ITV should be embarrassed by its Christmas TV lineup

It was fitting, somehow, that Christmas 2024’s two biggest televisual finales were distinctively British twists on Hollywood clichés. Wallace and Gromit, doing battle with Feathers McGraw in a low-speed canal boat chase over the Ribblehead viaduct, and Smithy chasing Nessa to the docks before she could take a boat to the Strait of Malacca. Forget fast cars, forget airports: this is Christmas as St George intended it.

The BBC were quick to proclaim the triumph of Gavin & Stacey. And rightly so: overnight viewing figures suggested that 12.32 million people had tuned into the finale, making it the most watched Christmas TV since 2008, when Strictly Come Dancing bowed out on the big day. And 9.4 million people watched Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, a figure that would’ve topped each year since 2019, when an audience of 11.6 million tuned into – you guessed it – Gavin & Stacey. It is all in stark contrast to last year, when the King’s Speech proved the day’s biggest broadcast with a measly 5.9 million viewers. The BBC was already threatening yuletide hegemony then, scoring nine of the top 10 biggest shows of the day. This year they have swept the board.

It has become very clear, to the public as well as critics, that ITV has abdicated the festive period. They counterprogrammed the second Downton Abbey movie, from 2022, against the conclusion of Gavin & Stacey, while Emmerdale and Corrie had to do battle with the multimillion-pound Wallace and Gromit extravaganza. Lowlights of ITV’s Christmas Day schedule included a repeat of the Bullseye Christmas special (which first aired on the 22nd) and Ainsley’s Festive Flavours, at 2pm, for anyone who hadn’t decided on their Christmas meal by that point.

The total scheduling dominance of the BBC is both a negative reflection on their competitors and a virtuosic show of strength from the corporation. It is the icing on the cake – the crown of blue fire on the pudding – of a superb year for the BBC, which has aired some of its most ambitious new shows, like We Might Regret This and The Listeners, as well as superb literary adaptations like Mr Loverman and Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light. All that while steering clear of another Line of Duty knock-off.

But Christmas is not about flexing your creative muscles. The formula for success at Christmastime is different from any other part of the year. Firstly, people still actually watch linear television, as the farewell to Barry Island proved. It is the punctuation of the big day (“We need to be done with dinner in time for Wallace & Gromit”; “You need to stop arguing about Brexit before Gavin & Stacey”) and has held that responsibility, even as streaming services, including BBC iPlayer, have stepped in.

Secondly, it has to be pan-generational. That doesn’t just mean that programming should be filled with Aardman-style sight gags, so that the grown-ups can think about Robert De Niro in Cape Fear while the kiddos coo over an evil penguin. Most children will, after all, sugar crash in the late afternoon and be passed out by 7pm. No, the true test of a show’s timeless appeal is whether it can both keep the grandkids off TikTok and stop Grandpa falling asleep in the comfy armchair. The demands of viewing for different ages are as stretched now as it’s ever been, but Christmas can be a time to correct that.

Gavin & Stacey proved the perfect solution to this problem. While it doesn’t quite have the ubiquity amongst truculent teens as, say, Friends or Gilmore Girls, it is a show that has quietly built its reputation as a comfort watch. On last week’s episode of The Graham Norton Show, actor, and millennial pin-up, Timothée Chalamet flexed some newly acquired knowledge of the show in front of its creators, Ruth Jones and James Corden. “I know this is the end of the third season,” he said, with a charming lack of confidence. “It’s been going for 17 years,” Jones corrected, sending Chalamet into fits of self-effacing giggles. “Three seasons over 17 years,” Norton pointed out, “they’re not prolific.”

And they’re not. Gavin & Stacey is that uniquely British thing – a programme beloved of the nation, which has been on for donkey’s years, but has only produced a sum total of 22 episodes. There is a grand total of 275 watchable minutes of Wallace & Gromit across its 6 films since 1989. Similarly, Outnumbered, Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin’s sitcom about family chaos, has managed a monster 36 episodes since the show began, back in August 2007. They returned for a festive one-off after eight years. Barack Obama was president when it last aired.

But while Outnumbered, which took the prime slot on Boxing Day, seems to have divided critics and fans – with most feeling like the show has lost its frenetic magic – the BBC can reflect on a job well done. Specials for EastEnders, Call the Midwife and Doctor Who all provided their customary returns of modest but engaged audiences (it is hard to imagine, now, that 17 million tuned in to EastEnders on Christmas Day to watch the return of Dirty Den in 2003). These were shows that didn’t make concessions to the casual viewers. They were for the fans, and if you’re a Whovian you’re going to spare the time.

Wallace & Gromit and Gavin & Stacey, though, proved that there is still space for a showstopper in the schedule. When I missed the critics screening of Gavin & Stacey a week ago, I made a show of disappointment for the sake of my professional reputation. But secretly, I was pleased. It meant that I could watch the show as it was intended: half-cut on mulled wine, full to bursting with turkey and potatoes, and together, in a room full of people struggling to remember where they’ve “seen the actor who plays Dave Coaches before”. Christmas perfection.