If I could sum up 2025 in a nutshell I’d have to say it’s not been my favourite year. If I could sum it up better I’d say it’s been a bit whiffy and rather a lot of effort to digest. And if I wanted to sum 2025 up with the full use and impact of profane brevity I’d say it’s been shit. Fucking shit. Not that it’s all been bad – no year alive is totally without its merits – but the gentle rain of sadness and disappointment has been noticeably heavier in 2025. More things to give cause to pause; pause and reflect on just what a tightrope walk it is to navigate oneself through life and to always find a happy place at the other end of the wire. I won’t miss 2025, and I doubt it will miss me.
Fortunately, it’s not all doom and gloom because, as we have been told, constantly since mid November, there is a positive circus of goodies coming our way thanks to that greatest giver of inertia and apathy – the television. Why worry about death and paralysis when you’ve got thousands of channels all lined up with festive shit ready and waiting to hypnotise you? Why worry about alcoholism, credit card debt and domestic abuse when you have a Sistine Chapel ceilings worth of gaudy rubbish to plough through between now and New Year’s Day? Someone, somewhere must have made a kind of effort to celebrate the silliest of seasons because a portion of what’s gracing the little screen this Christmas will be branded as original content, for we will be expected to gasp with appreciation until we realise that the label ‘original content’ is in no way whatsoever a guarantee of quality, or indeed, ironically, originality. In fact, some of the original content that is being wheeled out over the next few days will struggle to even call itself content – content suggesting emotional tangibility, absorbing, rewarding and worth our while. It won’t be, because so little that is new is worth the slightest bit of our while on the best day, let alone Christmas Day. But hey, why am I moaning? We’re all in the same boat, because unless you work in a soup kitchen or a petrol station you probably might have quite a few hours of feeling your soul die on the sofa ahead of you, so here’s a guide to some of the unimaginative bollocks you can catch as you flick from channel to channel, slowly going mad, like a particularly put upon laboratory rat.
I’m sticking to the big channels here, by the way. Life is too precious to bore you with what you can watch in between advert breaks on Legend or Dave or U&Drama or ITV4 + 24, the last one being a new concept whereby you can literally live the same television day, every day for the rest of your life, thus freeing up valuable time to never again have to engage with any sort of valuable emotion other than what it must feel like to rot, very slowly, in hell.
23rd December. Shit films that you wouldn’t watch at any other time of the year unless you were drinking before lunch include ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’ (hint: it isn’t), ‘Hook’, ‘Jurassic Park III’ and ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ (which is textbook example of a film that is so very far away from being anywhere near as good as you were promised it would be). Between those you can watch Arsenal v Crystal Palace in the League Cup, a very detached view of ‘Christmas at Kensington Palace’, which will have no similarity whatsoever to the lives of anyone except, of course, the people who live at Kensington Palace. Oh, you can also find out more than you ever needed to know about making stuff in a factory (possibly more even than the people who work in the factory) with Paddy McGuiness in the suitable titled ‘Inside The Christmas Factory’. And it’s not even Christmas Eve yet.
Christmas Eve. The second most Christmassy day of the year certainly won’t disappoint you, provided you recently parted ways with your taste for culture and at the exact same moment were given a dangerously high dosage injection of tolerance for thick-witted drivel. If you’re one of the three people left on the planet that haven’t seen ‘Paddington’, ‘Love Actually’, ‘Minions’, ‘Babe’, ‘Home Alone’, ‘Santa Claus – The Movie’ or those stone cold festive classics, er, ‘Calamity Jane’ and ‘Indecent Proposal’, then boy oh boy are you in for a treat. Alternatively, or if you plan your day well enough, as well as, you can indulge in a ‘Great British Sewing Bee Christmas Special’ (followed by a 95 minute long ‘Gavin and Stacey’ repeat because, presumably, they’re hoping it might have magically become funny this time round), an ”All Creatures Great and Small Christmas Special’, ‘Royal Carols -Together at Christmas’ (provided you go back to the homeless shelter as soon as Hark The Herald Angel Sings finishes up), and a full hour of ‘The Last Leg’ (starring Rick Astley AND Alison Hammond, please Jesus, stop, you’re spoiling us), a comedy show so thoroughly deprived of comedy that by this point you may be hoping to see out the rest of your Christmas from the inside of a coffin.
