For me, Christmas and the holiday season is all about spending time with friends and families, board games, presents, carols, food and outdoor rambles to try and walk off the food, and of course tuning in to lots of great television. Every year at the BBC we aim to put on a great range of programmes that unite friends and family as well as appealing to a whole range of tastes.

This year there are an enormous amount of original commissions - from comedy and entertainment to music and children's drama - more than any other broadcaster. In fact this year there are no repeats in prime time on BBC One between Christmas Eve and Boxing Day, and repeats on BBC Two have gone down again.

To see whether this year's schedule holds up against our ambition of appealing to all tastes I decided to do a quick (although not very scientific) survey of my own extended family to see what they are likely to be watching over the holidays.

My son is a keen Top Gear fan so he will be switching on to see Jeremy, Richard and James as they set out across the Middle East, following the route of the three wise men (although they'll be doing so in wholly unsuitable sports cars rather than on camels, of course) and asking the question 'what exactly is myrrh and where do you buy it?'

In the film here you will see the hair-raising moment when the boys first touch down and realise exactly what lies ahead for them.

My daughter, back from university, will be glued to the Strictly Christmas special (and Most Annoying People 2010 on BBC Three!).

 

Luckily for me my husband is a keen and talented chef, so he is sure to feast on Toast, the drama based on Nigel Slater's memoirs starring the wonderful Helena Bonham Carter. My sisters (one a literary expert, the other an artist) are both fans of BBC Four, so Dirk Gently, the Douglas Adams' adaptation with Stephen Mangan is a must, plus Jools' Annual Hootenany and the Live Aid drama, When Harvey Met Bob, because they were there!

My sisters-in law and brothers-in-law are all accomplished classical musicians and will definitely be tuning in to see Jonathan Kent's new production of Don Giovanni from Glyndebourne on BBC Two and on BBC Four, and Simon Russell Beale's joyous Sacred Music featuring composers including Bach, Mendelssohn and Handel.

Christmas every year means all of us watching Carols From Kings as well as wall-to-wall BBC One from EastEnders to the big films. Doctor Who is a huge event for us, and has opera diva Katherine Jenkins taking on her first acting role with the marvellous Sir Michael Gambon.

Ronnie Corbett has a new all-star sketch show, The One Ronnie, and then there's the welcome return of Matt Lucas and David Walliams to BBC One in their airport mockumentary Come Fly With Me. You'll get to see just a few of their comic characters here in the film including the check-in girl Melody and Taaj, one of the airport ground staff.

Across the whole festive season, I can't wait to watch the revival of Upstairs Downstairs with my mum in particular, as she loves period drama. I'll warn her, and all of you, to catch the monkey.

And I'm sure all the generations will be tuning in to see Tony Jordan's thoughtful retelling of The Nativity to enjoy the story of Christmas and to see Peter Capaldi transformed from being Malcolm Tucker in The Thick Of It to one of the three Magi.

I hope you enjoy this sneak preview film and that you find plenty to whet your appetite this Christmas on the BBC. Everyone who works for me - the channel teams and schedulers, the talented programme makers and the camera and studio crews, marketing and press teams - all spend months preparing for the Christmas season and I know all of us want to wish you a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and great viewing!

Jana Bennett is director of BBC Vision.

Comments made by writers on the TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

These reports are essentially health checks done every five years to ensure that the channels are delivering the kind of programmes that audiences expect of them.

The way it works is quite simple.

We submit a report on each channel to the Trust, analysing its performance, the range of programming provided and an outline of its achievements and strategy for the future.

The Trust examines these reports, canvasses the views of licence fee payers and then publishes its findings. You can read the reports we submitted for each channel - part one is here: (BBC Trust Review Exec Submission 1 [pdf]) and part two is here: (BBC Trust Review Exec Submission 2 [pdf]). There's a summary of the report at the beginning of each one.

Also you can read the Trust's conclusions on their website.

I've had a chance to read these reports in full and I'm pleased to see that the Trust has recognised all the good work that the channels have been doing to deliver great programmes to you on all channels. On BBC One, dramas like Five Daughters and Luther have been truly distinctive offerings this year.

Both have had a passionate reaction from the audience as seen on the posts on this blog by Five Daughters executive producer, Susan Hogg and Luther scriptwriter, Neil Cross.

Elsewhere on the channel we've had programmes like The Day The Immigrants Left, Bang Goes The Theory and Modern Masters that are offering viewers the kind of unique peak viewing that you just wouldn't see anywhere else.

This is what the Trust want to see even more of but I'm pleased they can see how much we are already doing here.

On BBC Two and BBC Four the Opera season, Gareth Malone Goes To Glyndebourne and Wonders of The Solar System have proved to be hits with audiences and critics alike.

