Does a bit of tinsel add sparkle to the warmed-up leftovers TV bosses pass off as Christmas specials? Can anyone replace Del Boy as top Santa or will it be just another selection of repeats?

ON Christmas Day last year, 20 million people - that's 73 per cent of the audience - settled down in a spirit of post-turkey euphoria to watch the return of Del Boy and Rodney.

The BBC was able to gloat about the ratings success of Only Fools And Horses, and pay no heed to the less-than-enthusiastic criticism from reviewers and viewers alike.

The figures also helped disguise the fact that, as a nation, we are spending less time in front of the box over the Christmas period. Last year viewers spent 4.4 hours a day watching TV between Christmas and the New Year, compared to 4.7 hours in 2000.

The news for ITV, which has usually come a poor second to the BBC in Christmas programming, was particularly bad with a reported 20.6 per cent drop year-on-year over the festive period.

The days when the entire family sat down to watch The Morecambe And Wise Christmas Show or the TV premiere of a blockbuster movie are long past. The rise of video and now DVD means that films are no longer the big attraction they once were. People have seen them long before they reach terrestrial TV.

And these days any programme with the word Christmas in the title tends to deter viewers rather than encourage them. Too often programme-makers think that sticking a bit of tinsel on the set adds up to a Christmas show. What we get now on Christmas Day is wall-to-wall soap with an hour each of EastEnders, Coronation Street and Emmerdale, carefully programmed so you can skip from one to another in quick succession without missing a minute of any of them. Mainly this provides the opportunity for viewers to see people having a more miserable Christmas than them. Two deaths, a potential murder and that rarity - a happy wedding - feature in the mix of tantrums and tears this year.

Ever since the EastEnders episode in 1986 in which Dirty Den served Angie with divorce papers notched up a record number of Christmas Day viewers, soaps have been seen as an easy way to attract viewers. People still talk nostalgically of Eric and Ernie being as much a part of Christmas as mince pies and mistletoe. To a large extent, David Jason has taken their place. He's a Christmas fixture, whether it's as wide boy Del Trotter or detective Jack Frost in A Touch Of Frost.

Last year ITV thought it had scored a coup by teaming Jason and Only Fools writer John Sullivan on Micawber, about the character from Charles Dickens's David Copperfield. But the public didn't take to this particular character, so ITV returns to Frost - a repeat - this year.

Morecambe and Wise will still appear on Christmas Day, in a repeat of a 1973 festive special on BBC1. But the channel banking on the comic duo, and other big names from the past, this time is five which screens a whole evening of classic Christmas shows under a Nostalgia Night banner.

As they've chosen Boxing Day, when both BBC1 and ITV are screening major dramas, the channel may well attract good audiences.

But the package isn't quite as good as appears on the surface. The Morecambe And Wise Show dates from 1981 and is one of the duo's ITV offerings, made after they switched channels. Their shows for the commercial channel were generally acknowledged to be not up to the standard of their BBC classics.

Tommy Cooper's Christmas, first shown in 1973, finds the man in the fez joined by singers Sacha Distel and Clodagh Rodgers. Carry On Christmas, which dates back to 1969, was inspired by Dickens' A Christmas Carol in as much as the special is split into three parts with The Ghost of Christmas Present, Christmas Past and Christmas Future.

Stanley Baxter was another performer who could always been relied upon to come up with a seasonal special - or Christmas Box, as it's called here, from 1976 in which the Scottish comic dresses up and impersonates a variety of characters.

The popularity of Only Fools And Horses as a seasonal attraction was reinforced by the recent poll commissioned by Woolworths to find the most popular Christmas TV show of all time. The Trotters took the top two places in the survey of 4,000 people, and a total of four places in the top ten.

First place went to the 1996 special Heroes And Villains, in which Del and Rodney dressed as Batman and Robin for a fancy dress party and became accidental crimefighters. Runner-up was Miami Twice, in which Del is mistaken for a Mafia godfather

In third place was the EastEnders divorce papers episode. A 1977 Morecambe And Wise special. Others in the list were: 5 One Foot In The Algarve (1993), 6 The Queen's Christmas Speech (1997), 7 Only Fools And Horses: The Jolly Boys' Outing, 8 Coronation Street Christmas Special (1987), 9 Only Fools And Horses: To Hull And Back, and 10 Men Behaving Badly (1998).

The big headache for TV bosses is that, as yet, there's nothing on the horizon with the pulling power of Only Fools And Horses. As writer John Sullivan has said the current films will be the last, executives need to find something new to put in their Christmas stocking.

* Five's Nostaliga Night on Boxing Day features Tommy Cooper's Christmas (7.40pm), The Morecambe And Wise Christmas Show (8.40pm), Carry On Christmas (9.40pm) and Stanley Baxter's Christmas Box (10.45pm).

* Morecambe And Wise: BBC1, Christmas Day, 11.15am.

* Only Fools And Horses: BBC1, Christmas Day, 9.40pm.