Forty One years ago ‘Doctor Who’ aired its first Xmas special. It was rubbish.

For me there’s only one annual Xmas ‘must watch’ and it’s the 1984 BBC TV adaptation of former poet laureate John Masefield’s utterly peculiar seasonal children’s novella ‘The Box of Delights’.

I haven’t seen ‘Home Alone’ in well over a decade. I have no particular desire to correct this oversight…

A fondly remembered BBC tradition, it was always a mystery through the 1980s and 90s as to why exactly the BBC never revived the ‘Ghost Stories for Christmas’ series of literary chillers…

Over the course of Shiny Advent we’ve largely focused on things you could actually watch/read in a day, so we haven’t done any novels yet…

If there was any doubt that the BBC has a stranglehold on Christmas TV viewing in the UK, it must have been dispelled this year by the way rival broadcasters have moved their festive highlights out of the way of the BBC’s Christmas week onslaught…

There’s more than one Yuletime episode of ‘The X-Files’ to choose from, but the others tend towards the maudlin instead of the gothic humour…

“Cor blimey, isn’t life amazing and stuff, yeah right? Cos even if you’re a dull stereotype like me, you can still get an entire episode of ‘Torchwood’ devoted to you. And that’s, like, so amazing, yeah!”

On 17 December 1989, the first half-hour episode of ‘The Simpsons’ aired in the US, kicking off a sitcom of unprecedented popularity and one of the defining TV shows of the last decade and a half…

The Christmas episodes of ‘The West Wing’ are unremittingly bloody miserable…