I’m kicking off today with Disneyland’s 30th Anniversary Celebration. A seemingly random collection of musical acts (including The Pointer Sisters and Julian Lennon) have been corralled together for this excessively glitzy bash.
There’s a Grange Hill Christmas special at 5.35 on BBC1. It was Phil Redmond’s last script for the series and (alas) introduced Harriet the Donkey. So we know who to blame …
YouTube have again come up trumps for Stanley Baxter’s Christmas Hamper. Baxter’s return to the BBC after more than a decade spent with ITV, he delivers exactly what’s expected of him (for some reason, the Where Do You Go To My Lovely? skit was the one which has stuck in my mind from the show’s original tx).
As for ITV, it offers a two hour cutdown omnibus of Chocky’s Children (I’ll have to make do with the original 6 part version) and another episode of Me and My Girl. This is a day fairly light on big hitters then, but maybe after the excesses of the last few days it was decided that the schedules should have a quick breather.
Archive Television Musings 
The only thing that I remember seeing on this day was ‘Stanley Baxter’s Christmas Hamper’ with my parents, and all of us finding it really funny. I haven’t seen it since… I hope that when I do it will still have the sense of renewed comic vigour (when compared to the obviously very elaborate LWT shows) that I recall.
There are a number of old films and shows that I might find myself watching, but the only things that I’d actively plan to watch on this day would be Stanley Baxter and ‘Clive James In Dallas’.
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The Wizard of Oz parody with Stanley Baxter playing all the parts was very clever
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The Disneyland celebration looked truly ghastly. (I regard the Disney theme parks as a glorified fairground.)
The Grange Hill Christmas specials (both shown rather tactlessly in the middle of the school holidays) got omitted from the Sunday morning repeats of Grange Hill in the nineties.
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The 1985 Christmas Special of Grange Hill is a rather light hearted affair which sees the final appearances of some characters and the introduction of some new faces for Series 9.
Thankfully, Harriet the Donkey would be absent throughout the forthcoming Series 9, but she would return with a vengeance a year later to dilute the promising Series 10.
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Some people really don’t like the Harriett the donkey storyline.
Mind you I don’t know what I ever saw in Grange Hill.
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