SLOWLY, sadly, Christmas television is dying. You wouldn’t know it necessarily from looking at the Radio Times - it is as thick and colourful as it ever was. And you might not even notice the trends if you scanned what’s on telly over Christmas and New Year. But look in more detail and you’ll see a different picture of how the influence of traditional television is changing and waning. Drama is the last bastion of the way things were, but have no doubt: it too is on the way out.

There are essentially three things happening - none of which I really noticed until I started to go through the schedules and spoke to the people involved. The big drama this year is The Witness for the Prosecution, an adaptation of the Agatha Christie short story by Sarah Phelps.

The two-parter is lusciously shot and extravagantly casted with Kim Cattrall and Toby Jones and Sarah Phelps has really thought through what she wants to do with a story that has already been adapted several times for television and stage, including by Christie herself. Phelps told me she could see the influence of the times on Christie - the aftermath of the First World War and the inequalities of the Roaring Twenties. “It’s like a fuse,” she said. “You put a light to it and it explodes.”

Phelps has done a superb job in bringing these underground tributaries to the surface, but even so the budgetary limitations are clear on screen (the First World War for instance is represented by one man and a field) and these are only going to get worse for the BBC in the face of Amazon and Netflix, who can afford to spend more serious amounts of money. There will also come a time when the low audience figures will no longer justify the expense - even at Christmas.

You can see these trends already in two other areas that used to be big at Christmas: movies and comedy. In 1996, the special of Only Fools and Horses attracted 20million viewers; this year, Mrs Brown’s Boys is about the only comedy special on TV but it can only manage 10million.

There is some comedy on elsewhere - Alan Davies crops up, for example, in QI and David Renwick’s comedy-thriller Jonathan Creek, but when I spoke to him he seemed to acknowledge that even that show was from another age.

The point is that Christmas television is terribly old-fashioned and has, in many ways failed to acknowledge what has happened in the last ten years. The big Christmas film, for example, is an irrelevance - the BBC is showing Frozen but is there a child - or reluctant adult - who has not seen it several times already?

But should we mourn all this? Possibly not, because viewers seem happy with the way things are: dipping into programmes when they want to. My prediction is that we will see the end of the TV schedule completely before too long and possibly the end completely of BBC1 and channels like it. Instead, we will be presented with a menu to choose from and programmes will no longer be shown at a set time.

That doesn’t make me sad - it’s just the direction of travel we need to accept. Christmas TV is dying, but something more exciting, convenient and relevant may emerge in its place.