The start of a new year is not a fresh beginning full of new horizons but a screeching gear-change back to normal after a week of lounging about. Metal grinds against metal as we all go back to work, unless we’ve been working for one of the essential services in which case we never stopped. The BBC1 listings here are from the first Sunday of 1998 - January 4th - which is perfect, because Sunday’s television schedules have always been vaguely hungover and, especially by now, increasingly obligated in many cases. There’s no outright adult education programming - learn a random European language, here’s how computers work, that sort of thing - but the whole “Sunday is for God” philosophy is still alive and well, whereas these days they just plug the schedules with repeats from the 86 decade-strong archive of Bargain Hunt and Homes Under the Hammer episodes.

 

Not so in 1998. Although one thing then and now do have in common is the morning repeat of the previous nights’ Match of the Day, at 7.15 - although it’s less necessary now, especially since they finally got the rights to post these highlights on the Internet.

 

Similarly, the hour afterwards from 8.30 is Political Discussion Time. These days the slot is occupied by Laura Kunessberg, so the less said the better, but in 1998 that means Breakfast with Frost, in a studio looking like a cross between his TV-am digs and an oak-panelled study, complete with mahogany table for Tony Blair to bang his fists on occasionally.

 

Then the religious/spiritual/moral stuff begins in earnest at 9.30 with The Big Question, in which Mark Lawson discusses the meaning of life with various celebrity guests. This week: Bernard Manning. Which in itself is a better punchline than anything he ever said.

 

Fortunately that only takes fifteen minutes. Seems a bit short for a discussion on the meaning of life, but not so much given the main participant. That’s followed at 9.45 with some light entertainment in First Light, described as “a series looking at how people, places and events can change people's lives and beliefs”. This one’s about school nurse Lisa Potts and how her life has changed since the day in 1996 when an insane man leapt over the wall of St. Luke’s nursery in Wolverhampton and began indiscriminately attacking three year olds with a machete. I assume she spends the half-hour interview explaining that it was bloody horrible and she still can’t close her eyes without seeing flashing metal and blood. Happy New Year! Incidentally, no-one was killed in the attack, which I’d call a miracle except whatever force is behind miracles could just as easily have stopped it altogether, so it’s a backhanded miracle at best.

 

At 10.15, See Hear - now spelled without an exclamation mark - the usually monthly magazine for the deaf and hard of hearing which has hopped between BBC1 and 2 and Saturdays and Sundays for nearly 45 years, and is now - after being put out to tender - made by ITV, for Christ’s sake. Oh well. Today’s episode follows a woman called Sandra as she researches deafness in her family tree.

 

At 10:45, imported programming that no-one particularly wants to watch but the BBC somehow has in their pockets anyway to fill three quarters of an hour. Aussie bush-Western The Man From Snowy River started out as a poem, became a pretty good movie and a bollocks sequel (and a silent before that, technically) and squeezed the last few pips out of the lemon in the mid-nineties with a series that ran on the Nine Network at home, the Pat Robertson Bigotry and Blood Diamond Channel in America and here on the BBC under the pointlessly reconfigured title Snowy River: the MacGregor saga. No-one noticed.

 

But it does successfully bring the time to 11.30. Time for Countryfile with John Craven, in which he yomps through muddy fields pointing at cows or something. Actually, it’s 1998, so there’s probably at least something on the Countryside Alliance and their latest reactionary whining about having to pay taxes or the potential ban on pointless animal cruelty.

 

Back to Australia at noon for The Call of Kakadu. This is a one-off documentary, previously shown as part of The Natural World strand of bought-in wildlife films, about the vast natural reserve in the Top End, which is huge, beautiful and full of things that can kill you. And some which will just fight you, like kookaburras, which is what this film is mostly about.

 

After the news it’s the omnibus edition of EastEnders from 1:00, which iPlayer has made obsolete - much to the annoyance of the schedulers, I’m sure, because that’s another 90 minutes eaten up with a single programme. It would be two hours now.

 

Well, 85 minutes leaving out the reprises and credits and the odd bit cut for time, which is why the Clothes Show starts at 2.25. Originally conceived as a reason for Selina Scott to keep hanging around, it’s now hosted by “Sweet” Tim Vincent, Margherita Taylor and Caryn Jackson and has a remixed version of “In the Night” for a theme tune.

 

Swallowing up the rest of the afternoon is the bollocks war film Battle of Britain from 2.50. The Radio Times gives it 3 stars, but that’s a bit generous if you ask me. It’s hard to make a film full of air battles that doesn’t become incredibly repetitive pretty fast, and Guy Hamilton didn’t manage it. And then there’s the scene where Michael Caine’s dog looks up wistfully and whines.