Getting Over Christmas TV

There you go - another Christmas Day recedes in the rear view mirror as we accelerate toward the New Year.  Yeah, I know that it's Boxing Day and we've got that whole strange interim period of the festivities sitting between Christmas and New Year, but the excitement is over now and the media are losing interest and employers just want everyone to fuck off back to work.  As ever, it never ceases to amaze me how the very people who spend so much time hyping up the season and raising expectations (the media, retailers etc), can't wait to see the back of the season once the expensive bit they make money off of is over.  Again, as I always point out this time of year, Christmas is meant to be a twelve day festival that doesn't abruptly end on New Year's Day.  But let's get back to Christmas just past - did you enjoy the Christmas Day TV schedules?  I remember a time when the main TV channels actually made an effort.  This year they struck lucky with Christmas falling over a weekend, so they basically just kept most of the usual weekend schedule and stuck bits of tinsel on it, claiming that all the programmes shown were 'Christmas Specials'.  The Morecombe and Wise Christmas Show from 1972 that BBC2 screened again on Christmas Day was a reminder of how it used to be done - something that was more than just a regular edition with a Christmas tree in the background.  

Still, at least EastEnders maintained its festive tradition by bringing a dose of misery and depression to the festivities.  Has Mick Carter really drowned after a series of increasingly unlikely events saw him diving into the English Channel?  The lack, so far, of a body, fuels my suspicion that a few years down the line - when Danny Dyer needs the work - it will be revealed that he was picked up by a dinghy full of migrants heading for the Kent coast.  When they finally land on the beach, his trauma induced amnesia and strange dialect will result in the authorities assuming he's a foreign national and shipping him off to Rwanda.  From where he'll escape and become a mercenary, fighting in various African civil wars before regaining his memory and rushing back to Walford, just in time to rescue ex-wife Linda from Max Branning and his gang of international sex traffickers, with a gunfight in the Queen Vic.  After which he is arrested as a war criminal and dragged off to the Hague for trial, vowing, when released, to return for Linda.  Either that, or he's discovered working in a Salvation Army homeless shelter in Folkestone.  

As ever, in the face of the main networks' seasonal indifference, I came up with my own festive schedule.  Just for once, I thought, let's keep it wholesome and tasteful.  It is bloody Christmas, after all.  Well, I tried.  I did spend a big chunk of Christmas Day watching all three hours of the 1956 Around the World in Eighty Days widescreen epic.  Mainly because I realised that I had never actually sat through the whole movie in one go.  I'd seen it in bits, but never all at once.  Moreover, most TV screenings are shortened, omitting the prologue (which originally included a showing og George Melies' silent short adaptation of From the Earth to the Moon, intermission and exit overture.  The version I was included all three.  I have to say that the whole thing has a certain charm, if one can look past the outdated cultural stereotypes and casual racism which were part and parcel of the era it was made in.  It certainly presents the viewer with a spectacle (the scale of the production is all the more impressive in view of the fact that, back in 1956, the was no CGI so a lot of it had to be stage 'for real').  But the allure of schlock, even at Christmas, is just too great for me to resist.  It certainly was this Christmas, as I also found myself indulging in Jesus Franco's bizarre 1968 private eye/Bond knock off/fantasy movie Kiss Me Monster.  Actually, by Franco standards, this was pretty good - an enjoyably made parody of the many Euro action/adventure movies  being churned out during this period.  Christmas Day, for me, was rounded off with a viewing of The French Sex Murders (1972).  I hope to look at this one in more detail later, but its gleeful mixing of lurid and bloody murders, police investigations, curses, mad scientists and high class hookers managed to carry it through some lacklustre direction and provided a suitable antidote to most Christmas TV.