My New Year’s TV recommendations
New Year’s Eve
Channel 4 – Amazing Spaces Show and Ice Special 7pm ***New***
I love Amazing Spaces, would love to live in these kind of small spaces, and would love to design my own. It could not get better for me as he is in the Cold North looking at a number of different properties.
Architect George Clarke and master artisan Will Hardie find out how Norway, a country with some of the harshest weather on the planet, has become a leader in architectural design. Buildings include a treehouse that can withstand nine tons of snowfall and gale force winds, and an ice hotel complete with 30 rooms, a bar, and even a snow chapel. Plus, a moveable home that has kept members of its community safe for hundreds of years
BBC 1 – The Graham Norton Show 10:20pm ***New***
It as to be New Year’s Eve in with The Graham Norton Show and his A-listers filling his oversize sofa while on Channel Four Alan Carr is playing around with the same old Z-listers from reality TV no one really cares about.
Hugh Jackman, Zendaya, and Zac Efron, who star in The Greatest Showman, a new movie musical about circus maestro PT Barnum, join Graham. Other guests include Doctor Foster's Suranne Jones and Gary Oldman, who discusses playing Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour. With music from Leading Ladies, the super-group consisting of Amber Riley, Beverley Knight and Cassidy Janson, who perform One Night Only.
New Year’s Day
BBC 1 – A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong 1:15pm ***New (Repeat)***
I will miss this tonight due to other commitments so I was pleased to see a quick repeat for New Year’s Day with a perfect time slot.
This is the latest raid on TV by the Mischief Theatre Company, whose stage productions (The Play That Goes Wrong, The Comedy about the Bank Robbery and others) have proved blockbusting, award-winning hits full of finely tuned slapstick that teeters on the edge of chaos but never quite falls in.
This time their fictional counterpart, the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society, brings its genius for catastrophe-farce to A Christmas Carol.
The idea is that after last year’s Peter Pan shambles, the company has been banned by the BBC, but force themselves back on screen by hijacking a starry version of the Dickens classic that is being broadcast live.
From there, they do it their own way, with the new Jacob Marley having some difficulty with his ghostly chains and narrator Diana Rigg held up in traffic. But the show must go on…
BBC 1 – Grandpa’s Great Escape 6:55pm ***New***
A TV drama based on a David Walliams book is becoming as much a Christmas tradition as the fairy on top of the tree. This one, his sixth festive outing, is a heart-warming story about the close relationship between a boy (Kit Connor) and his grandfather, who was a Second World War flying ace.
Except, sadly, Grandpa (Tom Courtenay) an actor I have long admired has Alzheimer’s disease and his episodes of confusion land him in Twilight Towers, a dreadful home for the elderly run by a cruel Miss Trunchbull figure (Jennifer Saunders). When Jack helps his grandpa escape (come on, that’s not giving anything away), you’ll be cheering them on.
It’s full of comedy stereotypes (including Walliams as a boring dad obsessed with traffic cones) but there are a few tear-jerking moments too.
BBC 1 – Maleficent 5pm ***Film***
The untold story of Disney's most iconic villain from the 1959 classic "Sleeping Beauty”. A beautiful, pure-hearted young woman with stunning black wings, Maleficent has an idyllic life growing up in a peaceable forest kingdom, until one day when an invading army of humans threatens the harmony of the land. Maleficent rises to be the land's fiercest protector, but she ultimately suffers a ruthless betrayal - an act that begins to turn her pure heart to stone.
Bent on revenge, Maleficent faces an epic battle with the king of the humans and, as a result, places a curse upon his newborn infant Aurora. As the child grows, Maleficent realizes that Aurora holds the key to peace in the kingdom - and to Maleficent's true happiness as well.
Sky Premiere - Kong: Skull Island ***Film***
A secret government organization mounts an expedition to Skull Island, an uncharted territory in the Pacific. Led by an explorer (John Goodman) and a lieutenant colonel (Samuel L. Jackson), the group recruit a disillusioned soldier (Tom Hiddleston) and a photojournalist (Brie Larson) to investigate the island's peculiar seismic activity.
But once there, they discover that Skull Island is home to a gigantic ape called King Kong, and find themselves caught up in an ongoing war between the beast and the area's indigenous predators. Jordan Vogt-Roberts directed this reboot of the classic monster franchise.
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