I know everything can’t be jolly all the time.
There are events, terrible incidents in history, that have the right to be revisited and looked at and remembered so new generations can perhaps better understand and learn from them.
And television and film are the perfect canvass for achieving this.
But I just can’t help but think the run-up to Christmas is not a brilliant time to be screening a three-part series about the infamous serial killer John Christie.
I admittedly thought I knew everything there was to know about the case and Rillington Place, Christie’s home and the title of the dramatisation starring Tim Roth and Samantha Morton as the killer and his abused, brainwashed, wife.
But there was even more, darker material to come, including the fact he stitched up an innocent man who actually, in a terrible miscarriage of justice, hung before the mistake came to light and the real murderer was brought to justice.
The whole thing though was enough to make the Christmas tree’s branches droop.
I had to put my festive mince pie back in the box. Which actually was probably a good thing.
Then when I sought light relief over on ITV, Rillington Place is on BBC 1, I was presented with the chance to watch the first episode in another equally dark three-parter this time based on a real-life case set in the 1950s.
In Plain Sight, which is equally as disturbing, is about the race to bring to justice a man who taunted police and more or less laughed in their faces as he attacked and killed women in Scotland.
It will conclude the week before Christmas so that will leave us feeling all sparkly and cheery.
There are 52 weeks in a year - could the schedulers not have thought about it a bit more ?
But I guess the people who don’t mind this sort of thing, any time of the year, are the ones who settle down after the turkey and Christmas pudding and watch everyone shout and swing punches at each other on the cobbles/Albert Square/the Dales.
It is a sort of anti-Christmas present to themselves.
I’m more of a fan of those specials, which have been few and far between of late, where Shane Ritchie leads everyone in a sing-song around the Christmas tree outside the Vic.
It always snows on Christmas Day in Eastenders as well. And they often get married then too.
A wedding on Christmas Day might be unlikely but at least it vaguely resembles a happy occasion.