"Don't you talk to me about being fucking professional or you can piss off"

[Nelson Swillie]

A genuine quote there from Mr Michael Parkinson, slightly miffed at his floor manager during a recording of Parkinson in the late 1970s, captured on a Christmas tape. And that, dear friends, is what this thread is all about...Christmas tapes.

Have you seen Bungle's twanger? Brian Cant tickling one of Toni Arthur's breasts? Tom Baker swearing at K9? Of course you have, thanks to Steve Penk and his TV's Naughtiest Blunders knackers. All you have to do to get on this programme is fuck something up, swear, say a couple of rude words and gurn at the camera. Big deal. But context is all.

However much these tapes are torrented, YouTubed and otherwise swapped around, there is still something tremendously exciting and illicit about viewing a Christmas tape. Yes, they're shatteringly unsubtle and drenched in smut and innuendo, but this was the late seventies for fuck's sake. And they weren't aimed at a BBC2 audience - they were aimed at civil service drones pissed up on BBC champagne at the end of year bash. Hell, they make me laugh every time, and I'm as sober as a very sober judge.

[Catalogue Trousers]

From what I know (a member of my family worked as a despatch rider for Anglia Television in the late 70s to mid 80s and as such was able to get hold of some of these), they were produced as part of a sort-of BBC/ITV equivalent of the WWI Yuletide truce. Local BBC and ITV companies would join forces to produce an annual tape each, and copies of these would then be delivered to the personnel of each other's studios for a brief half-hour or so of uncommon professional camaraderie.

Looking back on my memories of them, they're a bizarre mixture of the genuinely funny (if unsubtle) and the unintentionally bleak. A lot of the VT staff who put them together seemed to have very frustrated sex lives, leading to a preponderance of clips of tits and general nudity (sometimes stolen from films such as Kentucky Fried Movie) that appears rather grim in hindsight. It's all too easy to imagine some lonely nerk of a TV techie cracking one out over bits of them in the comfort of his own seedy bedsit, and for every marvellous-if-esoteric instance of Suzi Quatro singing about the joys of killing sports programme presenters, there's a wrist-slashing routine of a guy who looks a little like Bill Oddie if you squint perving at a stripper gyrating with a piece of fruit to the Saturday Banana theme as he sits in an armchair in a darkened room.

[jonbob]

They were (10 years ago) still made by Australian TV stations and for all I know they may still be. They were slightly different, they were just made up of out takes from the shows produced at the station and shown at the staff Christmas party
I was told the gardening shows out takes were mostly footage of some mighty fine, if not strictly legal crops grow by the presenters

[Famous Mortimer]

I went through a period of downloading them, and had 20-30 a while back, but then watched some of them and got bored quite quickly. It's a nice idea and all, and there's the odd gem, but I'd suggest it's not worth expending that much effort tracking them down. Is there a Youtube person with a lot of them uploaded?

[Nelson Swillie]

The Kentucky Fried Movie clips always amused me. But if it was a wank they were after, why didn't they include the 'Catholic High School Girls in Trouble' bit?

I can't hear 'He's In Love With You' by Suzi Quatro without mentally singing along "He's a sports PA"...