Why does UK television love the Christmas special?

June 12, 2023 7:43 AM

Basically any UK television show that isn't a Serious Drama observes the annual tradition of a Christmas special. Why, and why didn't this catch on elsewhere--or did it? Was there an ur-Christmas Special?
posted by pullayup to Society & Culture (16 answers total)

Relevant: Wikipedia List of Christmas television episodes and specials in the United Kingdom, Christmas by medium > Television specials and episodes > United Kingdom.
posted by zamboni at 8:10 AM on June 12, 2023

The ur-Christmas special, which started on radio, is the Queen's/King's Christmas Message. Christmas 2022 viewed by 10.6 million.
posted by boudicca at 8:26 AM on June 12, 2023

I've seen it argued in academic circles that the British Christmas special is an outgrowth of nineteenth century Christmas stories in periodicals, Royal Variety, pantomime, and in-person telling of ghost stories. I can kind of see these influences - like the way specials tend to up the comedic elements and melodrama, and also randomly introduce supernatural elements into shows that are not normally supernatural. It isn't a neat line, though - Christmas specials really took off in the seventies and eighties, some time after those other traditions were on the wane.
posted by Ballad of Peckham Rye at 8:35 AM on June 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'm a bit confused by the premise that this is a UK-specific phenomenon, because it's also definitely in the US. I definitely remember there being Christmas-themed episodes of US shows as a kid, and here's a list to back me up.

Those are episodes that are still the show, it's just that Christmas is the setting or whatever. But we also have "Christmas specials", a whole lot of one-offs that only air around Christmastime.

So - if neither of those are what you're talking about, can you give a bit more detail as to why?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:50 AM on June 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

Those are episodes that are still the show, it's just that Christmas is the setting or whatever.

This is the key difference--"a Christmas-themed episode" vs The Christmas Special (all capitals). Christmas specials in the UK typically air between Christmas and New Year, give or take, distinct from the standard television calendar, which is when US shows air their Christmas episodes ("sometime in December"). American Christmas specials are outside the standard television calendar, but they're the same programs shown year after year--maybe there's no Charlie Brown one year, but it'll be the same Charlie Brown the next time it's shown.
posted by hoyland at 9:24 AM on June 12, 2023 [8 favorites]

UK Christmas specials are different from standard episodes of a show that are just set at Christmas. For example, last Christmas, a couple of years after the last episode of Detectorists had aired, there was a Christmas special, as a stand-alone episode. It was, IIRC, feature-length, and when I arrived at my friends' where I was staying for Christmas, I said that the only thing I was going to insist on watching was Detectorists on Boxing Day.

I think the various TV companies - and particularly the BBC - like to persuade the writers/producers/performers of their most popular shows to come up with a Christmas special because they know it'll be requried viewing at a time when people tend to watch a lot of TV. This is particularly so if it's a much-loved show that's no longer in production. If a series is still running, then the Christmas special will often be a longer episode than normal, and will be a one-off story in its own right, sometimes with a 'Christmas' message.

Certain shows the networks know will have huge audiences - e.g. the Bake-Off, Vicar of Dibley and (God knows why or how), the excreable Mrs Brown's Boys - will have their own specials. Soaps like Eastenders or Coronation St will tend to have a huge plotline airing on Christmas Day/Boxing Day (e.g. Den serving Angie with divorce papers in the 1980s, which had millions of viewers), but won't be a 'special' in the sense of being a one-off stand-alone show.

The BBC still shows 50-year-old Morecambe & Wise Christmas Specials and, honestly, they are as fresh and funny as they were when I first watched them as a kid.
posted by essexjan at 9:46 AM on June 12, 2023 [9 favorites]

The UK Christmas shows are also sometimes a bit "more" than the regular shows, like maybe 1.5 or 2 times the normal run length, and they're generally a self-contained thing. So like, Doctor Who had a number of "Christmas" episodes, there's typically a Christmas version of GBBO where they'll bring back contestants from earlier seasons, the "White Christmas" episode of Black Mirror, and a few of the "[bygone time period] Farm" things with Ruth Gordon and company have a special Christmas thing.
posted by LionIndex at 9:47 AM on June 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

