live. I assume looking back at them now they might look quite obviously pre-recorded but we weren't to know. The Talking Telephone Numbers breakdown is a great example, it absolutely blew me away to realise most of the show was pre-recorded, but from a current perspective, why wouldn't it be?
