R. E.
In 1993, Channel 4 decided to screen an alternative for those who find the Queen’s annual monologue to be a bit lacking in pizzazz. The first alternative Christmas message, billed as Camp Christmas and airing at 3 p.m., came from flamboyant raconteur Quentin Crisp, who began the broadcast by riding in a horse-drawn carriage to the sound of an out-of-tune trumpet playing a lopsided and unpatriotic version of the national anthem. ‘As Mr Dickens would have said,’ he began, ‘1993 has been the best of times and it has been the worst of times.’ The following year, American civil rights activist Jesse Jackson used his message to warn the British government of the ‘intolerance and violence’ it was stoking. This prompted permanently furious Conservative politician Norman Tebbit to say: ‘If Channel 4 wants to make itself look ridiculous, it’s a matter for Channel 4.’ But Channel 4 was delighted to be seen as ridiculous in the eyes of Norman Tebbit – in fact, I’m surprised that isn’t written into its public service remit – and in subsequent years it enlisted the services of Sacha Baron Cohen in the guise of Ali G, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other people who Norman Tebbit definitely wouldn’t want his children to marry.
After The Queen (and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or whoever) have finished their respective addresses and popped out for a well-earned fag, there’s a quaint tradition where families are brought together in a spirited argument about whether to watch the afternoon film on ITV or BBC. It seems unusual, in this era of multi-channel television, DVD box sets, Netflix, TiVo, iPlayer and all kinds of time-shift and catch-up telly, that we feel sufficiently bound to the Christmas schedules to have an altercation over whether to watch The Lion King or Frozen. But that will have happened in 2016, in an echo of classic family arguments of yore, such as the 1988 dilemma when The Empire Strikes Back and Back To The Future were screened simultaneously, or the threats and recriminations heard in 1990 when ET was up against Moonraker.
“If I can’t watch Christmas Bake Off then nobody’s watching anything.”
I asked Dan McGolpin, the Controller of Daytime television at the BBC, whether these national tiffs were cooked up between the networks just to give us something to do on an otherwise uneventful Christmas afternoon, or whether it’s like a game of Scissors, Paper, Stone, where neither network knows what the competition is doing until the double issue of Radio Times appears. ‘In terms of films,’ he says, ‘we have them locked down years in advance. We knew it would be Frozen on Christmas Day 2016 maybe three years previously. But yes, we know exactly what our rivals are going to be showing. There are exchanges in the industry between different broadcasters, we see each others’ draft schedules and we can move things around in the interest of viewers.’
Despite the industry’s best intentions, it’s hard to keep a family happy with one screen and one remote control. Admittedly, it’s better than it used to be: in pre-remote-control days, changing the channel involved getting up from a chair, pushing a button on the telly and then sitting down again. Those buttons were really heavy, they would make a big ‘ker-chunk’, and pressing them would make a real statement. Then someone else would get up and angrily push a different button, and so on until the police were called. But these days, whoever has the remote control is in control of Christmas. It is a wand of power, a baton of authority that’s used to beat the weak into submission, metaphorically speaking. Possession has traditionally defaulted to the eldest family member, and they would inevitably fall asleep with it next to them during a repeat of Laurence Olivier’s The World at War. But dare to grab hold of it so you could watch Scooby Doo, and they’d open one eye and say, ‘Don’t you dare’.
East Sussex, Christmas 1987
At Christmas there was a lot of friction between my mother and her mother-in-law, who would descend on our house and try to take over. This would cover things like how the turkey was cooked, but also extend to control of the television.
The network premiere of Ghostbusters was in 1987. Amid all the tension and madness of Christmas, Ghostbusters represented a beacon of hope for a 15-year-old boy. I’d had to sit all afternoon, listening to the adults going on, and now a bunch of men in jumpsuits were going to fire weapons at ghosts and this would be my moment. But my grandmother wouldn’t let us watch the beginning of Ghostbusters because Oliver was still on the other side. And I threw a proper huff about this, shouted something like ‘You’ve seen Oliver a million times’, went up to my room, slammed the door and stared at the wallpaper. Eventually she capitulated, and I was summoned back to the lounge for Ghostbusters, but I remember that there was a lot of tutting. In the bits of Ghostbusters she didn’t like, she’d turn to my grandfather and say, ‘Ugh, Eric’ as if it was his fault. As if he’d written the screenplay.
