Christmas Day audiences were faced with a choice between Del Boy and Arthur Daley – but what else do the festive schedules tell us about the era we lived in?
It’s Christmas 1985. Mrs Thatcher has been in power for just over six-and-a-half years and – appropriately enough – those zeitgeisty wheeler-dealers, Derek “Del Boy” Trotter and Arthur Daley, are on the covers of the Radio Times and the TV Times.
The television listing magazines of 30 years ago (there were just two of them back then), make for a fascinating read, and tell us much about the state of Britain in the middle of the 1980s. Although we can see evidence of cultural changes since 1978, the last Christmas before Thatcherism, we’re still five years away from the Broadcasting Act of 1990– and the television experience was still not as fragmented as today. Programmes aimed at all the family, including the elderly, just about held sway for peak viewing.
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