25th December

Originally broadcast 37 years ago today, The Murder at the Vicarage was the first of the Joan Hickson Marple Christmas Day treats. Two more would follow in 1987 and 1989 – although the final two adaptations (in 1991 and 1992) had slightly less prominent late December slots.

The Murder at the Vicarage is my favourite Miss Marple novel and T.R. Bowen’s adaptation more than does it justice (we’re back in an era when Christie adapters were content to treat the original novels with respect). Paul Eddington, as the somewhat bewildered Reverend Leonard Clement, heads the guest cast.

26th December

The Two Ronnies – The Studio Recordings has done the rounds multiple times since its original broadcast in 2010, but it’s something that I’ll always be happy to recommend. Pluses – the whole programme is devoted to the studio footage (allowing previously unseen sketches to run in full – rather than interrupt them every ten seconds with celebrity talking heads). Minuses – the footage is cropped to widescreen (something that regularly happened to 4:3 footage a decade or so ago – thankfully this isn’t the case now).

A pity that it didn’t lead to further dips into the archive, as I’ve no doubt there’s a fair few programmes which also have existing studio recording sessions. Maybe one day ….

Two Noël Coward plays – Playhouse – A Song at Midnight (1982 with Deborah Kerr and Paul Schofield) and The Wednesday Play – The Vortex (1969 with Margaret Leighton) also feature this evening. Both are available on the Noël Coward Collection DVD boxset, but I don’t think they’ve been on television since their original airings, so they’ll be new to many.

A Horizon documentary from 1967 with Isaac Asimov also looks to be worth setting the VCR for.

27th December

Today we’ve got the 1998 Goodness Gracious Me Christmas Special and the first four episodes of The Singing Detective. In my idle moments, I sometimes wonder why BBC4 has started to strip programmes like this across several days. It’s hard to imagine anyone having the stamina to actually watch four episodes in a row – so presumably it’s expected that people will PVR them or watch on the iPlayer. That’s reasonable enough, but I do appreciate the way Talking Pictures TV tends to broadcast their archive television programmes – once a week and in the same timeslot. Radical I know, but it worked for a fair few decades.

28th December

Bob Monkhouse – The Last Stand is another very familiar offering, but if by some miracle you’ve never seen it (or not for a while) then it’s well worth tuning in. What turned out to be his last stand up gig was set up in order to record material for a short series called Behind the Laughter (as it turned out, none of the footage filmed made the final cut)

Broadcast in October 2003 (just a few months before his death) Behind the Laughter saw a remarkably candid Monkhouse discuss and analyse  his comedy contemporaries. The likes of Morecambe & Wise, Tommy Cooper, Frankie Howerd and Benny Hill were some of those put under the microscope (and it’s fair to say that Bob didn’t pull his punches). As an aside, Behind the Laughter is well overdue a repeat.

The Last Stand does suffer from having too many contemporary talking heads – yes it’s nice to hear how much Bob was loved by his colleagues, but it’s a shame that we have to keep cutting away from Bob in order to hear them. Still, even in this form there’s a lot of interest here – not least when Bob introduces his surprise guest (Mike Yarwood) and has a surprisingly candid conversation.

That’s followed by another familiar, but still worthwhile, programme – Talking Comedy – Bob Monkhouse.

29th December

Top of the Pops – Christmas 1983. By a spooky coincidence, this is one I already had on my playlist (since I’m spending the Christmas fortnight in 1983).

The rest of the evening is spent in the company of The Chairman of the Board. The programme that’s caught my interest is a 1979 Arena documentary about My Way (which doesn’t look to have been repeated since 2008).

30th December 

I get the feeling BBC4 are having a day off – there’s three movies (The Sound of Music, the Finney Murder on the Orient Express and the Ustinov Evil Under The Sun) as well as another chance to see Yes Minister – Party Games. They could at least have swapped Evil Under the Sun for the Ustinov Death on the Nile (far superior) or maybe dug out the 1982 BBC Christie adaptation of Spider’s Web with Penelope Keith. Hey ho.

31st December

Larry Grayson’s Generation Game takes pride of place today. It’s the New Years Eve special from 1979 and it promises surprise guests. Should I do a bit of Googling to find out who’s on or resist the temptation? I’ll resist, for now …

Those hardy souls who have stayed up to hear the chimes of Big Ben will be able to wind down with And Now For Something Completely Different. The first Monty Python film (albeit one that few seem to remember) is certainly packed with quality sketches, the only problem is that they’ve already been done (and done better) on the television show. It’s turned up a fair few times on various BBC channels over the last decade (which surprises me a little). Maybe this is the year I’ll finally watch it.