Tonight’s ABC North… in 1966 

25 December 2014 tbs.pm/5397

I 19661225 ABC North

ABC static trailer slide 1966From the TVTimes for Sunday 25 December 1966 comes this run down of what you could be watching on ABC North. Things worth noting:

  • This is ABC’s last Christmas Day
  • The Royal Palaces of Britain is an unusual BBC/ITV joint production, predating the more famous Royal Family documentary from 1969
  • No closedown at lunchtime
  • It may be Christmas Day, but ABC still pops on the dire imported series Adventures of the Seaspray as usual for a Sunday teatime, and trots out Eamonn Andrews as normal at 11.05pm
  • Rio Bravo was from ABPC-investor Warner Bros, explaining the ABC presentation tag

You Say

8 responses to this article

Kif Bowden-Smith 26 December 2014 at 9:24 pm

Their last Christmas Day indeed but not their last Christmas week – which was the following year. The vagaries of split week contracts!

Arthur Nibble 28 December 2014 at 10:52 pm

The Queen gets seven minutes, roughly the third of the time given to a programme featuring a rare Christmas day outing for Gordon Rollings. Who was Voytek, by the way?

I love the fact those prices in the Leroy Sunjet holiday advert are in guineas.

Alan Keeling 18 January 2015 at 8:23 pm

Nice to see that ABC screened 2 back-to-back episodes of Towers of London’s 1958 series of Tales from Dickens, which was last screened during school holiday periods in 1968.

Joanne Gray 4 October 2015 at 9:02 pm

The Tyne Tees produced show A Tour of Carols has Executive Producer Maxwell Deas credited. As a Tyne Tees viewer, I think I’m right in saying that Mr Deas was head of religious programming for the station and appeared on screen throughout the 1970s and 80s reading the region’s version of the Epilogue (he may have actually been a member of the Anglican clergy – I’m almost sure he was referred to as the”Reverend Maxwell Deas” – can any fellow North Easterners confirm, please?)

Les 8 October 2015 at 2:07 pm

Quite a lot of regional variations on christmas day, for example atv in london and anglia had a movie at 3 followed by a christmas edition of thunderbirds. Atv and westward had a doris day movie in the evening ‘young at heart’. Atv also took out an advert in the christmas daily mirror, wishing viewers a happy christmas.

Rediffusion for their part were on air at 7am on boxing day. Their christmas logo had rediffusion written in an olde english type of font.

Oh, and southern took ‘rio bravo’, but ran the cartoon huckleberry hound instead of seaspray. An interesting christmas for regional variations.

Ray Oliver 14 March 2016 at 11:37 pm

I am quite impressed by the range of programmes and the money spent on religious broadcasts.
Compared with ten years later, when ITV “threw in the towel” on Christmas Day due, possibly, to the lack of post Christmas advertising revenue available at the time.

Dot Nelson 11 December 2016 at 10:24 am

I sang in this programe A Tour of carols and would love to have a copy of the show can anyone help .

Russ J Graham 12 December 2016 at 12:50 pm

Virtually no material of this sort survives in the broadcasters’ archives due to any of the following:

– live material was rarely recorded
– videotape was expensive and was wiped for reuse
– film took a lot of expensive storage space
– non-entertainment and topical material was thought to have no value as it could not be sold abroad or repeated

For those reasons, the chances of this surviving are approaching zero.

However, you may consider searching ITN Source http://www.itnsource.com/en/ for such material, but please note this is a business-to-business service and therefore charges are accordingly expensive.

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