- Lockjaw
- Dec 17, 2025
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This year’s Christmas Radio Times is a record-breaking 1,200 pages, and costs £22.
This year’s magazine lists the on-line festive offerings for the first time. It has traditionally given comprehensive listings for terrestrial TV and some streaming services, but is now bowing to modern media usage.
‘People watch less and less TV, and more and more content on social media apps,’ says analyst Mike Teevee. ‘The Radio Times was looking increasingly out of date. The clue’s in the name. This latest move is interesting. You could accuse them of trying to print out the internet. Twelve hundred pages is going to be too heavy for a lot of old folk. But marks for effort.’
Magazine editor Liz Tings is talking up the festive edition. ‘The Christmas Radio Times is a family tradition. It’s the issue that makes us all the profit for the whole year, so it’s important that we get it right. This year, we are helping our readers to navigate all of the wacky stuff on the internet, seeking out the best dancing kitten videos for Mum, car crashes for Dad, and skibidi toilet stuff for the kids. We’ve done our best to steer clear of all the dodgy stuff on the net, and we have not listed any websites on the Dark Net.
‘We obviously haven’t listed everything on YouTube. We didn’t have enough pages for that. But we have listed the Christmas highlights of past years, and our experts have curated the best content for 2025. Not all YouTubers were able to give us preview tapes, unfortunately.
‘The magazine is now quite big, so it comes with a separate highlights leaflet, so that you find the most popular programmes quickly.
‘We are aware that the magazine will have used lots and lots of paper, so we are encouraging everyone to keep their copy for the New Year. Page 1,196 gives readers our 2026 work-out plan, so that they can get fit by using the Radio Times, instead of buying dumbbells or weights. We have a competition to find the biggest Radio Times loser, who will win a year’s subscription – so that they can find out what the magazine is like at all the other times of the year.
image from google gemini
The BBC says it will be giving its TV current affairs programme Panorama a complete make-over following revelations that reporter Martin Bashir had forged documents to dupe Princess Diana. “Mr Bashir ratcheted up the Princess’ anxiety levels to the maximum by fabricating bank statements to convince her the security services were spying on her," said a BBC spokesman in a suit.
“He did this to get a juicy interview in which Diana spat out streams of invective against the Prince of Wales and the Royal Family, and that gave the BBC our biggest-ever scoop. Now that the truth about Bashir is out, I suppose what we really ought to do is to apologise for his behaviour, promise never to do such a thing again and try to regain the public's trust.
“But we’re going to do something much more fun than that! We’re going to take Panorama, rename it Paranoia, and turn it into a sadistic reality TV show in which we'll be melting the minds of a whole load of other famous people. We’ll lock them for weeks on end in a dark, damp cellar with rats and dripping taps and feed them nothing but hunks of stale bread.
“Every couple of days, an earnest young man in glasses will come in and pass them documents suggesting that MI5, the CIA and Islamic Jihad are all planning to murder them. Then, when they’re on the edge of a comprehensive nervous breakdown, we’ll take them up into a glaringly bright studio, switch on the cameras and just see what insane torrent of demented nonsense they come out with.
“Now, who shall we pick as our first guest? It should be someone who’s already in the depths of despair and convinced everyone’s out to get him. What about Harry Kane?”
First published 15 Dec 2022
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