T. B.
Many of the films that we consider to be Christmassy have nothing to do with Christmas at all; they simply deliver the required doses of emotion and tension that we require in order to forget about the washing-up. The Great Escape and The Sound of Music are good examples; we think of them as Christmassy because of their sheer scale, but they’ve only ever been shown once each on Christmas Day.26 Margaret Deriaz of the British Film Institute muses on the BFI website about how Christmas films don’t necessarily need snow, snowmen or ho-ho-ho men; in her perfect Christmas film, the characters face adversity ‘and emerge refreshed and revitalised with a keener, clearer perception of what really matters in life’. In this category we have the heart-tugging schmaltz of It’s a Wonderful Life, but also Die Hard, the most unlikely Christmas film ever made. It comes complete with presents, Christmas trees and jingling bells, and the character of John McClane (played by Bruce Willis) comes to the realisation that he still loves his career-pursuing wife when he bumps off a German terrorist using a gun he stuck to his back using festive packing tape. Heart-warming stuff.
Leeds, Christmas 2016
When I was recovering from surgery I thought I’d be watching loads of box sets, but I didn’t have the concentration because I kept passing out. So I found these two cable channels, Christmas 24 and True Christmas Movies, which show really bad Christmas films back to back. They’re mostly American, mostly made-for-TV. We’re talking films like Mrs Miracle, which stars James Van Der Beek (who was Dawson in Dawson’s Creek) as a sad dad.
Those films were perfect, because if I missed a bit it didn’t matter. It was good fun to guess what was going to happen, although it was pretty easy to do. There are ones where the naughty child is stuck at home and learns the true meaning of Christmas, and others where the awful businessman meets someone down to earth from their home town and learns the true meaning of Christmas. My boyfriend would wander in and say, ‘Has anyone learned the true meaning of Christmas yet?’
P. A.
Then we have Love Actually, considered to be a modern Christmas classic by some, and certainly containing a fat dollop of Christmas, but it’s safe to say that no one emerges with a clearer perception of what really matters in life, especially not the audience; half of them are blubbing their eyes out while the other half are making perceptive points about feeble female characterisation and how they all tolerate far too much Christmas bullshit from annoying men. Personally, I’m happy with the goofy romance of Elf, the festive brokering of commodities in Trading Places, and the unfaithfully faithful Muppet Christmas Carol. And don’t you dare change the channel when they’re on or we’ll end up having an argument.
TV listings magazines provide us with timetables of potential family flashpoints. The sales figures of the Christmas double issues are a testament to the strong link that still exists between Christmas and telly; the Christmas 2016 edition of What’s on TV sold more than double the number it would in a normal week, while the double issue of Radio Times occupies a special position in British culture, even if it’s no longer the biggest seller. Fluorescent highlighter pens help to map out the upcoming conflicts over 14 days, giving plenty of time for individual family members to prepare their arguments and rehearse their closing state
ments to the jury.
The Christmas morning schedule is almost entirely animated, as children monopolise the TV while pushing each other about and getting queasy on Smarties. Raymond Briggs’s animated short The Snowman, however, can elicit a sentimental sigh from even the most emotionally repressed adult. It usually crops up on Christmas Day afternoons, and has been shown on Channel 4 every Christmas holiday since 1985, filling British living rooms with the sound of Howard Blake’s gorgeous score. David Bowie’s spoken introduction to camera feels more poignant now that he’s gone; in the words of writer Jude Rogers, he uses those moments to ‘frame himself as the boy who made and loved and lost a special friend.’ Blake has confessed to writing the music at a time of ‘terrible turmoil’, but The Snowman helps to provide a dreamy moment of escapism in an otherwise intense Christmas Day. Incidentally, we tend to associate its centrepiece, ‘Walking In The Air’, with chirpy former choirboy Aled Jones, but it’s not Jones’s voice you hear in the film. That’s Peter Auty, a St Paul’s Cathedral choirboy who hurtled through puberty in the time between the film being made in 1982 and the decision to record it as a single in 1985. Peter’s now one of Britain’s leading tenors, performing all over the world. Aled’s much more famous than Peter, but hey, that’s what a two-year stint on Cash in the Attic does for you.