More recently I've been watching the Fatherhood season on BBC Four which is the kind of distinctive programming that only BBC Four would offer and that the Trust is challenging us to provide more of in order to increase the 'reputational dividend' for the BBC still further.

Richard Klein, controller of BBC Four, has written on this blog about the Fatherhood season, as has Andrew Martin, presenter of Disappearing Dad.

Another area where the Trust has asked some searching questions is our daytime output.

We've made great headway in introducing more current and consumer affairs into the daytime schedules with programmes such as Rip Off Britain, Crimewatch Roadshow and The Estate We're In (which won a Royal Television Society award and the second series of which is airing today) alongside new dramas Land Girls and Missing.

There is even more that we plan to do here; new Missing Live, a week of programmes around Remembrance Sunday, a new series of Jimmy McGovern's Moving On and a 1960s season of programmes including drama The Indian Doctor with Sanjeev Bhaskar - just the sort of quality programmes that sets us apart from all other channels in daytime.

So overall I am pleased to see that the Trust has endorsed our determination to bring audiences programmes that surprise and delight in a truly distinctive way.

There is plenty more to do and you will see this coming over the next year or so with new dramas such as Outcasts and Sherlock and factual programmes such as Frozen Planet, the Battle of Britain season and a major new literature series, Faulks On Fiction.

But in the meantime I encourage you to have a read of both reports and let us know what you think.

Jana Bennett is the director of BBC Vision

Continuing on the sporting side, we will also be showing, amongst others, The Open and Women's Open, the Rugby League Challenge Cup Final, European Athletics Championships, Royal Ascot, the Rowing World Cup and of course the latest rounds from this year's Formula One championship, which may yet see a British driver crowned world champion for the third year running.

From the musical festivals we will have coverage from Reading & Leeds, T In The Park from Balado, Kinross-shire and, of course, Glastonbury from the Eavis' farm in Somerset. The Proms are also back in July and will this year be presented by Katie Derham.

One of the main reasons the BBC exists is to broadcast events that bring communities and the nation as a whole together. I can't imagine a better line up to do just that.

It is worth bearing in mind however, that since many of these events are live, there may be occasions when some of the nail-biting sporting action or musical performances will run a little longer than originally scheduled.

We saw this happen in a different arena just last month where we watched extraordinary developments unfold following the election results.

On this occasion, political drama took over from fictional drama in our schedules as EastEnders and Holby City were moved to bring viewers news of Gordon Brown's resignation and the announcement of the new coalition government took place in front of 10 million viewers on BBC One.

When events overrun or turn into edge of your seat moments, we may decide to either alter the schedule so we can stay with them, or move their coverage from BBC Two to BBC One so that we ensure the largest amount of people can see them.

That is after all what we are here to do - to share these big moments with as many people as possible.

We don't take that decision lightly though. We are very aware of the disruption it can cause to the rest of the schedule, including things like the regional news.

That is why this year we have decided, wherever possible, to steer clear of moving events from BBC Two to BBC One until after 7pm so as to avoid disrupting the regional news services. That is the one thing that we cannot swap onto BBC Two owing to technological restrictions.

I cannot say we won't ever change the schedules or move things earlier than 7pm - after all no-one would thank us for leaving a performance, an historic sporting battle or a change of government before its conclusion. But where we do, it will be done whilst trying to cause the minimum of disruption to all our viewers.

For now let's sit back (or jump up and down) and enjoy what looks set to be an incredible summer of live events on the BBC.

UPDATE Thursday, 1 July:

Last night we had just such a situation where we wanted to ensure the biggest possible audience could see the culmination of Andy Murray's battle for a semi final place at this year's Wimbledon.

In order to do that we moved the match from BBC Two to BBC One at 6.40pm.

Although this meant the news hour was slightly shortened I felt the importance of the match justified the move.

As I have said above, we don't take these decisions lightly but having seen that around 5.5m people tuned in it seems like our audience shared the view that it was worth doing.

Jana Bennett is director of BBC Vision

BBC Four's Newswipe with Charlie Brooker was recognised above two estimable giants of the entertainment world: X Factor and Britain's Got Talent.

The humorous and uncompromising voice of Charlie Brooker on the BBC has gained this acclaim by having originality, an attitude and genuinely, something to say about our media today. The fact is that BBC Four, a relatively new channel (in British terms anyway), can punch above its weight at these important industry events.

The night saw a record number of awards for BBC television, winning 19 out of 27, if we include the distinguished Norma Percy's judges' award for her unparalleled work for the BBC. It also illustrated what we mean by quality when we talk about the BBC's ambitions in the future.