I feel like soap Christmas episodes are somewhere between a regular show that just happens to be set at Christmas and a special, because they do have distinctive tropes of their own, and it's not unheard of for them to have an extended length. I'd also be quite surprised if they aren't produced in the knowledge non-regular viewers will be watching. Christmas day is literally the only time all year I'll watch EastEnders, it doesn't really matter that I'm not familiar with the ongoing storylines because they hit the same beats every Christmas, and I quite enjoy that it doesn't change.
posted by Ballad of Peckham Rye at 10:03 AM on June 12, 2023

Hmm. I wonder if it's a function of the "seasons" in British shows being much shorter compared to the US, and so they can play around more, and there's time to do an episode that's more of a "special event".

Meaning: take Doctor Who. The seasons are on average about 10 episodes each, with recent years' seasons being even shorter (the 2021 season was only six episodes, and last year only saw three specials). That gives the show runners time to pour more energy into something that pulls out the stops for Christmas a bit. It also lets the networks play around with scheduling when to run those episodes - Jodie Whitaker's first season as The Doctor started in early October that year and ran through December, ending with the big Christmas Special, but her second season started in January of 2020 and ran through to the end of March that year, and then gave us a holiday special in January 2021.

Compare that with US TV, where the seasons are twice as long and all start in late September. The second Big Bang Theory season, for instance, was over 20 episodes long, and ran from late September through to late May. Every episode after that followed a similar schedule. So since that's such a consistent schedule, maybe the showrunners are a bit more "routine" with their Christmas episodes - it's still very much of the show and the canon, and it's more like "this is the episode close to Christmas so let's acknowledge that and move on".

Also, the first season of Big Bang Theory just went on a sort of hiatus for the months of December, January and February during that season; that kind of suggests that maybe it was the show whose episodes always got pre-empted for more "special event" programming like a Live-Action performance of Godspell or the Super Bowl or stuff like that. And that may be another reason why the Christmas Episode hasn't caught on as a thing here - your show may be getting put on hold for something like a "Dolly Parton And The Thundercats Christmas Spectacular" one-off special that is being broadcast by your network instead.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:27 AM on June 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

Back in the mists of time (i.e. the 1970s/80s), British TV executives assumed that people would watch less TV at Christmas. Strange as it may seem now, it was received wisdom that viewing figures would be lower on Christmas Day because people would be too busy doing other things, like playing Scrabble with their families or whatever it was that passed for fireside fun in those days.

That all changed in the 1980s. Martin Johnes suggests in Christmas and the British: A Modern History (2016) that the 1986 EastEnders Christmas special was the game-changer:

A historian of Coronation Street has pointed out that in the show's first two decades the Christmas episode could often be the least seen of the year, an indication of how soap operas were still establishing themselves. In 1967, for example, the highest watched episode came in September when 9.45 million tuned in, whereas just 2.78 million watched the Christmas Day episode. The result of such experiences was that in the 1970s there was just one 25 Dec broadcast of the show. It was EastEnders' success in 1986 that changed the stakes by demonstrating people would watch if there was a special storyline. Coronation Street followed it up in 1987 with Hilda Ogden's departure, which, together with its repeat, was watched by 26.63 million.

(This has to be understood in the context of the BBC/ITV duopoly that governed British television at that time. The two channels competed head-to-head and divvied up the TV audience between them, so once EastEnders broke the mould, Coronation Street had to follow suit.)

The other big change was the advent of the VHS player. Up to that point, the heavy hitters on Christmas TV were the blockbuster movies, because if you'd missed Raiders of the Lost Ark in the cinema or wanted to see it again, this was your only chance to catch it. But once VHS came along and video rental stores started popping up on the high street, the viewing figures for the Big Christmas Movies started falling off. That left a gap in the schedules which was filled by the Christmas special.
posted by verstegan at 11:52 AM on June 12, 2023 [8 favorites]

> Compare that with US TV, where the seasons are twice as long and all start in late September.

You definitely still have shows on the primary broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, and to a lesser extent The CW) that follow that relatively rigid formula. But a lot of TV no longer exists in this timeline, and hasn't for some years, even some of what is on those same networks. (Several years ago, FOX famously declared the end of their adherence to the "new shows premiere in the fall" script and September to May season, though many of their tentpoles still follow it.) And a lot of shows, including the vast majority of cable and streaming, have both "random" season starts (versus traditional) and much shorter episode groupings, much more akin to a British "series" than a traditional US "season."

