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…

The Nightmare Before Christmas’ is a late relic of stop motion animation, an art now almost entirely eradicated by CG animation…

The BBC may have caused a bit of noise this year with its decision to cancel ‘Top of the Pops’ but it has, very quietly, kept the show ticking over…

While there have been many adaptations of the Dickens classic over the years, few capture the heart of the tale and convey it with such lean brevity as this 1983 Disney offering…

Tim Burton’s sequel to ‘Batman’ is riddled with perverse decision making – not only is it a big summer movie set at Christmas, but it’s also loaded with bleak moments of humorous violence and fetishistic relationships…

There are some lifestyle choices which can’t be justified by any objective standard, and a full-on enthusiasm for Chevy Chase is one of those…

Given that ‘Only Fools and Horses’ has had about three episodes designed to stand as its definitive finale, it’s hard to imagine a time when the BBC wasn’t bothered about giving closure to its sitcoms…

We’re now more than half way through the first season of Torchwood and despite some shaky moments, it’s shaping up to be a bold, confident, crazy and clever show…

Bruce Willis may not be the obvious contender for title of Christmas action hero (Arnold Schwarzenegger can, after all, draw on Jingle All the Way, and good luck to him with that)…

Just in case you thought this advent calendar business was all going to be dewy eyed nostalgia about the movies we used to watch on TV when we were still young… here’s something new.

It’s semi-remarkable in itself that a Channel 4 sitcom made it to a third series only two years after the first…

What could be more Christmassy than suicide?

The tradition of the Christmas Special is embedded in British culture…

The Brett/Burke ‘Blue Carbuncle’ is perfect Christmas viewing. It has some substance as well as atmosphere but it really gets the festive juices flowing.

People have their own preferences as to which is the best film version of ‘A Christmas Carol’. For my money, however, the pick of the bunch is Bill Murray’s ‘Scrooged’.

It’s hard to forget during the commercial onslaught through autumn and winter, but Christmas isn’t just about presents, booze and food…

‘Brazil’ is Terry Gilliam’s absurdist take on Orwell’s ‘Nineteen-Eighty-Four’: not merely a totalitarian dystopia but an incompetent one, where it is not thoughtcrime which destroys you but a mistake in the paperwork.

Here at Shiny Shelf we’ve come up with the wheeze of doing a sort of reviews advent calendar, building up to the festive period by writing about a Christmassy movie or TV episode for each day of advent…

If you go down to the woods today…

‘Stranger Than Fiction’ is a warm and fuzzy experience, the shortcomings of the plot made up for by a witty script…

Who killed Superman? (Clue: For one time only the answer is not Geoff Johns.)

The art of scheduling isn’t dead at BBC4, where they still know how to string together some programmes on a common theme and make a good season out of it…

‘Casino Royale’ is a superb film, it’s a superb modern-day adaptation of a book that would seem to defy any such thing and it’s also a superb Bond film.

Low budgets and high camp in cosmic Cardiff…

‘Seven Soldiers’ concludes, Carey’s ‘X-Men’ continues, the not-Bay ‘Transformers’ movie adaptation, some ‘Civil War’ tie-ins and penultimate ‘Planetary’…

The next wave of Russell T Davies’ ‘Doctor Who’ based takeover of the BBC is here, with his first ‘Who’ spin-off ‘Torchwood’…

Grant Morrison’s take on one of Image’s most recognisable properties crossbreeds the two most notable previous ‘eras’ of the book to incendiary effect.

Well, I never expected that.

The second series of ‘Extras’ has concerned itself with sticking the boot into BBC1 lowest-common-denominator comedy, with questionable results…

This is the first of 2entertain’s budget-priced ‘Doctor Who’ releases, and it has raised the odd complaint from fans…

Go back a decade or two and Channel 4 was the coming force of TV in the 80s…

There’s a semi-serious strand running through ‘Clerks 2′, a maudlin tone of lost opportunity that matches with the slacker ethos of the first movie…

Surprisingly restrained in its use of graphic violence the first episode of BBC One’s drama-documentary series ‘Ancient Rome – The Rise and Fall of an Empire’ boasted outstanding production values and an extraordinary central turn from Michael Sheen.

Marvel simultaneously relaunch ‘Blade’ and ‘Union Jack’, two of their less popular night stalkers…

‘That Mitchell and Webb Look’ is a TV version of the radio sketch comedy series from the team behind Channel 4’s skin-crawlingly excellent ‘Peep Show’.

‘Blackbeard’ is a quintessentially BBC response to the ongoing pirate craze…

For the 40th anniversary, some top tens and top fives, of episodes, movies, moments and general stuff, compiled by those of us at Shiny Shelf.

I didn’t want the fortieth anniversary of ‘Star Trek’ to pass by without some comment from those of us here at Shiny Shelf.

‘The Mark of the Rani’ is one of the strongest stories from the mid-eighties (lets say 85 – 87) drought that ‘Doctor Who” suffered.

For any rabid ‘24′ fan the past few months have been a cruel drought of politically convoluted techno-thrillers.

As the original theatrical cut of ‘Star Wars’, unseen for nearly thirty years, makes its way onto DVD, Jim Smith looks back at the movie’s genesis and production.