"To provide a party of children with a spread that will satisfy their keen sense of what is due at Christmas-time, without making them ill, is no mean feat."

And it is with this 1927 listing that we begin our collection of safety advice gathered from the BBC listings - and found thanks to Genome's clever advanced search function. Food poisoning, as this 1997 festive episode of 999 Lifesavers reminds us, is a clear and present danger over Christmas. Even the halls of Holby City Hospital have been seen "inundated with policemen who have fallen prey to a dodgy batch of turkey sandwiches" one Christmas Eve.

Fear not: while the 1980's Food and Drink team will tell you all about how to avoid food poisoning during the festivities ("an important aspect of Christmas", they say), 1960's DIY guru Barry Bucknell is ready  to help you with some advice on how to "keep accidents, draughts, and burglars well away from the family circle." 

Failing that, you could always find solace on this episode of Radio 4's Misery Christmas:

"Did your turkey explode last year? Did the children have the mumps? Were you burgled, breathalysed, or stranded at an airport? That was a misery Christmas. A seasonal anthology for all those who sympathise with Scrooge, and have wished to see anyone who said " Merry Christmas " boiled alive with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.'"

The 1944 Christmas edition of Radio Times magazine included the usual Food Facts ad by the Ministry of Food about how to make the best out of what was available at the time to make "Christmas Fancies."

More advice was available on radio thanks to The Kitchen Front, a daily programme devised by the BBC and the Ministry of Food to "talk about what to eat and where to get it" - the idea was to give wartime housewives hints and tips on the best and most resourceful ways of using their rations.

Browsing through the episodes provides a good glimpse into wartime daily life - suggestions on how to make mincemeat without suet, talks from women writers, guest appearances by "men in the kitchen" and, of course, some comedy to take the mind away from it all.

Here at BBC Genome we've been dusting off the baubles and untangling the fairy lights in preparation for our own Advent Calendar, which is going out on this blog from tomorrow. Every day we'll be featuring snippets, cuttings, listings and all things Christmas from our listings and old pages of the Radio Times magazine.

Way too soon to talk about Christmas? Leave November alone, we hear you say? Well, you might find that Mrs E. Martinek from 1929 would disagree:

"Shopkeepers are not the only ones who are already deep in preparations for the Christmas festival: housewives, if they are to do justice to the culinary side of the occasion, must also begin to get ready."

And this was broadcast on November 5th. 

Now, should you feel guilty enough to wonder how to start the preparations here's a recipe for a Christmas pudding from 1954 from the fabulous TV chef Marguerite Patten:

Demonstrating the arcane and byzantine processes of cookery has been one of the mainstays of broadcasting since its earliest days. The first definite instance of a cookery programme listed on Genome is in 1924 on 5SC Glasgow, where a Miss Dunnett of the Glasgow and West of Scotland College of Domestic Science gave a talk on the subject in the series Topics for Women. 

In 1923 Mrs C.S. Peel had given a talk entitled Kitchen Conversation but it is not clear exactly what that was about… All the early cookery programmes were of a similar nature, with speakers, all female, discussing the subject in series such as Women’s Half-Hour from 5NO Newcastle  and 5IT Birmingham’s Women’s Corner, and Ada Featherstone giving her Cookery Talk to Women programmes from 6BM Bournemouth. The first mention of a man in relation to cooking is in Children’s Hour from 6FL Sheffield on 15th December 1926, in which one of the 'uncles' was to begin a cookery class.

Some of the earliest radio and television personalities were cooks and chefs, from the suave and sophisticated M. Marcel Boulestin, the pre-war French restaurateur who instructed in the mysteries of dishes from 'salade' and 'khebab' to exciting flambéd creations that threatened to set light to your curtains (in a rare holistic approach, he even presented some shows along with the TV gardener C.H. Middleton, to show where the ingredients came from) – to the presenters of post-war cookery shows on radio like Marguerite Patten, who advised on making the most of your rations, then TV chef Philip Harben, the eccentric Fanny Cradock, and through the 70s, 80s and beyond with Delia Smith and the current cornucopia of culinary experts… not forgetting Jimmy Young and his daily recipe on Radio 2. 

You have to take your hat off to the early TV cooks, who were risking their reputations by trying to make dishes live. Television of course lent itself far more to the demonstration of culinary skills, as radio had to confine itself to the straight talk, with only the fluency of the speaker to excite the appetite. M. Boulestin first broadcast in 1927, giving a talk entitled Wastage in the Kitchen.

He is credited with popularising French cuisine in Britain, ran several successful and acclaimed restaurants and wrote several cook books. Tragically, he was in France when that country fell to the Germans in 1940, and died in 1943 before it was liberated. The earliest television cookery programmes included Boulestin’s series Cook’s Night Out  which gives a clue as to the income bracket of the first television viewers. There was a simplicity to the recipes attempted, given the time available.

Sometimes programmes verged on the bizarre, with a Christmas Day programme on how best to carve your turkey – were people having Christmas dinner in front of the television even then? 

Every Sunday, Andrew Martin will be guiding you through the history of broadcasting by digging out archive gems and information from the BBC Genome listings.