Christmas Down Under

Question: What's wrong with this mental image?

Father Christmas is sitting in a shopping centre, surrounded by lights, tinsel, trees, presents and a queue of adults and their children. A little boy climbs up onto Santa's lap and .... Yes that part's clearly wrong. But also - the boy is wearing a t-shirt, shorts and sandals. And so is his Dad. And so is everyone else in the shopping centre. Apart from the ones wearing dresses or skirts that is. Welcome to Christmas in the middle of summer.

So after almost a week of lounging around, eating too much and cultivating the sort of rotund figure that only Santa would be proud of, it's time to tell you all about our upside down Christmas, a.k.a. Christmas in Australia.

It has to be said that crimbo caught me unawares this year. It's been a year now since I was last corrupting the minds of innocent young kiddiewinks and, without the weeks and weeks of tortuous school xmas play rehearsals in front of a head teacher looking like they've chewed a wasp, I'd sort of forgotten about the whole thing. In spite of the Christmas trees and fake snow all over the place, the weather was all wrong and it took a while to realise that I would have to take some drastic action over prezzies I had to send to the UK. Thank God for Amazon and the fact that my family likes books!

Our day started with prezzie opening and suitable admiration for my family's ingenuity in (a) finding flat yet thoughtful presents to send and (b) planning ahead enough to buy and send them in time for crimbo. Diver Dave had made me a beautiful emerald and white gold ring (see www.davidfrithjewellery.com if you'd like one too!) which I showed my Dad on Skype, then had to explain that it really was only a Christmas present! So all our presents were duly appreciated and tried on before 8 am, including the surprisingly rude looking M&S pants my Mother had sent. Then we had to throw ourselves into action before the rest of Christmas arrived. Starting with the turkey fight.

We'd decided to host a waifs and strays xmas for other poms not with their families, plus a few bemused aussies. So with poms in mind, we had a traditionally Blighty xmas; roast turkey, sprouts (yuk), the works. Thankfully, the weather was pretty miserable so not only did it stop us overheating with the turkey, but it stopped us feeling homesick too! We solved the usual pom problem of not having enough room in the oven by cooking the turkey and roast spuds on the barbie with the lid down. Our aussie friends had hopefully brought some salad and prawns (not for the barbie!) as this is what most aussies eat on xmas day in the height of summer. It hadn't escaped my notice that the fish counter had doubled in size recently at Woolies but I wasn't sure how to combine it with roast turkey and stuffing. So I ignored it. And it looked like the other poms didn't know what to do with it either.

By early evening it looked like one or two guests had had rather a lot to drink, judging by the amount of utter toss they were talking. I had stopped running about with the hoover/dirty dishes/clean dishes and wanted to watch some proper xmas telly. Unfortunately, I was in Australia. After attempting to watch some Courtney Cox dross for half an hour or so, my sofa mate Sal and I gave up and paid Austar to show us Hot Fuzz on their Box Office channel. So there.

Next day, our remaining guests and we made up for all the crap telly that had been on by spending a full day in front of episode after episode of Only Fools and Horses on so called UKTV, followed by almost as many episodes of Extras.

So really the only difference in Christmasses between Oz and Blighty was cooking the turkey and roasties in the barbie, the motley assortment of guests and the fact that we were all sitting at the table outside. And, according to Diver Dave, Father Christmas is still the same down under except he's got a 4x4 and a hydration pack. Christmas telly was still crap - just a more cornea shattering form of crap than the norm in Blighty.

God Awful Australian TV

Look out! Mega whinge alert!

Oh dear oh dear. It seems the aussies have accidentally decided to follow the American TV broadcasting model: Utter shite, interspersed with irritating advertising drivel every 5 minutes. In the UK we enjoy having a good old moan about the telly; how awful and dumbed down it is, particularly with the advent of 'reality' tv programmes that seem to be reproducing themselves interminably.

Well. Not only have the aussies adapted some well known reality tv formats to make their own, eg. Big Brother, Australian Idol, etc, but they also broadcast the complete toss that is American reality tv in order to pad out the programming schedule. And, just to add insult to injury, Neighbours and Home and Away, which are currently tucked away at the 6pm and the god-only-knows-where time slots respectively on British tv, are featured as the cream of aussie creativity in prime time viewing slots of around 7pm. God! I can't understand it. Total tripe from the nation that brought us such movie greats as Gallipoli, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, the Piano, Muriel's Wedding, Shine, Moulin Rouge, The Dish and Happy Feet! And such tv greats as ...er... Prisoner Cell Block H...?

Even sport doesn't escape the madness of crapness. Trying to watch the Rugby World Cup match where the poms trounced the aussies (tee hee!), proved irritating beyond belief with all the bloody adverts shown in the middle of the game. I could barely see Johnny's thighs!

The only saving grace in all this trash is that aussie terrestrial tv is free, so there's no unfair licence fee to pay for a channel you only watch for 'Stenders' and Doctor Who.

If you can't manage without your telly in Australia, then the solution is to pay for cable or satellite tv courtesy of Foxtel or Austar -both seemingly Sky affiliated, so the facilities will seem very familiar to Sky users. Having said that, the ridiculousness that was Foxtel's customer service when we attempted to terminate the contract was not very familiar. It dragged on for months after we had moved house and started an Austar contract.

Thanks to UKTV you can still get a daily dose of Trisha, Emmerdale, Corrie and Stenders, albeit up to a year out of date. It appears to be the place where British tv channels finally send their programmes to die. Last week's exciting announcement was that "I'm a 'Celebrity'" is going to be shown on UKTV.... Last year's. So I know who won. Although I still don't know who he is.

After UKTV we mainly watch SBS (when last year's Top Gear is on), the History Channel and the movie channels. We also watch Sky news as, through the magic of the red button, we can watch the UK version.

Which brings me onto my next whinge: Why can't we in Australia view UK programmes via broadband like you can in Blighty? Well actually I know why and it's purely political. After sending whinging emails to the BBC and Ch4, I've learnt that it's all down to licensing; they aren't licensed to broadcast in other countries - or some such rubbish. The BBC said it was something they hoped would be available in the near future. I hope so because they're missing out on a lot of revenue in the meantime from desperate ex pats all over the world who are pining for Richard & Judy, etc.

So the moral is if you're a confirmed couch potato with square eyes, maybe Australia is not the place for you.