Christmas tape

In relation to British television, Christmas tapes are unendorsed videotapes compiled by technical staff for their personal amusement and peers' enjoyment. The name originates from the 1950s, when the material was filmed at the staff's Christmas parties where impromptu sketches were carried out. As time progressed, other types of material (such as outtakes and deliberate misbehaviour) were included on the videos.

As videotape gradually overtook film as the dominant medium for television recording, the proliferation of Christmas tapes grew. Early Christmas tapes were plundered for outtake shows like LWT's It'll be Alright on the Night, presented by Denis Norden, which started life as an occasional treat in the schedules and eventually grew to become a genre in their own right. Copies of the tapes were shared over internal playout systems or networked playback, and some then leaked outside, appearing on the private collector's circuit, a phenomenon which led to an incident in 1978 when a mocked-up sequence featuring Princess Anne in that year's BBC Christmas tape, "White Powder Christmas", came to the attention of the Sunday People newspaper. Several references to the previous year's Christmas tape were made in the 1979 BBC Christmas tape, "Good King Memorex".