IT was bloody freezing last Sunday night. One of those nights when all thoughts of leaving the house should be reserved for the emergency services and milkmen only.
Yet it didn't stop thousands - and I mean thousands - of people from heading down into Liverpool city centre for the staging of the Liverpool Nativity by the BBC, which was screened live on BBC3.
This being a BBC 3 production, it was repeated on the same evening and is due for its first airing on BBC 1 at 10.45pm today. If you did miss it last week (a respectable 700,000 tuned in - not bad for BBC 3) then it's well worth looking out for.
Set in Liverpool, Joseph was an asylum seeker and Mary a pregnant teenager, and despite the perhaps slightly cliched modernisation of the birth of Christ, the whole thing worked really well.
That's despite BBC Radio Merseyside trying to whip up controversy about the event by getting a newspaper columnist on to dismiss the idea of Joseph being an asylum seeker as rewriting history.
Fortunatley, no-one appeared to pay much attention to such stirring and the result was a bumper crowd out in the cold to watch something special.
Set around the streets of Liverpool, and using some of the city's best-known songs, the production benefits from a great script (look out for the great moment on the Mersey Ferry) which means the hour in which it lasts flies by.
Tunes by The Beatles, John Lennon, George Harrison, Teardrop Explodes, Echo & The Bunnymen, the Icicle Works, Dead Or Alive and The Las are all in there.
Some of the scenes were pre-recorded, but the vast majority was live on the night. As curtain-raisers for 2008 go, it was one which can't be knocked.
Of course, it's a tad annoying that this repeat clashes with the Match of the Day 2 show with Manchester United v Everton on it. For the Blue half of the city, there's yet another repeat of the play, on Christmas Day itself, back on BBC 3 at 7pm.
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