Easter treats

2016-03-25T09:00:00+00:00

Happy Easter from �� Genome! To mark the festivities, here's a selected goody basket of seasonal moments from the listings and magazines of years gone by.

A glance over broadcasts from the 1920s onwards show that Easter was treated differently from Christmas, which had a special cover every year and was much more celebratory in nature.

Certainly in the ��'s early days, Easter was a more religious, reverential occasion and church services made up the bulk of seasonal broadcasts.

But as the years progressed, Easter was embraced by a broader range of programmes, and was reflected in both the listings and the Radio Times magazine.

Do you have any special memories from Easter radio and TV? Was it as memorable as Christmas? Let us know your thoughts in the space at the end of this post.

Easter is of course a festival of food, and television quickly cottoned onto this in the 1950s. Here, legendary television cook Marguerite Patten prepares a simnel cake for the cameras as part of Designed For Women.

Billy Smart's Circus became a regular Easter treat for viewers during the 1960s and 70s, which included some elaborate and detailed listings, including an act "who spend their family life on a slack wire". This spectacle fell out of televisual favour in later years.

A suitably seasonal Radio Times cover for Easter week in 1960, which involves a liberal splash of yellow as colour gradually made an appearance in the magazine.

Blue Peter became more famous for its annual Christmas advent crown and a whole host of other seasonal craft ideas, but the programme often got in on the Easter act as well, as this 1976 photograph featuring Lesley Judd shows.

Easter 1987 and here's a very striking cover from the Radio Times, created by artist Ashley Potter. It encapsulates one of the iconic themes of the season.

It comes as little surprise that sitcom The Vicar of Dibley embraced both Christmas and Easter with special episodes. Geraldine Granger (Dawn French) was shown in a series of publicity photos with a bunny, a lamb, a fluffy chick - and this mouthwatering plate of hot cross buns.

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Easter treats

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