Christmas Telly

I guess my 76th birthday is as good a time as any to reflect on how things change. Earlier this week I was flicking through this week’s TV guide, wondering if there’d be anything I wanted to watch. And I wandered back down memory lane, to those innocent days when I would draw up a complex chart for at least ten days: four columns along the top for the main channels, boxes across for each of the days, and codes for what we’d be watching and what we’d be recording, so as to maximise the choices of four very different viewing tastes…Happy days.

And now, there’s almost nothing being transmitted that I want to watch. But there are riches galore on catchup, Netflix, mubi.com. So on iplayer alone in the last week I’ve savoured Death of Stalin, The Happy Prince and Paddington 2. You couldn’t get a wider spectrum of subject matter and tone, but all put together with vitality and intelligence, teamwork at the service of the grateful viewer.

And that’s leaving out Rocco and his Brothers, a three-hour monster from Visconti, which I watched as a spellbound sixthformer more than fifty years ago - and it still comes snarling off the screen, even if there are bits that now seem over the top. So it doesn’t matter too much that the weather’s not great. I can listen to the video of my son’s family performing Happy Birthday on What’s App in their dazzling Lidl Christmas jumpers, and know that I shan’t be short of entertainment.