GREAT! Christmas went live at 8am on Wednesday 26 August 2026, on Freeview channel 52. Most schools in England were still on their summer holidays, and Christmas Day was 121 days away.
From that morning to 15 October, the channel showed at least 849 hours of programmes with Christmas in the title. That’s about 17 hours a day, for 51 days in a row. Add in everything else across Freeview, from the Christmas sitcom specials on That’s TV to Come Dine with Me Christmas on 4seven, and the total is at least 900 hours of Christmas television before the clocks have even gone back.
We know because we keep a record of every programme on 32 Freeview channels, every day. Here is what the numbers show, and where they are soft.
When does Christmas TV start in the UK?
For the past five years there has been a clear answer: the day GREAT! Christmas comes back. It is the free-to-air channel that turns itself over to Christmas films for four months, and it comes back earlier every year.
| Year | GREAT! Christmas launch | Days before Christmas |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | Thursday 23 September | 93 |
| 2022 | Thursday 8 September | 108 |
| 2023 | Thursday 7 September | 109 |
| 2024 | Thursday 5 September | 111 |
| 2025 | Thursday 4 September | 112 |
| 2026 | Wednesday 26 August | 121 |
The launch dates for 2021 to 2025 come from RXTV’s reports (2023, 2024, 2025). The 2026 date was announced the day before, and our listings confirm it: the first Christmas film started at 8am on 26 August.
From 2022 to 2025 the launch crept earlier by a day or two at a time. This year it jumped by nine days, and for the first time it launched in August.
GREAT! Christmas is GREAT! Romance’s seasonal rebrand. It is the same channel in the same slot, 52 on Freeview, and it switches back to romance films in early January. Its daily listings are on our GREAT! Romance TV guide.
Christmas was on TV before the channel even launched
The Christmas channel was not the first to get there. Programmes with Christmas in the title had been dropping into Freeview schedules for three weeks before it launched:
- Thursday 6 August: First Dates at Christmas on E4, just after midnight. This is the earliest Christmas programme in our archive.
- Thursday 13 August: Rising Damp‘s 1975 Christmas episode on That’s TV, at noon.
- Saturday 15 August: GREAT! Romance itself showed Christmas with a Crown at 6pm, eleven days before the official switch. The same evening, Dave ran a Not Going Out Christmas special at 11pm.
- Sunday 30 August, the bank holiday weekend: That’s TV ran six Christmas sitcom episodes in a single day. Three Bread Christmas specials (1988, 1989 and 1990) in the morning, two Steptoe and Son Christmas episodes in the afternoon, and Birds of a Feather at teatime.
- Sunday 13 September: Film4 showed Christmas with the Kranks at 4.30pm, its first Christmas film since our archive began.
- 15 and 16 September: 4seven showed five episodes of Come Dine with Me Christmas back to back on both afternoons.
Most of this is not really “Christmas TV” in the sense of a channel getting festive. It is channels with deep archives of old sitcoms and cookery shows pulling whichever episode fills the slot, Christmas or not. A Christmas episode of Rising Damp in August says more about how many repeats a channel like That’s TV runs than about Christmas. We counted that too.
How much Christmas TV has been on so far?
At least 900 hours: 788 airings of 176 different titles between 2 August and 15 October 2026. Almost all of it comes from one channel.
| Channel | Christmas-titled airings | Hours | First one |
|---|---|---|---|
| GREAT! Christmas (Freeview 52) | 734 | 849 | 15 Aug, Christmas with a Crown |
| That’s TV | 20 | 17 | 13 Aug, Rising Damp 1975 Christmas episode |
| Dave | 14 | 14 | 15 Aug, Not Going Out Christmas special |
| Film4 | 4 | 8 | 13 Sep, Christmas with the Kranks |
| 4seven | 10 | 5 | 15 Sep, Come Dine with Me Christmas |
| Quest | 2 | 2 | 29 Aug, Shed and Buried Christmas special |
| Drama | 1 | 2 | 19 Sep, Jonathan Creek 2016 Christmas special |
| Sky Arts | 1 | 2 | 3 Sep, Nutcracker |
| ITV2 | 1 | 1 | 15 Oct, Ant and Dec’s Limitless Win Christmas special |
| E4 | 1 | 1 | 6 Aug, First Dates at Christmas |
Week by week, the switch on 26 August is sharp. Before it, Freeview was carrying a few hours of Christmas TV a week. Afterwards it was carrying more than a hundred, every week:
| Week starting | Hours of Christmas TV | Of which GREAT! Christmas |
|---|---|---|
| Mon 17 Aug | 2 | 0 |
| Mon 24 Aug (launch Wed) | 79 | 70 |
| Mon 31 Aug | 125 | 118 |
| Mon 7 Sep | 125 | 121 |
| Mon 14 Sep | 136 | 125 |
| Mon 21 Sep | 130 | 125 |
| Mon 28 Sep | 116 | 114 |
| Mon 5 Oct | 132 | 127 |
By month: 105 hours in August, 546 in September and 249 in the first 15 days of October.
What does GREAT! Christmas actually show?
