Advent Calendars are in season at the BBC this December, with BBC Worldwide releasing a general version for YouTube culled from the company’s programming at large, and BBC Scotland mounting a much more specific rendition based around the long-running Scottish soap “River City.”

Rather than stale chocolates emerging from behind each day’s opened slot, these digital calendars feature video content as their daily prizes, which, in “River City’s” case, means great clips from the archives, previews of upcoming episodes, and on-the-set messages from the actors who play fans’ favorite characters.

As the longest-running continual drama on the BBC, “River City,” which has been building a fan base since 2003, is a worthy choice for this kind of promotion, explained BBC Scotland content producer Paul McFadyen. People have gotten to know the characters and are “used to coming back for regular updates. You couldn’t do [an advent calendar] with any program. It has to be a program people have been coming to for a long period of time.”

BBC Drama publicist Julie Whiteside conceived of the calendar as a way to reward fans who “love behind-the-scenes glimpses and little snippets of getting to know people” as well as to provide teasers of upcoming episodes, she said.

To produce 11 of the 24 days on the calendar, McFadyen headed to a “River City” set where many of the actors were working for the day. In a barn outside of Glasgow, he pulled each actor aside to film a getting-to-know-you message with them out of character. Some popular characters did not make the cut for the calendar because, according to Whiteside, “we didn’t want to burst the bubble of who they are.” For instance, “there’s one particular character called Billy Kennedy – who is a very, very bad man, quite frankly. He kills a lot of people and we thought if we got [the actor who plays him], Alexander Morton, who is LOVELY, to do this, it would feel really weird. So we didn’t do him.”

Because the location of the interviews was the set itself, the clips McFadyen shot were already lit to look like the show, making it easy to mount them on the “River City” homepage and blend in with the rest of the content. In addition to the chats with actors, other days’ scheduled clips included classic clips from the past season, teaser clips for upcoming episodes and one hilarious clip featuring the character of Molly O’Hara doing her own rendition of a Black Eyed Peas song for a fun run (seen in the below clip at the 8-minute mark.)

Viewers are lead to the calendar through the show’s social media outlets and a promotional message at the end of each episode. McFadyen said it’s a nice Christmas gift for new and old fans alike because “it looks over the past year and fills [new viewers] in on the background” but also “a lot of the video messages are quirky with in-jokes. So it’s rewarding for the people already familiar with this show and its characters.”

The two BBC Scotland veterans are “trying to look at different ways to do things with the website and with publicity,” Whiteside said. “Paul and I felt that the website had kind of fallen by the wayside slightly, so we decided to take it upon ourselves to make it a bit more juicy. [The calendar] was a different way to communicate a message to fans. It’s made Paul and I want to do more of this type of thing.”

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