Film choice

For those many people unable to get tickets for the stage revival, Carol Reed's film version of Oliver! (10.15am BBC1) might provide some compensation. In this multi-Oscar-winning interpretation of the Lionel Bart musical, Ron Moody makes for a memorable Fagin while Mark Lester (now, I believe, an osteopath) is suitably cute as the boy who dares to ask for more.

The remake of Miracle on 34th Street (2pm C4), with Richard Attenborough, may be selling like hot mince pies in the video stores, but it is not a patch on the original. George Seaton's 1947 classic stars Edmund Gwenn as a department store Santa claiming to be the Real McCoy.

A Bond film has become as traditional as turkey at Christmas. This year's is The Spy Who Loved Me (3.40pm ITV), in which Roger Moore takes on the metal-toothed Jaws (Richard Kiel), the best baddie this side of Goldfinger's Oddjob.

Spielberg may be accused of sentimentality, but he certainly knows how to wow children, as delightfully proven by ET the Extra-Terrestrial (3.40pm BBC1).

Groucho Marx once remarked: "I've been around so long I can remember Doris Day before she was a virgin." Day projects that familiar sense of rectitude to pleasing effect in Move Over, Darling (8.45pm C4), where she plays a woman presumed dead in a plane crash, who re-appears to discover her husband (James Garner) about to marry another woman.

In Rear Window (12.50am BBC1), James Stewart and Grace Kelly investigate suspicious goings-on at a neighbour's. Stewart's immobility only adds to the feeling of claustrophobic intensity.