My Robust Plan to Stop Streaming Services from Ruining Christmas

Christmas is all about planning. Buy your presents early (haven’t bought anything yet and my daily routine has been disrupted due to mail strikes), order meat of your choice in November (it’s bound to be beef ribs en route in the back of someone’s van), plan your travel arrangements taking into account the risks of adverse weather conditions and the actions of the industry (oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, processing your cake for several months to achieve the optimal ratio of moisture and of taste, and whipping up a baked potato on Christmas Eve to put it in the oven a big day at your disposal for us.This guarantees us a stress-free holiday during which no one cries (except, for example, Snowman), no one is disappointed and no one threatens blood relatives with a meat cleaver.

Obviously, I’m more of the “Wing it” type. I’ll be at John Lewis’s on the 24th at 4:00 pm to find out what’s left of the Emma Bridgewater collection that I haven’t bought for my mom in a panic for the past 10 years. Depending on the move of the East Midlands Railway employees in the coming days, I will probably be asking strangers on Twitter to take them home. Keep fists. Do not worry. Everything will be fine. It’s ever.

But there is one area where planning is critical: deciding what to watch on TV. Because I can’t spend another year watching my dad slowly scroll through everything on BBC iPlayer, Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, All4, Apple TV+ and all the other streaming platforms I forgot about but subscribed to and reply : “You heard? about it?”, “Who’s in?”, “Does he have good reviews?” – he could try to read his daughter’s newspaper to find answers to the last question. Ignore the butcher knife, I’m often tempted to hit him over the head with the remote control.

We all get nostalgic for Christmas TV, don’t we? It’s not as good as it used to be! Why doesn’t anyone else write a good Christmas special? Isn’t it great when we highlighted our favorite shows on radio times and the whole country sat and looked at something together? Deal with it and watch the replay, my advice to you. The real problem is how not to spend hours every night feeling frustrated, angry, and paralyzed by decision fatigue caused by overwhelmed streaming choices (wasn’t that supposed to make life easier). make?).

Trying to find something that not everyone has seen, that is suitable for all parties and that everyone is in the mood for, is more difficult than finding the right sauce. Even more difficult when you consider the language barrier: a friend spent many Christmases directing David Attenborough and Carol’s concerts, so lack of English is not a problem.

My sister and I only have two words to say…Fog“ – and here we are in my grandma’s living room watching an outrageously lousy Stephen King adaptation that someone accidentally picked out of desperation in 2009 and that everyone was too tired to protest against. I thought it would never end. I was hoping some big, terrible beast would break in and crush me, just to cut the two hour lead time. It’s really not worth it if television is the meaning of Christmas in my opinion.

So: plan, plan, plan. It’s not too late yet. Secretly assign one person in your group to create a guide (I mean one: it’s a “too many cooks” situation), show him the “best TV shows of the year” and “best movies”. assign them, mark them, add to favorites, “list” them – whatever it takes to put them first and in the center so that whoever finds himself with this poisoned bowl (remote control) in his hand will not was tempted to delve into the annals at length to find something half decent.

Put the biggest and best things right in their faces, give the group a few options, and make them all good ones that can’t be argued with. They will think it was their choice, and it was: people sometimes need to be nudged in the right direction, away from the algorithm. I also suggest a reflection time of up to five minutes.

So what do we see in our house? With my solid plan, expert advice, and decades of the best audiovisual entertainment ever caught on tape, at the end of the Amazon Firestick?

Probably as usual: corrie, Challenge University and, repeated over several days, the BBC Four Slow television film All aboard! Sledging, in which the camera is attached to the head of a reindeer and follows its journey through the Norwegian wilderness to the sound of bells and the crunch of snow as the soundtrack. It’s not a glossy box set, and it didn’t top the year-end lists, but it’s so mesmerizing and tender that it seems to calm rising family tensions in seconds. My father has had it on a Virgin box since 2015. Maybe he was the one with the plan.