The range of BBC One's awards was remarkable. From Peter Bower's drama, Occupation to popular factual series like Famous, Rich And Homeless; from EastEnders in its 25th year and Jimmy McGovern's The Street; from the searing feature-length documentary, Wounded, following the slow painful rehabilitation of two veterans of the conflict in Afghanistan to the best history winner, Garrow's Law and double winner Small Island - these were all quality but all very different.

That key ingredient, quality also stood out for the judges, across a wide variety of programme winners, from both children's channels, CBeebies and CBBC as well as our BBC Four international programme, Mad Men.

BBC Comedy also did well. Miranda Hart, who I sat next to, was fine until the ceremony's wonderful host Rob Brydon suddenly announced halfway through, that there would now be speeches for the remaining awards.

What was a reasonably stress-free evening for nominees suddenly tensed up around the comedy table.

But win Miranda did, for best comedy performance, after her breakthrough sitcom Miranda on BBC Two. While the winner of scripted comedy on my other side was Armando Iannucci, and his Thick Of It team.

Last week's launch of the BBC's strategy review was headlined 'Putting quality first'. No doubt what this means will continue to be debated - but its significance really hits when you look at all these very different winners and the huge array of talent behind them.

Jana Bennett is the director of BBC Vision

The author of that feminist classic, The Feminine Mystique died a few years ago. Betty Friedan's highly influential book was all about how the American system had celebrated women doing paid work during WW2 but then tried to repudiate that part of US history and forcefully reintroduce the notion of femininity in the 50s to get women back at home.

It was fascinating to me because it told of the experience of my own mother's generation - an experience reflected in the wonderful Mad Men series on BBC Four now.

Some of the most influential feminist writers - Marilyn French and Mary Daly - have also died recently. What happened to that body of work? There are a number of writers who made a big contribution. What does their writing mean to women these days?

What brought this into sharper focus for me was a chat with some girls in a local sixth form who didn't know why feminists would have talked about burning bras as a symbol of liberation. "Why would you want to do that?" one of them asked.

When I was a student, it felt like my whole generation read The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer - and I mean young men as well as women. This year it's 40 years since that book was published.

Could we tell the story of the contribution made by these writers who had defined post-war feminism and look at the influence of these ideas over the decades through women's and girls' lives?

It feels like a good moment to assess the effects of feminism over the generations. I thought this series could form a chronicle of our own social history driven by writers.

So this is what's coming up:

Documentary producer Vanessa Engle has made a series of three documentaries, the first of which, Libbers, is on BBC Four on TV on 8 March.

These engrossing programmes look at how important these post-war writers had been on much thinking on women's rights and women's lives.

Marilyn French gave Vanessa her final interview before she died, so this film is all the more precious.

In A Passionate Woman on BBC One, Kay Mellor tells the two-part story of her mother's affair with a Polish neighbour in the 1950s - and its impact on her family a generation later in the 1980s. Billie Piper and Sue Johnston are among the cast.

Beyond this, how much have these ideas of Western feminism been shared right across the world where the most basic rights aren't in place?

BBC Three is contributing more stories to the collection, including an incredibly gritty but in some ways uplifting documentary called Judith: Going Back To Congo. A young British woman goes back to her birth country, where, as Amnesty says, rape is cheaper than bullets. Systematic rape has been used as a way to destroy communities there.

Danny Cohen, the controller of BBC Three, has also commissioned two documentaries about Afghanistan - Girls On The Frontline about young women soldiers and Women, Weddings, War And Me where another young British woman goes back to her birth country, this time to look at the struggle with the Taleban.

This week's Question Time comes from Dewsbury and though chaired by David Dimbleby as usual, it has a female-only audience for the first time on the show.

So across the spectrum, the idea is to capture through different programmes, some of the experience of women's lives here and elsewhere - across the ages and across the globe.

Also in honour of International Women's Day and this week of programming, the BBC website is publishing two absorbing archives of women's history - Marriage and Second Wave Feminism. I encourage you to go there to listen to footage such as a question posed on Any Questions in 1955 - At what age does a woman become a spinster? (Answer - when she can no longer attract!)

There's lots of video clips too - like this Nationwide feature from the 1970s where a female journalist tries to buy a coffee after midnight and can't get served anywhere because she is an unaccompanied woman - and therefore probably a prostitute.

Going back to the sixth formers' conversation - the era they were wondering about is captured in this footage. Do have a look - and please leave your thoughts about this special week of programming on the blog here.

Jana Bennett is the director of BBC Vision

EDITOR'S UPDATE - Women, Weddings, War And Me had a title change just before it went on air so I've amended this post. The previous title which Jana had originally mentioned was Nel: From Camden To Kabul.

The central woman in the documentary, Nel Hedayat has written this evocative feature for the BBC News website: Marriage, prison or death?