Columnist Chris Britcher remembers when the festive edition of the Radio Times and TV Times signalled the real start to the festive season...

As you look over the 200+ channels on your TV guide, flick through the offerings on the likes of Disney+, Netflix and Amazon Prime, the chances are you'll be able to curate the perfect viewing to suit your mood this yuletide - or all of 2023 for that matter.

And were you the sort of sad case who likes to schedule a whole day's personalised viewing then you need go no further than your mobile phone for research purposes. In fact, you could even watch said programming on that same device.

But back in the early 1980s things required a little more forward planning. Which, in short, meant looking forward to one of the most anticipated publishing events of the year.

There was, as a youngster, nothing to put you in the festive mood quicker than a stroll around WHSmith, spotting the Christmas editions of the TV listings magazines.

Bumper two-week issues of the Radio Times (for the BBC's offering) and the TV Times (for ITV and newcomer Channel 4); they promised a smorgasbord of Christmas specials, decent films for once and more advertisements for holidays than you could shake a stick at.

That was, by the way, the only choice if you wanted to know about TV listings in advance. There were no on-screen guides, no internet, no voice-activated Alexa. Not even rival publishers were allowed to tell you what time Coronation Street was going to be on until the day itself. They were different times.

It was also a treat to get both - my parents normally only got the Radio Times - heaven knows the gems I missed on grubby old commercial TV during my youth for the other 50 weeks of the year.

'Trying to formulate the finest 9am to 6pm viewing schedule for Christmas Eve was one of the holiday season's treats. I rarely actually ever watched the full day's list but it was comforting to know there was something half decent to watch if I so desired...'

We did, of course, only have four channels back in those days. Although, depending where you lived in Kent, you could sometimes pretend to have five.

This was achieved by tuning your portable (yes, my prized black and white portable TV required you to turn a dial like tuning in the radio to find your picture while taking hours to then balance your coat-hanger-style aerial stuck in the back of the chunky set 'just right' so the show you were watching didn't give the impression of taking place during a snow storm) and picking up both TVS and Thames (or LWT at weekends) - even though most of the shows were the same. (I won't bore the younger reader here about the TVS' and LWTs of yesteryear, suffice to say they were just regional variations of ITV, which sounds about as exciting as a fence in retrospect).

But enough of such dull musings, back to those TV listings magazines.

During the year, the ability to subscribe to a movie channel delivering blockbusters any time of the day or night - let alone on-demand - were the sort of fantasies we could only entertain when listening about cable TV in the US.

In the early eighties, the biggest movies debuted on regular TV - albeit normally about three years after tumbling out of the cinemas - and Christmas was when the most mouthwatering were deployed.

The Radio Times and TV Times were your old-school Google. Wanted to know what films were going to be on? Open the magazines and find out. They even reviewed all of them for you too.

What it meant was there was genuine excitement (and before you bleat about getting excited at such things, I was only a child at the time) as you scanned the pages discovering what you could watch.

It was also an era where the best films weren't always modern ones. TV schedules would feature classics like the Marx Brothers, Laurel & Hardy, Will Hay - black and white era, masters of comedy which my father would recommend and I lapped up.

You could skip through the generations over the festive period and, of course, when you're young, few things are repeats to your fresh mind so everything seemed new and exciting.

As for those sad cases who would draw up a whole day's viewing?

Well, never fear, dear reader, I was one of them.

Trying to formulate the finest 9am to 6pm viewing schedule for Christmas Eve was one of the holiday season's treats. I rarely actually ever watched the full day's list but it was comforting to know there was something half decent to watch if I so desired.

That, after all, was impossible to achieve during non Christmas periods when daytime TV was still a glint in a producer's eye and breakfast television was still very much a novelty.

In truth, I think I relished TV more back in the day. Those four channels had a lot of pressure on their shoulders to entertain and over the festive period it seemed they always did. Or at least it seemed that way.

The only danger, of course, was if you missed a TV show then you'd missed it. Video players were still in their very-expensive infancy.

Don't get me wrong, I'd not swap the overwhelming choice of today for back then. But you certainly learned to appreciate what you had.

Happy Christmas everyone.

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