Christmas Day. More movie fun, with a pick and mix that even the most remote and isolated Amazonian tribes must be utterly fucking sick of: ‘White Christmas’ (which may be an old favourite for some, but that doesn’t stop it being unbearably third rate); ‘Babe 2’; ‘Sister Act 2’; ‘Home Alone 2’; ‘Armageddon’ and ‘Love Actually’ (again, in case you missed it yesterday and had forgotten the plot of a film that you’ve seen more times than you have your own feet). You can also have some exhumed ‘Morecambe and Wise’, ‘A Bake Off Christmas Special’ in which celebrities attempt to make a showstopper than looks, and tastes, exactly like money for old rope, the obligatory star-studded faecal glitter ball that is the ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ special and finally, for those who can’t decide between a botched abortion and a miscarriage, you can drift towards acute alcohol poisoning with ‘Call The Midwife’, no doubt attaching itself to all that Christmas spirit with a well chewed umbilical cord. I’m ashamed to say that ‘Jaws’ is also on; ashamed because it is the best film ever made and it really shouldn’t be wasted on something as lame as Christmas.
Boxing Day. By Boxing Day you’ll be wishing it was the start of April, but you can easily distract yourself with knocking on for five hours of ‘The Ten Commandments’, which has got next to fuck all to do with Christmas but does solve Channel 5’s problem of not having the money to put anything else on between breakfast and lunch. There are sequels to ‘Minions’ and ‘Paddington’ along with ‘The Great Escape’ (people say it’s a tradition, but I just say it’s lazy), ‘Four Weddings….’ and one of those Pierce Brosnan Bond films which isn’t ‘Goldeneye’ and is therefore best left alone. More Christmas specials abound, including another dose of wire coat hanger action with the second part of ‘Call The Midwife’, a ‘Masked Singer’ and ‘The Festive Pottery Throw Down’, in which a few semi-famous people that no-one cares about attempt to make something out of clay that doesn’t resemble what recently dropped out of the back end of a rhino. Worst of all, and perhaps the lowlight of the whole season, is ‘ABBA vs Queen – Who Are The Greatest?’ (the obvious answer to which is neither), in which a panel of experts etc discuss which of these two huge acts made the least inspiring, most overrated and caustically irritating music of all time. Frankly, if this doesn’t make you regurgitate your sprouts nothing will.
From this point on it’s a lottery really. More specials, more sequels, more repeats. Same old shit, slightly different day. ‘Biggest Night of Musicals’, hosted by Jason Manford, sounds worse than an outbreak of Ebola in an overcrowded orphanage. Do we need another documentary about the Titanic? I had hoped ‘Torvill & Dean’s Last Dance’ might be something they’d have preferred to do in private. ‘The Celebrity Apprentice’ will be about as much fun as enduring open heart surgery without anaesthetic, only to learn that the surgeon suddenly remembered he’d left his scalpel tucked between your lungs just after he finished sewing your chest back up. There’s even a ‘DIY SOS’ featuring assorted Gladiators, which sounds like a waste of everyone’s time and effort. All that said though, it would be remiss of me not to mention ‘World’s Strongest Man’, a programme which threads it’s bulging, veiny path right through Christmas and New Year and truly is an act of blessed relief. Because the sight of grown men, most of them three quarters of the way to a heart attack and supported lovingly by wives so tiny they could actually eat them for breakfast, trying to outdo each other by lifting extremely heavy, and unlikely, objects for as long as possible or until their spines drop out of their muscular arseholes is more fun than almost everything else on TV at Christmas put together. There, I knew I could end on a high. Merry Christmas, whoever you are.
G B Burton. 23.12.2025
On stupidity......and other causes for concern. 