Express attacks Xmas schedule

It's that time of year.With 22 days before the festivities the Express this morning devotes its front page to the news that this yeultide we will be getting our usual dose of repeats.

According to the paper,this year’s Christmas television schedule will feature almost 600 hours of repeats.

The glut of tired shows and old films on offer from the four major terrestrial channels will be the largest number of repeats ever shown over the festive fortnight.

adding that

Some of the programmes to be screened this Christmas will already have been seen on television dozens of times.

The last days or a nostalgia trip

As Xmas approaches are we seeing the last days of that televisual feast known as Xmas day watching.

As for Tv generally the days of 20m plus viewers sitting down to Morecombe and Wise or the Generation game on Xmas night are long gone in our new media world of segmentation,niche etc.

Nick Clark writing in this morning's Independent goes a stage further

Thursday could be the last Christmas Day on which everyone in Britain watches the same programmes at the same time. As the boundaries increasingly blur between technology, telecommunication and media companies, and mobile phones and laptops can be used to watch videos, the television industry is preparing for unparalleled change.

and according to Ben Keen, chief analyst at Screen Digest,

"There is a shift in the way viewers engage with television, as they use different devices and via different formats. Broadcasters have to react to this. It is no longer about providing one linear channel; they have to engage with their viewers as much as possible in as many different ways."

Personally I think that Xmas will remain Xmas and may actually become the one day of the year barring England getting to the final of the world cup when everyone sits in front of the telly.
Maybe it will even become a day for nostalgia as we remember in our old age,the golden days of 1970's televsion

We are all Xmas turkeys

So the Beeb wins the ratings war over Xmas but perhaps the Mirror's leader tells us the real reason

BBC bosses are celebrating victory in the Christmas ratings war after screening nine of the 10 top shows.
But was it really the BBC's brilliance or were we all too full of turkey to pick up the remote?

Boxing Day ramblings

Boxing day is always a little of a anti climax.We wait so long for Xmas,then at a blink of an eye.....it's over.In this gap between supplies of food some ramblings

First of all something on last night's Xmas telly.Really was quite bad,the Doctor Who was turgid,70 mins of drivel.Catherine Tate was appalling,you could play guess the punchlines and what about the use of the F-word.Even though it was well past the watershed,how many kids would have been watching at 10.30 on Christmas day?

The only decent thing I have watched,apart from the Dad's army repeats, was the ITV,Xmas at the Riveria(Sky plussed from Xmas eve).A good old fashioned comedy farce,the ashes being put in the turkey and being pecked at by geese was something else).

The papers this morning are predictable,reports on the various speeches of our religious leaders and royal leaders and various tales of shopping sales,online trading etc.Why bother publishing?Give journalists another day off.

Read Allison Martin's piece on Press Gazette on how to survive the graveyard shift

The seemingly never-ending evening will be punctuated by pointless phone calls from drunk people with “World Exclusive” stories about spacecraft in Filey or with a bee in their bonnet about the number of repeats on TV, all of which would fail to make page 83 of a weekly local freesheet. However, these people are to be endured in the spirit of peace on Earth and goodwill to all men.

For a religious perspective at this time of year.check out Steve Borris writing on Xmas day who tells us

Modern Journalism has been typically skeptical, when not outright disdainful, of Christianity. In the movement’s founding work, Liberty and the News, Walter Lippmann declared journalism a new science for a new age when Man had finally come to his senses, no longer believing “that an omniscient and benevolent Providence taught [Man] what end to seek” and that it would now be “blazing arrogance to sacrifice hard-won standards of credibility” to such irrational beliefs

But we should be grateful because freedom of the press was first mooted in Genesis.That's the old testament,not the rock dinosaurs

which established that Man was created in God’s image, bestowing upon individuals a dignity that is not inevitably derived through use of reason alone.

The other purpose of the media in this time between xmas and New Year is to review the last 12 months.Jemima Kiss looks at what created the most traffic on Guardian Media and surprise,surprise it was reality Tv,no fewer than 10/20 entries,fuelled by the Shilpa Shetty episode back in January.

Anyway enough and back to eating and drinking