Detective work required

There's gold among the dross of the holiday viewing season, and here is help to find it

There's gold among the dross of the holiday viewing season, and here is help to find it

"THE one thing women don't want to find in their stockings on Christmas morning is their husband," Joan Rivers famously joked. Certainly the festive season is not one for shocks or confronting surprises of any kind.

And you won't get many as you try to work out what to watch on TV, certainly not on the commercial free-to-air networks. At first glance it looks like the usual TV summer of hype and hope.

The network programmers are again busily promoting the holiday viewing calendar as a vital part of the networks' schedule. But the reality is that discerning viewers will, as usual, turn mainly to the ABC and the pay-TV channels, or lustily delve into their treasured cache of DVDs, especially hoarded for commercial-free holiday viewing.

The months between ratings periods for the commercial networks have always been a dumping ground, with shows ripped out of context and chronology (though that's happening more and more in prime time, too).

There are new versions of failed shows, returning programs, and new episodes of oldies - already dead in the long night of the ratings - are retrieved and recycled. Some are "relaunched" in the hope, or is that belief, that no one saw them the first time. How advertisers maintain any trust in TV is one of popular culture's great mysteries when shows shift so abruptly and sometimes so bizarrely.

For example, it's been a given that if the commercial stations talk of testing new shows through the summer, then they can't have much confidence in them. So why should we? Why would you want to advertise on them?

Some of the offerings this year seem dire, to say the least, some of them rushed on last week as soon as the ratings period ended. But look really closely and there are some surprises, with Ten, and to a lesser extent Seven, cleverly using the off-ratings period to build an audience for a few classy shows that still haven't found their constituency.

Like the ABC, Ten is simply ploughing on with a slate of series TV hardly different to its ratings period schedule, though not quite as mass-market in appeal. There are new seasons of several of my favourites, classy TV even if their figures so far don't bring screams of joy to network carpet-strollers.

Law & Order (Friday, Ten, 8.30pm), TV's prince of resilience, returned last week with its hard-boiled, street-wise cops and lawyers and their strange melancholy and "seen-it-all" pessimism.

The FBI procedural Numb3rs (Tuesday, Ten, 9.30pm) is also back with its un-CSI interest in the characters' family dynamics, and especially the cool maths that ensures riveting viewing for anyone who failed mental arithmetic.

And Ten is running season five of the brilliant American version of Ricky Gervais's The Office (Tuesdays and Thursdays, 8pm), starring the wonderful Steve Carell. Surely no other TV comedy at the moment knows just what decent sympathies may be trampled to death and why sadness may be a condition of life that can't be obliterated even by laughter.

Seven's best new show, the British police procedural series Wallander (Saturday, 8.30pm), starts tonight, starring fine British actor Kenneth Branagh. Based on the classy novels of Henning Mankell, this series of crime dramas set in Sweden could be a sleeper, though it's more ABC Sunday nights than conventional commercial-style viewing.

And Seven shrewdly began repeats of the great Steven Spielberg series Band of Brothers (Sundays and Wednesdays, 10.30pm) last week. The 10-parter is based on Stephen E. Ambrose's nonfiction bestseller about a World War II US army unit.

Shown on Nine years ago, the story of "E" Easy Company, from initial training to the end of the conflict is classic TV drama. And the screenings lead into the premiere in early February of the highly anticipated follow-up The Pacific, which tracks three American Marines through the same war. The series was shot largely in Melbourne.

Nine is hardly offering a great deal of innovative Christmas viewing (lots of great cricket, though) but I never miss Carols by Candlelight (Thursday, December 24, 8pm). It's one of TV's great traditions, televised by the Nine Network since 1979.

In a sense this rather camp, often tacky show remains one of the last links with variety TV. Every popular vocalist of the time seems to turn up, as well as all the current celebrity wannabes. This year we get to see stars of musicals Mamma Mia and Jersey Boys, alongside some former Australian Idol identities Guy Sebastian, Ricki-Lee Coulter and Paulini Curuenavuli.