But, traditionally, you are correct.
posted by tubedogg at 12:44 PM on June 12, 2023

Long before EastEnders in 1986, though, the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Specials, (mentioned above by essexjan), were huge. They ran from 1969 to 1977 and I'm pretty sure just carried on being repeated in the Christmases that followed because they were a feature of my childhood Christmases, and I probably wouldn't have watched/remembered before the early 80s at least.

If people were genuinely watching less TV at Christmas, I feel like Morecambe and Wise probably went along with the Queen's Speech, as the two moments over Christmas that the family would definitely warm up the set and all gather round to watch.

This article, though, suggests that there were a lot more comedy Christmas specials through the 60s and 70s - Til Death Us Do Part, Steptoe and Son etc. And this article mentions Mike Yarwood:

"The record for the largest single audience for a television programme is 21.4 million, set on Christmas Day 1977 by the Mike Yarwood show. That’s based on ITV’s measurements – the BBC claim that they hold that title for the Morecambe and Wise Christmas special that was airing at the same time based on their own readings."

(not sure of the article's provenance though, looks like a website for getting people's utilities connected, but anyway...).

None of that answers the why, though.
posted by penguin pie at 1:17 PM on June 12, 2023

I wondered whether Asa Briggs' fascinating (but variably comprehensive) "A History of Broadcasting in the UK" would say anything about this, and no, it doesn't - although volume IV does suggest that Cecil McGivern was hired as Television Programme Director in 1947 partly on the strength of his work with Laurence Gilliam on radio Christmas programming from the 1930s onwards.

As to the question of the ur-Christmas-Special, one way to answer that is through the historical listings on BBC Genome. Christmas episodes of popular series were clearly well underway by 1963, with both Z Cars and Compact having Christmas episodes that year. If music programmes count, then long-running music-hall revival The Good Old Days started doing Christmas episodes in 1957. But if you're after a Christmas special episode, then I wonder if there are any earlier examples than 1960's Christmas with the Appleyards - a reunion of a sitcom that ran from 1952-1957?
posted by offog at 2:55 PM on June 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yeah there was enough Christmas ratings competition for ITV to be set on poaching Morcambe and Wise in 78. The Two Ronnies were also big in the 70s, Christmas special wise - and there's so much reminiscent of musical hall in their shows I think continuity with Christmas theatre feels pretty persuasive. Especially as (this is so weird to me) both the BBC and ITV spent the 60s and 70s televising circuses on Christmas day.
posted by Ballad of Peckham Rye at 2:56 PM on June 12, 2023

I wonder if it's an artefact of both the longer Christmas break (relative to the US) and also trying to capture the audience for family entertainment. Generally speaking between Christmas and New Year, most of the usual tv is cancelled and the schedules are full of Christmas specials, and films of various kinds. Schools and factories are generally closed, so there are a lot of people who wouldn't usually be watching tv who could be tempted by a Christmas special. In addition, you can set it up so you need fewer staff to broadcast.
posted by plonkee at 3:16 PM on June 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

Don’t overlook competition. In the era where Christmas specials were at their viewer zenith, there were effectively only two channels in the game: BBC1 and ITV. The BBC were the old guard: taking their “inform, educate, entertain” public broadcaster remit seriously. They were the establishment and they wanted to give you what they thought was good for you. ITV were the commercial upstarts: putting together programmes which would sell cigars and summer holidays. Rivalry between the broadcasters was serious: celebrities would “defect” to ITV for a bigger pay cheque - and not then be invited back. For ITV the point was to make money; for the BBC it was to rise above such tawdry concerns and show that the funds from the (mandatory) license fee had been well spent.

For both channels, a package of televisual gifts was a perfect way of doing this: plays and opera for the toffs, soaps for oiks and a TV premiere of whatever blockbuster film the budget would stretch to. The Christmas specials were part of a meticulously planned attempt to keep you tuned to one or other channel during the whole evening.
posted by rongorongo at 3:32 PM on June 12, 2023