en Ö÷²¥´óÐã Genome Blog Feed News, highlights and banter from the team at Ö÷²¥´óÐã Genome – the website that shows you all the Ö÷²¥´óÐã’s listings between 1923 and 2009 (and tells you what was on the day you were born!) Join us and share all the oddities, archive gems and historical firsts you find while digging around… Fri, 25 Mar 2016 09:00:00 +0000 Zend_Feed_Writer 2 (http://framework.zend.com) /blogs/genome Easter treats Fri, 25 Mar 2016 09:00:00 +0000 /blogs/genome/entries/cff154fd-fe14-4ae2-bfa4-5719d0090acd /blogs/genome/entries/cff154fd-fe14-4ae2-bfa4-5719d0090acd Michael Osborn Michael Osborn

Happy Easter from  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 and was much more celebratory in nature.

Certainly in the Ö÷²¥´óÐã's early days, Easter was a more religious, reverential occasion and 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

Billy Smart's Circus became a regular Easter treat for viewers during the 1960s and 70s, which included some 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  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  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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