Karl Stefanovic and Lisa Wilkinson from Nine's breakfast show Today will host, again replacing Uncle Ray Martin who is no longer a network regular and is oddly missed. Avuncular Martin hosted the carols for 19 years with the panache of a frustrated showman. You sensed he loved the crowds and working live in TV's oldest tradition where anything can happen. These days we see less spontaneous performance because TV is now a highly manipulated medium.

Carols by Candlelight is always ritualistically switched to in our house, even if I'm the only one watching. I always find myself in a strange, oddly pleasurable time warp, hoping for Graham Kennedy and the cast of In Melbourne Tonight to make a surprise appearance as they sometimes used to do.

Most of them are gone but watch out for some unpredictable theatre when old rockers Frankie J. Holden, Glenn Shorrock, Wilbur Wilde, Joe Camilleri, Normie Rowe and Ross Wilson appear this year.

The ABC - now with three channels - has had another great year of innovative and entertaining new content, and it is taking that confidence into the Christmas season. Standouts include Oliver Twist (ABC1, Sunday, December 20, 8.30pm), a great two-parter starring the wonderful Timothy Spall. It breathes new life into Dickens's classic while staying gorgeously faithful to the integrity of the original.

Bush Slam With H.G. Nelson (ABC1, Tuesday, December 29, 8pm) is a six-episode series taking the comedian into Australia's country towns, exploring the folk spirit with performers including Melinda Schneider and James Blundell.

The ABC has the right idea: don't treat holiday viewing as any different to what's delivered during the rest of the year. Of course, repeats are never a problem when they are as good as the Father Ted Christmas Special (ABC2, December 24, 10.30pm), featuring Ireland's endearingly dysfunctional ecclesiastics, feckless fathers Ted, Dougal and Jack.

In this irresistible special there are abandoned Christmas babies, the Cleric of the Year competition, and Ted and Dougal marooned in a lingerie department while Christmas shopping. Terrified about the implications of publicly being caught near the scanties they stumble on more lost priests; one is injured violently by a bra.

Pay TV just ploughs on relentlessly during the summer. As always it's competitive and aggressive, with many award-winning first-run series premiering in this period and holiday marathons of favourites such as Discovery's Mythbusters (Friday, December 25 from 7.30pm) and popular Shark Week (Monday to Sunday beginning December 7, 8.30pm).

The History Channel premieres the remarkable series Life After People (Sundays, 7.30pm from tomorrow) on the exploration of a world wiped clean of humanity. It's not one for the climate-change deniers.

And Showcase's Dexter (Thursdays, 8.30pm, starting last Thursday) is back with an all-new season in which TV's favourite serial killer is now a responsible husband and father.

A good lead-in to the period of planning your family meals is LifeStyle Foods' Christmas Cooks' Challenge (daily from December 14, 11.30am) as each day various British celebrity chefs compete in cook-off master classes. This is the perfect way to practise your recipes for turkey and date tagine with couscous or that rack of venison with Brussels sprout gratin.

It's just as well there's so much to choose from on the now scores of channels because these days everybody is watching something different on another screen in a different room. PlayStations, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, iPods, Xboxes, video games, online gambling, chat rooms, blogs, and Blu-Ray all compete for attention.

This is an era, after all, that encourages social isolation, although perhaps young people always resented being crammed together as a family to watch old TV shows.

Some might bemoan it, but for me it's one of the joys of the summer season: you can have time to yourself and, these days, have a plethora of viewing choices. My partner has a cache of British property improvement shows, to which she is addicted, and has downloaded and stored up. There will be days when we will meet only at the fridge.

Last year I devoured the first season of Mad Men, so I treated myself to the full second season this year in the lead-up to Movie Extra's screening of the third series in early February.

Set in the smoky, executive rooms of Madison Avenue's advertising agents in the 1960s, the series looks at the ruthless profession that shaped the hopes and dreams of Americans on a daily basis. It's just the place to retire to for an entire summer.

* * *

THE BEST ON THE BOX
Oliver Twist ABC1, Sunday, December 20, 8.30pm
The Office Ten, Thursdays, 8pm
Bush Slam with H.G. Nelson ABC1, from Tuesday, December 29, 8pm
Band of Brothers Seven, Sundays and Wednesdays, 10.30pm
Dexter Showcase, Thursdays, 8.30pm