Christmas Day, 1979 - Marvel UK, 40 years ago this week.

Hang onto your reindeers, Yule lovers, because it's Christmas!

Or it will be tomorrow!

And that gives me a perfect excuse to look at what our favourite comics company was serving up on Christmas Day 1979.

But, first, what else were we doing on that day?

BBC One, that morning, was giving us The Spinners at Christmas. This was, of course, not the American band of that name but the British one, famous for singing folk songs about Liverpool and doing blood donation adverts with jokes about skin colour you'd struggle to get away with these days.

We also got the Black Beauty movie, a documentary about Olympic ice skater John Curry, and the inevitable Christmas Day Top of the Pops, featuring Blondie, Boney M, Dr Hook, Lena Martell, Gary Numan, the Police, Cliff Richard, BA Robertson and Roxy Music, presented by Kid Jensen and Peter Powell.

That evening, the channel gave us The Mike Yarwood Christmas Show, To the Manor Born, The Sting and Parkinson at Christmas.

BBC Two, that afternoon, was giving us A Hard Day's Night, while, that evening, it unveiled A Christmas Carol and Baboushka.

The latter of those had nothing to do with the Kate Bush song of the same name but was a musical which presented the legend of a woman who gives hospitality to the Three Kings as they pass through on the way to Bethlehem. Too busy to join them, she says she'll follow on later but, when she finally gets there, it's too late and she's missed all the fun. The legend says she's still searching.

Personally, I'd give up if I were her. I think I'd conclude that, after two thousand years and Christ's crucifixion, the boat's well and truly sailed on that one.

To close off the evening, the channel gave us the film Cabaret.

Over on ITV, that morning, we received Lassie: The New Beginning and then, that afternoon, Christmas Oh Boy! with Joe Brown and the Bruvvers, Billy Hartman, Freddie "Fingers" Lee, Alvin Stardust, Shakin' Stevens, Rachel Sweet, Tim Witnall, Fumble, the Oh Boy! Cats and Kittens and the Oh Boy! Boogie Band. I would love to claim I know who Fumble were but I don't have a Scooby.

Also, that afternoon, the channel broadcast Goldfinger before taking us into the evening with the 3-2-1 Dickensian Xmas Show with Ted Rogers, Terry Scott, Bill Maynard and Wilfrid Brambell.

The evening saw George and Mildred, The Three Musketeers, Christmas with Eric and Ernie and Cleo Lane's Christmas. Not one person will be surprised to learn the big guest on the latter show was John Dankworth.

And the channel finished off the night by showing Death at Love House, a movie I cannot claim to have ever heard of.

But, of course, the big thing that everyone wanted to know was, what was the Christmas Number One?

Well, as I write these deathless words, in 2019, a song about sausage rolls is currently the UK's Christmas Number One but what of exactly 40 years ago? Could the 1970s possibly hope to match the cultural and societal impact of a song about sausage rolls?

No, they couldn't. We had to make do with Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall Part 2 at Number One. It achieved this by gamely holding off ABBA's I Have a Dream. This meant that both the Christmas Number One and Number Two featured children singing on them. This is not a totally unknown phenomenon at Christmas.

The only actual Christmas songs on the chart that week were Paul McCartney's Wonderful Christmastime at 7, It Won't Seem Like Christmas by Elvis Presley at 25, Christmas Rappin' by Curtis Blow at 36 and A Merry Jingle by the Greedies at 47. Were the Greedies an unlikely team-up of Thin Lizzy and the Sex Pistols or am I just going mad?

So, those were the records we may have been unwrapping on that epic day but you know what else we all love to unwrap on Christmas Day?

Annuals!

And these were the ones Marvel UK had forced Santa to deliver to us.

This is a strange one, we get the whole of the Spidey vs Stegron vs Lizard story that, I think, involves the liberation of dinosaur skeletons in New York.

But that's not the strange thing. What is strange is that not all the annual's in full colour. Some pages are in a quaint combination of black, white and pink, creating a feel reminiscent of the days of the old Fleetway produced Marvel annuals of the very early 1970s.

On top of those reptilian antics, we get a text piece telling us all about Stan Lee's supreme and unique importance to the triumph of Marvel Comics and we also get a Spidey text story called Fun-House of Fear.

And the partial pinkness continues, as Marvel dishes out a reprint of the FF's first encounter with Salem's Seven.

There's also a cut-out Thing mask and a text story about our heroes fighting alien duplicates of themselves. I don't think the aliens are Skrulls but I cannot say that with certainty.

I do have to say that cover's almost identical to the one for last year's Fantastic Four annual.

And we get even more partially pink goodness.

We also get Thor going to Hel to confront Hela about something or other.

We get the Silver Surfer vs the Abomination, which, as I've remarked on more than one occasion, may well have been the very first Marvel story I ever read, back in the ancient TV21 comic that predated even Mighty World of Marvel.

And we're also served up Sub-Mariner vs Tiger-Shark in a Marie Severin drawn tale.

But now here's where we get the real odd one out, as the only hint that this is an official Marvel publication is a copyright statement at the beginning of it.

Otherwise, it's definitely aimed at fans of the TV programme, rather than those of the comic, with heavy use of informational text and photo features about the show.

The picture strips that are included are clearly UK originated material and not all of them seem to be about the Hulk.

Mostly the book's in black and white, with occasional outbreaks of colour, giving it a very very British feel.