Sit back and relax and pick out the best bits on the box to watch this festive season

John Daly

It’s the most wonderful time of the year…’ sang Andy Williams a fair few decades ago - but the sentiment holds as strong as ever.

It’s that time of the year again - the best of food, the best of friends and many happy days catching up on some of the year’s best television.

A time where it’s totally acceptable to wear pyjamas all day and binge watch your favourite telly shows. All the channels will present a marvellous mix of content that is sure to get everyone in the Christmas mood and bring festive spirit right into every Irish living room. Packed with family favourites, Christmas specials, blockbuster movies, thrilling dramas and laugh out loud comedy alongside the very best arts, documentary, music and religious programming, this spectacular 2023 line-up is all there ready for your finger on the remote control.

Running from 20th December right through to the New Year, the line up of action and entertainment includes another Mrs Brown’s Boys fun-fest, Mica Paris singing gospel, a pair of unusual Santas in The Heist Before Christmas and a range of Oscar winning movies like The Godfather, Saving Private Ryan and Daniel Craig’s last outing as James Bond 007 in No Time To Die. And the action goes on into the New Year as we preview the biggest movies coming to your nearest cinema - including Gladiator 2, Bad Boys 4 and Mean Girls.

We’ve even thrown in a bit of scary stuff for these dark evenings - so prepare to be transported to the vast and dangerous moors where lies the Baskerville Hall estate and its dark secrets - the stunning backdrop for Arthur Conan Doyle’s bestselling Sherlock Holmes novel about “a foul black beast, shaped like a hound”.