Christmas TV — what happened to it?

What’s on the box at Christmas, then and now.

There’s something about the process of getting older that adds a certain nostalgic filter to almost everything, especially when you have children. Christmas TV was never fantastic admittedly (3–2–1 Pantomime anyone?) but wasn’t there something more to it than the culmination of big, explosive soap plots that have led to Christmas TV ratings in 2016 at an all-time low. When such nostalgia strikes it’s sometimes a good idea to remove memories from the situation and dig into the actual data. So we set out to compare the schedules of our childhood (so only 3 channels of BBC 1, BBC2 and ITV) with the modern schedules to find out the truth behind Christmas TV, and how it has it changed.

3–2–1 Pantomine (1980) — Image from GB Gameshows

We grew up in the late 70’s and early 80’s, and so chose 1978 to 1985 as our comparison years to the modern TV of 2010 to 2017. After collecting the data from http://ukchristmastv.weebly.com/ (no small feat in itself, see below for methodology) we parsed each programme name and start time into a single readable dataset. In choosing to focus on just Christmas Day, we felt it provided a comparative day between years that wouldn’t change based on the day of the week. The final part of the process was to standardise the data and give each programme into a fixed type in order to make comparison between years easy; we tagged them with Comedy, Drama, Film, etc. Looking back we perhaps underestimated what an effort it would entail, it took many hours work over multiple days in order to successfully code around 2500 programmes into categories.

This coding process was an interesting one, and raised many emotions, from the sickening, labelling “Jim’ll Fix It” as Children’s, to the annoying “Mrs Brown Boys” which fell in no better bracket than Comedy.

Christmas Day 1983 — ITV — history judges Christmas scheduling very badly in some cases

Once the coding process was over we then compared the two eras visually. We also calculated how many programs of each type fell into each era — the “then vs now” percentage on each subheading below shows these.

Films (44% then vs 56% now)

One change that stood out immediately is that films on Christmas Day have shifted quite significantly between the two periods, as the gif below shows as it fades between the years.