Other notable choirboys you might spot on Christmas telly include the ones singing at Midnight Mass from St Thingy (or from Thingy Cathedral) on BBC One, and the ones you see on Carols from King’s, a traditional celebration of Christmas filmed in Cambridge, which has appeared on British TV every year since 1954. Neither programme contains any laughs, surprises, love affairs or grisly deaths, but both serve to remind us that somewhere, lurking deep within Christmas, is some vague association with Christianity.
Religion also tends to crop up in the specially curtailed Christmas news bulletins. The news is an unusual beast at Christmas, mainly because people tend to take a break from newsworthy decision-making. The two main headlines are usually something The Queen has said and something the Archbishop of Canterbury has said, and if the news is particularly slow you might get something that the Pope has said, too. ‘The cliché is that something big is going to happen,’ said a broadcast news journalist who asked me nicely not to mention his name. ‘But it’s usually very quiet. There’ll be several soft pieces that we have ready in case absolutely nothing is happening at all. I remember one year I worked the night of Christmas Eve. I drank half a bottle of wine and went to sleep under my desk at 11 p.m. I woke up at 8 a.m. the next morning, having been paid extra because it was Christmas Day. It was fabulous.’
On the evening of Christmas Day, Britain has settled into a regular pattern of limbering up with Coronation Street before vaulting into EastEnders, the latter usually managing to outdo the former in terms of anger, explosions and terminal illness. Ever since the 1986 Christmas episode, when Dirty Den informed his wife that he intended to divorce her after discovering that she’d lied about her cancer diagnosis (‘Happy Christmas, Ange’), the onus is upon EastEnders to fizz with acrimony. In the words of former Enders scriptwriter Sarah Phelps, ‘It’s when all the long-held secrets just go bursting into the air like lava.’ Bearing in mind the nature of the doom-filled plotlines, it’s a mystery why soap characters seem to look forward to Christmas and aren’t quaking in fear of its imminent arrival. But however improbable the plots might be, no one can deny the soap writers’ skill at creating stories that steep and mature over a year, like potent Christmas puddings, ready to be set ablaze on Christmas Day. The pub explodes, a baby is born, someone turns out to be someone we didn’t think they were.
“I don’t care if you find EastEnders depressing, I think it’s very true to life.”
‘It’s the golden crown of the year,’ says Phelps, who’s written a number of EastEnders Christmas storylines, including the fairy-tale Kat Slater and Alfie Moon episode in 2005. ‘At the time the soaps are broadcast,’ she says, ‘everyone has had a bit too much to eat and drink, and tempers might be fraying. But whatever’s going on in your living room will be exorcised by what’s happening on screen.’ EastEnders has never shied away from making us feel good about ourselves in comparison to the crisis-stricken residents of Walford. ‘Any hopes of a peaceful festive season seem slim this year,’ read the depressing blurb in the Radio Times for the 2016 Christmas Day episode, ‘with Phil’s health deteriorating rapidly.’ What could be more festive than watching Phil Mitchell struggling with a liver condition?
‘From a scriptwriter’s point of view,’ says Phelps, ‘you want as many lies and layers of lies as possible. You’ll have been cooking them up for at least a year – and this is really all because of “Merry Christmas Ange” in 1986, and Den Watts’ delight as he waited for the most psychologically devastating moment to deliver his news.’ That episode, which pulled in 30 million viewers (a figure likely to remain a record for ever), served as a timely warning to British citizens not to pretend to have cancer in order to cling on to a failing relationship. It might work short term, but ultimately things will probably get a bit messy.
