You can’t have the great British Christmas without a dose of Morecambe & Wise, now can you? Throw in a bit of James Bond for good measure and you had the archetypal 1970s TV line-up.
For Morecambe & Wise, 1978 saw their first Christmas show back at ITV after the previous year’s BBC Christmas show had been seen by 28.7million viewers, the biggest single audience of the decade.
Such was the fascination with the famous guests who would turn out for Morecambe and Wise that Ernie revealed, “People actually send spies to the rehearsal rooms. It’s incredible. You can’t keep a secret nowadays. So we have made a game of it. We drop names accidentally on purpose, like say Orson Welles, or Paul Newman, and say, ‘oops.’ The we watch the newspapers the next day. We still have a surprise or two for the night.”
The big films on Christmas Day were ‘Battle For The Planet of the Apes’, which followed a festive edition of ‘3-2-1’ in the afternoon, with ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ as the warm-up for Eric & Ernie. And don’t worry soap fans, there was an early Christmas Day episode of ‘Crossroads’ too, giving you the perfect excuse to go and get the spuds on.
You can catch up on the whole festive ITV package here.