Back-to-back TV films, mostly American, from 8am until the early hours.
From launch to 15 October it showed 149 different Christmas-titled films. ATV Today reported that it will show 186 over the whole season. Ours is a lower figure for two reasons: the season is not halfway through, and a number of its films don’t have Christmas in the title, so we don’t count them.
Since launch, Christmas-titled films have taken up 87% of the channel’s airtime, leaving out the short “Good News on GREAT!” bulletins. Most of the other 13% is festive too, just not by name: Two Turtle Doves, Snowmance, Holiday Hotline, Mingle All the Way. The one clear exception is Highway to Heaven, the 1980s drama.
Some films have already been shown many times:
| Film | Showings, 26 Aug to 15 Oct |
|---|---|
| Rocky Mountain Christmas | 12 |
| A Date by Christmas Eve | 11 |
| Christmas Love Letter | 10 |
| Hope at Christmas | 9 |
| Christmas on 5th Avenue | 9 |
| Christmas Overtime | 9 |
| Falling in Love at Christmas | 8 |
| A Christmas Crush | 8 |
| Christmas at Plumhill Manor | 8 |
| The Magical Christmas Shoe | 8 |
Twelve showings in seven weeks works out at one every four days. If you watched the channel in September and thought you had seen Rocky Mountain Christmas before, you probably had.
When do BBC One, ITV1 and Channel 4 start Christmas?
Not yet. As of 15 October, none of BBC One, BBC Two, ITV1, Channel 4 or Channel 5 had shown a single programme with Christmas in its title since our archive began on 2 August. The first sign from the big broadcasters is on ITV2, which showed a Christmas special of Ant and Dec’s Limitless Win on 15 October.
The big channels keep their Christmas schedules for December, and they announce the specials one by one through the autumn. The ones confirmed so far are in our Christmas TV guide, which we update as each broadcaster confirms them.
How we counted
The data comes from our own schedule archive: full-day listings for all 32 main Freeview channels, taken from the Freeview XMLTV feed every day and stored as structured records. The window is 2 August to 15 October 2026, which is 75 days and 61,448 programme slots.
A programme counts as Christmas TV if its title says so: Christmas, Xmas, Santa, Mistletoe, Reindeer, Sleigh, Scrooge, Nutcracker, Noel and a handful of similar words. False hits are excluded: Talking Pictures TV’s What’s On TPTV With Noel is not a Christmas programme.
Four limits, stated plainly:
- Every figure is a minimum. A Christmas film called Two Turtle Doves or Twinkle All the Way is festive, but its title doesn’t say so, and we don’t count it. The real totals are higher.
- Hours, not airings. GREAT!’s listings sometimes fold a short news bulletin into the film around it, so the same day can show as 12 entries or 34. Hours don’t move with that, which is why we report them.
- No “earlier than last year” from our own data. Our archive starts on 2 August 2026, so we can’t compare this autumn’s hours with last autumn’s. The launch dates in the table above come from published reports, not from our archive.
- Only the 32 main Freeview channels. No +1 services, Sky, Virgin or streaming. Sky’s own Christmas film channel isn’t included.
We will update these figures to 31 October in early November, and again in December.
Download the data
Both files are free to use, including commercially, with credit to TV Radar and a link to this page.
- Christmas TV by channel (CSV): one row per channel, with airings, hours, distinct titles and the first Christmas programme.
- Every Christmas-titled airing (CSV): date, time, channel, title and length for all 788 airings.
Want a cut we haven’t published? The contact page reaches us.
Frequently asked questions
When do Christmas films start on TV in the UK?
In 2026 the first dedicated Christmas film channel, GREAT! Christmas, went live at 8am on Wednesday 26 August on Freeview channel 52. That is 121 days before Christmas Day and the channel’s earliest launch so far: it opened on 4 September in 2025, 5 September in 2024, 7 September in 2023, 8 September in 2022 and 23 September in 2021. Odd Christmas programmes turn up even earlier. E4 showed First Dates at Christmas on 6 August 2026.
What channel is GREAT! Christmas on Freeview?
Channel 52. GREAT! Christmas is not a separate channel. It is GREAT! Romance’s seasonal rebrand, which takes over the same slot every autumn and switches back to GREAT! Romance in early January.
How much Christmas TV is on before Halloween?
Between 2 August and 15 October 2026 we counted at least 900 hours of programmes with Christmas in the title across 32 Freeview channels: 788 airings of 176 different titles. GREAT! Christmas accounts for 849 of those hours. Every figure is a minimum, because Christmas films whose titles do not mention Christmas are not counted. We will update the count to 31 October in early November.
Which Christmas film is shown most on TV?
On Freeview so far this year, Rocky Mountain Christmas, with 12 showings on GREAT! Christmas between 26 August and 15 October 2026. A Date by Christmas Eve has aired 11 times and Christmas Love Letter 10.
When do BBC One and ITV1 start showing Christmas programmes?
Not yet, as of 15 October 2026. Neither channel had shown a programme with Christmas in its title since our archive began on 2 August. The big channels hold their Christmas schedules for December, and the specials confirmed so far are listed in our Christmas TV guide.