Overall viewing figures may be slightly higher on New Year’s Day (thanks to our endearing habit of getting so hammered the night before that we’re unable to move from the sofa), but Christmas Day is regarded by the networks as the biggest telly day of the year,27 with the most popular stars doing their stuff as we gingerly step over presents en route to the kettle. In the 1950s, Television’s Christmas Party featured a bunch of celebrities who preferred to spend Christmas night performing in a BBC studio than staying at home with their loved ones: David Nixon, Petula Clark, Harry Secombe, Bob Monkhouse, Harry Corbett and Sooty all appeared in 1954, and it was probably only Sooty who managed to escape a rather difficult conversation with his family about priorities.
Things became more ambitious in 1958 with Christmas Night with the Stars, a selection box featuring two or three hours of small segments of hit shows (e.g. Black and White Minstrels, Steptoe and Son) that were pre-recorded, allowing the celebs to sit at home and watch themselves entertain a nation. Doctor Who made his first Christmas appearance on Christmas Day 1965, when viewers were treated to a festive episode entitled ‘Feast of Steven’. It incorporated a visit to a police station in the north of England, a chat with Bing Crosby, a Keystone Kops-style chase sequence, and ended with The Doctor, William Hartnell, breaking the fourth wall to wish a happy Christmas ‘to all of you at home!’ Sadly, this was wiped from the archives and is almost certainly lost for ever.
There was another Christmas Day TV landmark in 1971, and coincidentally that was my first Christmas, although I can’t pretend to have had anything to do with it. At 8.33 p.m. on BBC One, Eric Morecambe grabbed the lapels of conductor Andrew Preview (André Previn), and informed him that he was playing all the right notes of Grieg’s Piano concerto in A minor, ‘but not necessarily in the right order’. Five minutes later, Shirley Bassey had her performance of ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ disrupted by two errant stage hands, ending up with Eric’s boot on her right foot. These two celebrated skits helped to establish the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show as a centrepiece of Yuletide viewing, and clips from classic episodes are still repeated today: 1975’s ‘Hey Big Spender’ routine, 1976’s newsflash with Angela Rippon, and the unlikely recreation of ‘There is Nothing Like A Dame’ in the 1977 Christmas special. That 1977 show is regarded as a pinnacle of Christmas light entertainment; the prevailing nostalgic position is that an entire nation felt united by Eric and Ernie that night. ‘But to be honest,’ says social historian Joe Moran, ‘that analysis is largely retrospective. Nobody ever thinks that they’re in a golden age when they’re actually in it. Even at the time, people were saying that the Morecambe and Wise 1977 show wasn’t as good as the previous year had been.’
It’s certainly true that viewing figures don’t indicate whether we’re enjoying the show we’re watching. Included in the 21 million people watching Morecambe and Wise in 1977 would have be
en aunts grimacing, children watching under duress and grandfathers tolerating it because there was nothing else on.28 But while television has often stood accused of disrupting family life, it does at least have the ability to keep us all in the same room at Christmas, engendering a certain amount of cohesion and togetherness. Also, as Joe Moran notes, ‘it stops people talking, which kind of helps.’ Arguments can be smothered by a film, displaced by a quiz show. But when there’s no television at all, things can go to pieces.
Isle of Man, Christmas 2002
My dad was working in the Isle of Man as a gas fitter. He was out there for about eight months, living with two other plumbers, but he was on call for Christmas. We lived just outside Liverpool, but my mum didn’t want it to be just her and the kids for Christmas, so when she heard that the two men he was living with would be going home to their families, we decided to fly out to the Isle of Man. Me, my mum and my two younger brothers. None of us were particularly happy about it. We got to this house and it really smelt bad, of plumbers and Old Spice. But worst of all: there was no aerial for the television, and no DVD player. So we couldn’t watch anything. It was really bleak.
I remember there was a photocopier there, so instead of watching television we did hundreds of copies of our squashed faces and bums. There was also a wheelie office chair, and Phoenix Nights was popular at the time, so I got my brother to push me around while I did my Brian Potter impression. Oh, and we had a sprout eating competition and we made ourselves ill as a result. That’s what happens when there’s no telly. The cruel irony was that I got loads of DVDs on Christmas Day and couldn’t watch any of them.
A Very British Christmas Page 8