BBC Reveals Line-Up For Christmas and Winter
The BBC has unveiled the schedules which will take its ratings war with ITV into the season of goodwill and the New Year. £42m has been spent on the two week Christmas line-up for BBC1, while the £158m spend on the winter schedule includes £59m spent on drama.
Pay-TV may have reduced the pull of terrestrial film premieres, but this hasn’t stopped the Beeb placing Hollywood hits in prime positions in its Christmas schedule. Christmas Eve will see sci-fi action movie Independence Day sandwiched between homegrown stalwarts Auntie’s Sparkling Bloomers and a seasonal They Think It’s All Over. Christmas Day will see a similar story, with two episodes of EastEnders flanking Titanic. Kids choice will come on Boxing Day with 101 Dalmations.
Most press attention has been grabbed by one-off comedy, Mirrorball, going out on 22 December. Written by and starring the original Absolutely Fabulous line-up, transported to the world of West End musicals, it has apparently inspired Jennifer Saunders to revive Ab Fab for a new series in future. Other comedy specials over Christmas include Jim Davidson, Victoria Wood and The Royle Family on Christmas Day, Caroline Quentin in Kiss Me Kate on Boxing Day and Lenny Henry on 30 December.
The main drama offering over Christmas will be an adaptation of the classic Lorna Doone, showing in two parts on Christmas Eve and Boxing Day. Meanwhile Colin Firth appears without breeches (calm down, its a modern day story) on 28 December, in the title role of Donovan Quick, a story of a latter-day Don Quixote who builds a successful one-bus company against the odds.
Drama is the biggest gong being banged by the Beeb for the winter schedules, thanks to a £20m increase in spending since last year. The results are to include Ronan Bennett’s Rebel Heart, about a young man’s coming of age around the time of the Easter Uprising in Ireland, the return of Paul Abbott’s Clocking Off and his new series about a married woman living a double life, Best of Both Worlds. Nostalgia will be provided by the adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s tale of the upper classes in wartime Love in a Cold Climate, and for those with shorter memories, by the return of tortured schoolboy Adrian Mole in The Cappuccino Years, with Mole having grown up to be a celebrity chef and Pandora a “Blair Babe” MP.
BBC1 has signed physical comedian Lee Evans as part of its comedy and entertainment line-up for a show called Lee Evans- So What Now?. He will be joined on the schedule by Pauline Quirk in her first sitcom since Birds of a Feather, in which the life of the modern day office worker provides the backdrop for Office Gossip.
New Year’s Eve will have seen the end of the Castaway 2000 experiment, but those hooked on survival reality TV will be sated by Surviving the Iron Age, which takes a group of 17 people, including children, back to Iron Age conditions to see how they cope. Some of the participants are the children of people who undertook the experiment when the BBC pioneered the idea 30 years ago- which goes to show that watching Big Brother’s wall painting and caveman politics was not necessarily an original idea…
The Human Face sees the unlikely team of John Cleese and Elizabeth Hurley examining the “mysteries of identity, beauty, creativity and fame hidden behind the mask of life itself” as they chart the story of the face over the past 500 million years. Iron Age participants, presumably denied facial scrubs and night cream, will probably want to give that one a miss.
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