The Weakest Link: Celebrity Special (BBC2, Tuesday)
Titanic: The Survivors Story (N2, Saturday)
The League of Gentlemen (BBC2, Wednesday)
The Last Fast Show Ever (BBC2, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday)
Who in the house? Santa in the house! And when he/she (for I dislike these gender stereotypes. Why should such global largesse be confined to an elderly white male?) took a break from present delivery to sit back and relax with some seasonal telly, what did the elves of Irish and British programming departments have for him/her?
Well, if they get the BBC in Lapland, nothing would have energised Santa for the global delivery run better than The Weakest Link: Celebrity Special (BBC2, Sunday). Anne Robinson's Madam Lash impersonation would have any old gentleman up on his hind legs. There is a man in my office whose patterned necktie stands up straight every time Ms Robinson's icy quiz-mistress is mentioned, and she was in fine form on Christmas Eve.
"Who is rubbish with a capital R?" was one of the gentler questions she asked of her quailing team during this special version of the increasingly popular quiz. If by any chance you are still watching Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, and have missed the latest twist in quiz fashion, this show's format consists of a team of nine people answering questions, but being eliminated on the votes of team members, down to a play-off between the last two.
It has to be said that "celebrity" seemed a bit of an overstatement for the Christmas edition. I turned on expecting, maybe, Prince Charles, newlywed Madonna, Johnny Depp, the Gallagher brothers. To find that only six of the nine contestants were even remotely familiar - including Nicholas Parsons, Louis Theroux (of quirky travel documentary fame) and Vanessa Feltz (pounds thinner than when she hosted her own show, Vanessa). The others were a mixture of former daytime personalities, "actors" and presenters from Border Television. Parsons, a veteran quizzer and game-show host and participant, was the first to be eliminated as the weakest link in the team, but went down fighting. "I have written thousands of general knowledge questions in my time!" he protested. "None of that knowledge on show tonight," retorted La Robinson. Tie in air again, I bet.
For something more cuddly, Santa could have watched Olive The Other Reindeer (Sunday, Channel 4). This is a charming animated story of a dog who hears Santa talking on the radio of sickness among his team, requiring "all of the other reindeer" to pull extra hard to make up. Olive hears "all of" as her own name and becomes convinced that she is a reindeer manque, and must travel to the North Pole to do her festive duty. It took me a while to work out why her penguin friend was called Martini, and the Christmas drinks hadn't even started.
Don't Feed the Gondolas turned out a special Christmas edition (RTE1, Sunday) which wisely confined itself to the character of Father Brian, the rapper priest, introducing a series of scams perpetrated by his alter ego Brendan O'Connor. Some of these had been seen before, but others, including the taxi driver, were lent extra flavour by the topicality of that breed.
The best memories of Christmas TV are usually of watching Cleo- patra with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor through a mince-pie-and-mulled-wine haze on the days between Christmas and New Year. This year we had Titanic as the big Christmas Day film on both RTE1 and BBC1, giving another chance for much sobbing but also much wondering why James Cameron couldn't have cast a male lead who looked like Kate Winslet's lover instead of her 12year-old son . . . but Leo's box-office appeal makes up for his height.
In the rather protracted run-up to the Christmas Day "big movie", numerous programmes about the disaster of April 1912 were aired. The main impression they leave, apart from the horror of the icy North Atlantic, is of the invidious class system which meant the vast majority of the 1,500 casualties were the third-class passengers, the "steerage" working people and immigrants whose lives mattered so much less than the wealthy toffs upstairs.
"The Titanic stuck rigidly to the class system of 1912," commented historian Don Lynch in Titanic: The Survivors' Story €1, (N2, Saturday). But there was great nobility among the toffs, such as John Astor's dignified but firm farewell to his young pregnant wife, Madeleine, and the decision of banker Benjamin Guggenheim that he and his manservant, eschewing a place in the lifeboats, should dress in their dinner suits and meet death looking their best.
