Christmas is the day when we watch ourselves watching television. Viewing is a self-conscious act: you sit in the same place, looking at the same box, as every other day, but it’s different. You’re taking part in a ritual. It’s amazing how quickly we manage to create traditions. Two generations ago, hardly anyone had a television set; now we all watch it on Christmas night, more to be part of the fabric of the nation than because there’s anything worth seeing.

And there are traditional things we all watch. Richard Attenborough once told me he cringed every year at his role as Santa Claus in the saccharine remake of Miracle on 34th Street, but then added: “I’m also in the best Christmas movie.” Which, of course, he is: The Great Escape. And there’s It’s a Wonderful Life, a film that had limited success at the cinema, but found immortality on television. And the Queen’s Speech. This year, Elizabeth became the oldest serving monarch in our history: she has now delivered 54 speeches to you, me and the Commonwealth, which makes it one of the longest-running programmes on television. And can you remember a single thing she has ever said to you? One joke, one moment of wit, insight, even just a flicker of warmth? I’ve employed this woman to be head of my state all my life, and I’ve yet to see her smile.

The one Christmas programme everyone over the age of 40 remembers with uncritical nostalgia is Morecambe and Wise. Nativities should have little Morecambes and Wises next to the sheep and the donkey. Sadly, I’m not allowed to do uncritical. Watching Morecambe and Wise: The Greatest Moment (Christmas Eve, UKTV Gold) reminded me of how low our entertainment needs used to be, how simple Christmas was: four doubles entendres, three catch phrases and one humiliated newsreader. There was a time when half the country watched Eric and Ernie’s Christmas Special, and you wonder what excuse the other half came up with. A lot of us watched because the alternative was Christmas with the Vienna Boys’ Choir, cartoon fairy tales from Czechoslovakia or playing Boggle with your grandmother and the lonely man from next door. Morecambe and Wise was the best on offer, and we were grateful, but it was thin pickings. I’ll be perfectly happy never to have to watch the breakfast stripper sketch, or Angela Rippon’s legs, ever again. I ask my children who André Previn was: never heard of him. And who could now name all the presenters who did the South Pacific sketch? But, oh, how we laughed. This ridiculing of celebrity was the first budding of a light-entertainment idea that ended up with I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!. This was a limp programme: a lot of talking heads telling us how brilliant Eric Morecambe’s timing was, which is unarguable – he died right on cue at 58, before he could turn into John Cleese or suffer the sad comedic dementia that is Bill Oddie.

Christmas is still the only day when nonTristrams take an interest in viewing figures. It’s comforting to know you were at the same party as everyone else. This year, I bet the audience will have gone to Doctor Who’s Christmas special with Kylie (Christmas Day, BBC1). “Christmas special” is one from the long, glittering list of festive oxymorons, and this one didn’t disappoint. Or, rather, it didn’t surprise. It was suitably disappointing – an orbiting remake of The Poseidon Adventure, with evil robot angels, and the only one to survive was the really selfish, unpleasant passenger. Which must have looked clever in the script, but in our living rooms, it all looked like big-screen aspiration with small-screen production values and half a radio script. It was a thin joke.

Kylie was perfectly adequate as a waitress. She can act as well as anyone in Doctor Who, which is to say, not so much as to startle the robots. Why she wasn’t used to sing or dance, who can tell? This whole episode turned out to be a Who’s Who’s Who: even the smallest part was filled by an overqualified celebrity actor, possibly because there’s no Morecambe and Wise to be humiliated on any more.

The Old Curiosity Shop(Boxing Day, ITV1) was, all things considered, an odd choice for a festive-season Dickens, a story of unrelentingly mawkish, treacly misery that makes Jude the Obscure read like The Beano. It led to the most famous outpouring of Victorian literary wailing when Dickens killed off his saintly heroine, Little Nell. It was said that crowds lined New York’s docks, waiting for news from London. “Does she still live?” they shouted to the liners. It prompted Oscar Wilde to note that, at the death of Little Nell, it would have taken a heart of stone not to laugh out loud.

In this adaptation, you would need one to stop yawning out loud. Nell was a strapping, bovine lass, so insistently goodie-goodie, I’d have bludgeoned her to death if the pneumonia hadn’t relieved the world of her silent recriminations. Her feckless grandad was played by Derek Jacobi, who has pared down his dramatic repertoire simply to juggling his eyes and occasionally twinkling. They rather resemble the currant-like minces of a small rodent. His most successful and repeated thespian trick is to imitate the startled look of a homosexual mouse caught in flagrante by a marmalade cat with halitosis: a canny mixture of camp terror and disgust, which, frankly, I could watch for hours. I just wish they didn’t trouble him with all the talking and walking about.

I never read Ballet Shoes(Boxing Day, BBC1), so this theatrical popular classic, which I know holds such a warm spot in the greenroom of girls’ hearts, came to me fresh with this adaptation. It’s a pretty bonkers story: a strange old paleontologist collects baby girls and leaves them at home for his penurious family to bring up, disappearing for decades on end. Actually, it sounds like the plot of Shameless, but these being nice, middle-class 1930s folk, it becomes a story of courage, probity, penny-pinching and chaste sex. The three – or was it four? – girls (I don’t know whether I counted one twice) all go on the boards. The high points were Emilia Fox, as a very affecting consumptive, and Eileen Atkins, fresh from her triumphant death in Cranford, talking out of the side of her mouth with an accent thick enough to lag a boiler, as a Russian ballet teacher made up to look exactly like me as a pantomime dame. I take this as a huge compliment.

In fact, there were an awful lot of very bad wigs in this production, and, finally, there was Hermione from Harry Potter, whose hair was played by itself. The rest of her played a precocious, self-importantly vain little madam who gets starring parts because she’s blonde and pretty, and goes on to be a movie star. Not at all like real life, then. Let that be a warning to all pretty, blonde, stage-struck public schoolgirls.

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