What Christmas television gets right that streaming and TikTok don’t
Christmas television used to be a thing. It was when the heads of channels would splurge on buying the rights to air the latest James Bond film or play all 12 days of The Lord of the Rings in order. Schedules would be cleared of ordinary furniture and a hush would fall across the land as families gathered to bask in the warm glow of a unique broadcasting event. In the UK, the national grid would have to plan for huge surges of electrical demand when the nation boiled its kettles in the ad breaks or Frodo finally returned to the Shire in one piece.
Now we imagine a typical house as a cut-away diagram in which all personnel are squirrelled away in separate rooms, faces lit by individual streams. There’s Dad in the kitchen with a laptop, watching reruns of old Top Gear episodes courtesy of BBC iPlayer; on the sofa, Mum’s watching a Netflix drama on her tablet, earbuds in; upstairs, a pair of young teenagers are ghoulishly illuminated by TikTok’s attention-sucking algorithm, a phone for each of them. Presumably the spell might only be broken when a Deliveroo driver rings the doorbell.
You won’t be surprised to learn that figures for British viewers – a good representative for most mature TV markets – indicate that less than half of Gen Z would ever dream of watching television by switching one on. In the average two hours of screen viewing a day for 16 to 24 year-olds, more than three quarters of that time is spent on video-sharing platforms. So even streaming – getting what you want when you want it – doesn’t really cut it. On YouTube and TikTok you don’t really get to choose what you watch: stuff a bit like stuff you’ve already seen gets thrown at you and you can stick or twist. But is that a million miles from the linear TV through which you’ve caught yourself dumbly channel-hopping for decades?
There’s a case to be argued that Christmas TV – with its charming, pinball-random approach – is the canary in the come-back-to-the-schedules coal mine. This is that joyful time of the year when old-school television appears to have got on the sherries before lunch and continues to go rogue into the new year. There’s a warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you know that you can fire up the old Panasonic with your morning coffee and get chestnuts deep in The Muppet Christmas Carol before you’ve even thought of having a shower. Hold the ablutions further: Singin’ in the Rain is on after that. And surely someone in the scheduling department at Broadcasting House will be smirking at the possibility of viewers segueing from the sexy dilemmas suggested in Indecent Proposal (Christmas Eve, BBC2, 22.30) into the objectively less sexy Midnight Mass from Our Lady of the English Martyrs, Cambridge (Christmas Eve, BBC1, 23.50).
A good way to schedule TV, then, and even bring younger audiences into a more familial dynamic of multi-generational viewing might well be by channelling some of that anything-goes Christmas spirit into other times of the year. World Cups and Wimbledons exert a similar gravitational pull on the national imagination and schedules are adjusted accordingly. Slightly strange, unashamedly random seasonal scheduling might just be the gift that keeps on giving throughout the year. Like many things that come around at Christmas, the aesthetics are a little messy but everyone loves it just the same. Christmas TV? It still matters.
Robert Bound is a contributing editor at Monocle. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.
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