The other haunting theme of programmes re-living the Titanic is of the cacophony of fear and desperation that sounded over those waves on that night. "I will never forget the noise, the shrieks of the dying, the cries of human beings in despair," said one elderly lady of the atmosphere in the lifeboats. There were fewer than half the number of lifeboats required to evacuate the ship - which fulfilled the British Board of Trade requirement at the time.
Most of those telling their stories to the camera have died since, and naturally all were children at the time of the sinking. Being a child had its advantages: Ruth Becker Blanchard, who was 13 at the time and died in 1990, recalled: "I wasn't a bit scared, I was very excited. My mother, sister and little brother had all been put in another boat, so I went up to a sailor and said `Please mister, can I get in a boat' and he said sure you can and just tossed me into the next boat."
Titanic also made an appearance as a vignette in one of the myriad movies which stuff the Christmas turkey of a TV schedule. I know a TV review is not supposed to focus on films, leaving such essaying to my expert colleagues of Ticketland and environs, but it is quite impossible to write about Christmas television and ignore the fact that 90 per cent of the programming is movies. Hence, a fond mention of Time Bandits (RTE2, Wednesday), the 1981 film directed by Terry Gilliam, the Monty Python animator and filmmaker of vast imagination and humour.
The Titanic setting in this is one of half a dozen time frames into which the seven short bandits and their schoolboy companion drop, literally. Yet again they land right in the middle of Michael Palin's fumbling attempts to woo Shelley Duvall. This is a wonderful movie, as much for the humour (see also John Cleese as Robin Hood, in a Prince Charles interpretation of the role) as for the stark splendour of the evil-world sets.
Time Bandits was never a big hit at the box office because it is quirky rather than mainstream, and the same applies to The League of Gentlemen (BBC2, Wednesday), which had a splendid Christmas special edition. The League is set in the mythical (I hope) north of England village of Royston Vasey, whose outstanding residents include a lugubrious pair of local shopkeepers, a sadistic trainer of the unemployed and a taxi-driver named Barbara who has had a sex change.
For Christmas, the episode focused on the vicar, a "woman" named Bernice, to whom a number of parishioners came to unload their burden of Christmas misery. She, quite unsympathetically, heard about the marital problems of Royston Vasey's Tom Selleck (no relation), caused by his devotion to line-dancing; the horrible experience with the Duisburg choir in Germany which had left a young man scarred and traumatised in 1975; and the curse of the Chinnery family, generations of vets, which meant that no animal was safe anywhere near them.
A happy ending? That would be a joke. This is comedy of the blackest, served up by Jeremy Dyson, Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith. Bernice was last seen in a sack being driven away by the same evil Santa who had abducted her mother, with unthinkable consequences, many years earlier . . .
Preceding The League of Gentlemen was The Last Fast Show Ever, which was spread over three nights (BBC2, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday). At its best, this sketch show driven by Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson has been hilarious, with its cast of characters repeating their catchphrases - "Suits you, sir" from the lascivious gentlemen's outfitters, "I was very, very, drunk" from the incomprehensible old lord at his club, and so on. The Last Fast Show Ever spread itself a bit thin, maybe for the demands of the schedulers, and bore the signs that it has run its course, with a lot of the sketches descending into more crudity than usual to get their laughs.
Here, at least, was a glimpse of the delightful Johnny Depp, as a US tourist trying to buy a suit with the drooling perverts hemming him in. Depp is reportedly a big fan of the show, which screens on cable in the US. Arabella Weir was, as always, excellent in her cameos as the South African product demonstrator at a department store, the dowdy girl-friend of the maddening joker Colin, and other parts.
Whitehouse is brilliant in his roles, and has the skill of conveying the pathos of characters such as the pink-teethed bore in the pub, who desperately tries to start conversations by identifying with fellow customers. On Tuesday night, he tried to make conversation with a black man in the pub by saying, "I was black once myself". I look forward to seeing more of him, and indeed all The Fast Show team, but Fast is slow now, and goes gently into that good January night.