Pick of the day: Celebrity MasterChef: Christmas Cook-Off 2023
9pm, BBC One
Gregg Wallace (dressed part of the time as an elf) and John Torode welcome a quartet of past celebrity contestants back into the MasterChef kitchen. Mel Blatt, Richard Blackwood, Duncan James and Love Island’s Faye Winter compete for the Golden Whisk trophy. Their first challenge is to create a dish reflective of Australia during the festive season – guest judge Peter Andre sticking his fork into the results. The celebrities are then asked to cook their ultimate two-course Christmas dinner – with one contestant receiving the ultimate accolade from Torode – “I’m coming to you next Christmas.”
Kirstie and Phil’s Love It or List It
8pm, Channel 4
“It’s two against mum,” says Kirstie Allsopp as she and Phil Spencer return for a fresh run of their makeover-or-sell property series. Tim and teenage daughter Ella want to move out of Tim’s childhood home in the Wiltshire market town of Chippenham, while wife and mother Sonia simply doesn’t like the idea of moving and would be more than happy to stay put. They originally moved in to help Tim’s mother, who had developed Alzheimer’s, but with a kitchen stuck in the 1980s and a layout that doesn’t work for the entertaining-loving family, can Kirstie design enough changes to negate the need for a move?
Painting Birds with Jim and Nancy Moir Christmas Special
8pm, Sky Arts
Before he finally gives up making television, as he revealed earlier this year, Jim Moir treats us to a final edition of his art and ornithology series. Fittingly for his final curtain, Jim and wife Nancy are joined by Jim’s old Shooting Stars comedy partner Bob Mortimer, before the Moirs and their two daughters head off to Finland in search of waxwings.
The 1970s Supermarket at Christmas
9pm, Channel 5
The first-ever chocolate advent calendars hit the shelves in 1971, according to this nostalgic seasonal sweep of the supermarket aisles. Also catered for by the exploding supermarket scene were artificial trees, plastic tinsel and frozen turkey roasts. In the kitchen, chef Rustie Lee rustles up vol-au-vents and tries out a Bird’s trifle kit, while in the lab, Dr Chris Clarke finds out why the cheesy filling inside a cheese football snack doesn’t go off, and how the white gooey centre of an After Eight mint is created.
Glenda Jackson Remembers – Elizabeth R
10pm, BBC Four
Ahead of a screening of the first three episodes of the classic 1971 history drama about the life of Queen Elizabeth I, the late Glenda Jackson recalls the role that brought her to TV audiences in the same year that she won the first of two Oscars, for the movie Women in Love.
The Lateish Show with Mo Gilligan: Christmas
10pm, Channel 4
“I wish you were my dad,” Joel Dommett tells Fred Sirieix, but if anyone thought that this was a reference to Sirieix’s storm-in-a-teacup clash with Nella Rose on I’m A Celebrity – this lively Christmas special was filmed before the jungle reality show. Dommett and Sirieix are joined by Leona Lewis and People Just Do Nothing actor Allan Mustafa, while Gino D’Acampo is cold-called to try to make him to say the words “pigs in blanket” (“pigs in duvets” is the nearest he is able to manage).