Your views on the Christmas Day & Boxing Day Telly

Only Fools and Horses - the ending was nowhere near as good as the original ending.

Watched World Idol this morning - not bad and quite interesting from a production perspective, but it didn't feel like a big show.

Creature Comforts - class!!!

Didn't see any of the soaps. Re: ITV soaps - it's only been the last ten years or so that Corrie and Emmerdale have been shown on Christmas Day - ITV used to pull them on the day (apparantly). I think EastEnders has been shown on Christmas Day for longer, as the Dirty Den/Angie divorce show was shown around 1986.

The BBC won the ratings battle, but I do kind of feel they win it by default, as last nights offering were not brilliant - another EastEnders Xmas Day ending and another Last Ever Only Fools and Horses.

Also taped the Christmas Truce documentary on Five - a programme I would recommend to anyone.

I think the highlights of the BBC's Christmas season is The Office (which BBC2 should have had the honour of screening IMO), while ITV1 have alot of drama premieres over the next week. And if you watch C4 for 20 minutes or so, you might just catch one or two trailers for the 100 Greatest Musicals.

So what for Christmas 2004. Hopefully alot more effort - especially from BBC1. With Christmas Day on the Saturday, we will also get Holiday Monday and Holiday Tuesday, plus an extra Bank Holiday on the Monday after New Year (as around the Millennium).

Personally, I think the BBC1 should give EastEnders a rest and put Harry Potter on around 6pm, but I can't think of anything to fill the Only Fools and Horses slot. ITV1 should try a soap sandwich technique by squeezing a big programme between Emmerdale and Corrie - perhaps World Idol 2.

While if C4 want to screen 100 Greatest programmes virtually everynight around Christmas, can we have 100 Greatest Christmas Moments?

Also, a bit more effort around New Year by all concerned would be nice. It's certainly been worse this millennium than the last. C4 used to have a New Year special every year, but have hardly bothered since 1999/2000.

I loved what all of the broadcasters did in 1999 to mark 2000, it was great, and there was stuff to watch through the night. Mainly the biggest breakfast ever for me!

In that case, maybe they should rename the show " Only Fools Flog Dead Horses " ?

Perhaps. I know people will pull out viewing figures and the undeniable fact that it was the highest rated programme on TV yesterday, but that's rather more because of the timing and packaging of the programme.

The christmas day audience is in general more one of people seeking familiar friends to put on whilst slumping down in front of the TV (with a significant proportion of the population intoxicated to varying degrees) and half watching what's in front of them (indeed, on christmas day we even record things we are watching live, because we'll usually need to watch them again later on to take them in). People therefore watched only fools because it was only fools. If they decided on a change of plan and instead of a christmas trilogy packaged this same material as a series of 8 half hour episodes shown in the autumn season of 2001, I wouldn't expect it to be anything like as succesful, and I do believe there would be a noticeable decline in ratings as the series went on; it certainly wouldn't match the ratings OFAH used to get in it's heyday.

Maybe that was fine for the purposes of bringing in the ratings over the past 3 christmases, but I don't feel it's been at all good for the show in general. When christmas 2001/02/03 are just distant memories and the trilogy has just been added to the list of ad nauseum repeats on UK Gold, how will they stand? Not very well I feel.

OFAH was allready brought out of retirement in 1996 for it's conclusion (it ended regular production in 1991, and only had a single christmas special between then an 96). And it was given a well written and pretty much final sendoff. That was destroyed 5 years later by the advent of a dripfed 3 year trilogy of episodes (afaik, all these episodes were shot in 2001, apart from perhaps a part of post production, that 2003 copyright date in last night's episode meant nothing). Apart from the ruination of the original storyline, I don't even think that they were particularly good, with two of the cast members missing, the remaining actors looking visibly older even though the characters don't appear to have aged, and last nights second last ever episode was I feel the weakest of the lot.

As I've said, treated as a series of one off specials these might have worked, but in years to come when they are going to come at the end of a non stop chronological run on UK Gold, I rather feel that the series will be perceived as going out with more of a whimper than a bang, and the 1996 trilogy will now sit very oddly within the rest of the series, being final yet not.

Should the BBC have done this for the sake of ratings chasing on christmas day which they undoubtedly could have attained with a rerun of an old christmas special anyway? No, I don't think they should have.

No one could probably care what I thought, but I'll say anyway.

I watched... Millionaire Christmas Special, Coronation Street (first time since Richard Hillman died, annoyed the family by asking who everyone was), World Idol, Creature Comforts, ITV News on Christmas Day, and today I watched The Rugby World Cup review, ITV News, The Grinch, Coronation Street (first time since yesterday) and am watching Poirot.

