Christmas has always been a big deal on British television, with Christmas Day effectively being our rough equivalent of Sweeps Week in America – although nowadays I’m not sure how true that is anymore. Anyway, I had to do a Christmas themed post.
Below is a remarkable Christmas closedown from Granada, taking place on 23rd December in… erm, the 1980s. Weirdly, I can’t properly pin down the year. It’s either 1984 or 1985, and the copyright date at the start would seem to confirm the former, but the TV guides available to me have some inconsistencies.
Instead of Granada’s normal end-of-day theme being played out – like Thames, they never “did” the national anthem – there’s an exceptional version of In The Bleak Midwinter dubbed over a lovely montage of local North West areas looking all Christmassy:
And in the comments of that upload is one Steve Green, the man who actually put those visuals together! In an attempt to save what he’s written for posterity, I’m going to copy and paste it here.
I made that closing film using stock footage that the news cameramen used to take whilst they had a few spare moments. The library dug it out for me, I got it transferred to 2 inch tape and spent about 3 hours in an edit suite putting it together with the help of a more experienced promo maker (Graham?). It went out about 6 times. Head of Presentation, Dave Black chose the music.
The full quality version of that same music can be found in an official upload on Youtube. It was performed by Annie Haslam and the band Nevada:
And now, all that remains for me to say is that on behalf of Just Me and everyone else here at No Really It’s Just Me On My Own, this is Michelle Lyons wishing you a massive buttery smooth goody yum-yum gumdrops night, and I hope you have a lovely, super sparkling Christmas, with absolutely all the knobs on.