I haven't watched Millionaire for ages so it was all new and exciting to me again, and I enjoyed seeing the celebrities I saw on there, so I enjoyed that.

Corrie was like a new show, but it was interesting to watch.

World Idol; I wasn't expecting much from this as I was thinking along the lines of Pop Idol, but it proved to be a good experience ranging from Pan-Arab music to Nirvana and then Will Young... entertaining and I'm awaiting the results for that.

Creature Comforts was as good or even better than ever... great show.

ITV News... with 20,000 people dead in Iran and many other big stories 10 minutes of news was not much, but it would ruin everyone's Christmas to know about that.

Poirot is good so far...

Did not watch anything on BBC as I was watching ITV because their programmes are better and Only Fools and Horses has not been good for the last few years

Glad to see someone else has mentioned the vintage TV night on five. Talking of the Thames skyline, I see that before Carry on Christmas, the Thames logo with the mirror image of the skyline was used, rather than the pre 1978 variation - Carry on Christmas was filmed in 1969.

I wonder if we'll see more old ITV idents next Monday on BBC4? There's an evening of programmes missing from the archives until now. A chance to see the 'Rediffusion, London' ident before 'At Last the 1948 Show' perhaps?

They probably will be shown if they have them. Leaving frontcaps intact is becoming more commonplace now. Most if not all archive masters still have them intact (along with their original endcap), and most new transmission copies retain them. Only older ones will specifically have them cut off.

I personally see no reason to remove them, they might arguably be out of place for contemporary programmes, but on repeats of old programmes I think it adds a nice touch to leave them on (and also original endcaps - although it seems Pearson and FreMantle have a universal hatred of skyline endcaps, with very few 'Thames Colour Production' endcaps still surviving on transmission copies). They only take a few seconds to run, the longest one is ATV's at just over 10 seconds, no channel can't accomodate them. And before anyone proclaims that noone cares or that they are confusing, I wouldn't care to guess how many people over 30 watching C5 tonight said 'I remember that' at the start of the programmes which had frontcaps intact.

The only television I've watched over the Christmas holiday is this:

Christmas Day:
Creature Comforts (ITV1):
As excellent as ever. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Coronation Street (ITV1):
Humourous and joyful. Corrie at it's second best (well, it couldn't beat Hillman, but it was good enough!)

Millionaire (ITV1):
Very entertaining. The show itself is very boring now, but the celebrity specials are excellent and I enjoyed this one. I think that Millionaire should be exclusively for celebrities now. Sadly, they were advertising a new series at the end of it.

Boxing Day:
Third Reich In Color (five):
Interesting. Didn't really 'watch' it, had it on in the background during tea.

The Hindenburg Mystery: Revealed (five):
Watch half of this. Very interesting actually. Sadly, I fell asleep.

You've Been Framed (ITV1):
I was on it, so watching it was a must.

Coronation Steet (ITV1):
A bit of a missable episode - very little happened.

On the buses / Rising Damp (five):
Classics. Well worth watching.

All in all, I'm quite impressed with Christmas TV this year.

French and Saunders managed to impress as usual (although, unfortunately, I missed the first 10 mins).
Their Britney/Madonna 'Into the Zone' parody was very well done. I quite enjoyed the Matrix elements (esp. the clones of Dawn French).

well i can honestly say that my christmas day viewing only consisted of:
michael palin (simply because the telly was on when i woke up)
and creature comforts, which was recorded and watched today.

there was nothing in the schedules to sufficiently interest anyone in my house to move into the lounge. fools and horses - done to death, "celebrity" millionaire - good ... a few years ago, the soaps - why watch other people enjoying christmas day instead of enjoying your own?.

all in all (purely from the radio times) it was a very poor line-up.

and it does make me laugh to think of some forum members taking the batteries out of their remotes to force their entire family to watch a single channel's offerings, just because they have some misguided loyalty to a channel.

How similar was my day too.

All I managed to watch was [apart from a bit of breakfast tv at home while I was in charge of the remote still for a precious hour] Creature Comforts also. I did this by reminding everyone at fifteen minute intervals that I *insist* I watch it -- it became a point of principal. Even then they almost tried to put some sh*te dvd on about the war.

The tv wasn't watched much by me due either to too many related people in the dangerous vicinity/tiresome conversations/most of it apparently being in "satan's language".

But I also notice I didn't miss much. Apart from Morecambe and Wise. Boo.

Yes, Corrie was only on twice a week pre 1989 and Emmerdale only on twice a week pre 1997, so it was less likely an episode would fall on Xmas Day - and like you said I think if it did fall they would pull it.