The Ghost of Xmas TV Past

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

So said St Paul, in his First Epistle to the Corinthians. As far as I’m concerned, this is one of the best lines in the Bible – right up there with 2 Kings 2: 23-24 (the bit about bears eating 42 youths who took the piss out of slaphead prophet Elisha).

"Go on baldy - AHHHH"

Christmas is a time (isn’t it?) when childish things have a tendency to come back out, no matter how carefully we have put them away.

We imagine (don’t we?) that because we remember things a certain way, that this is how they in fact should be – whether they were or were not actually ever so. And when things do not live up to those imaginary expectations, we are disappointed. The secretly-nurtured belief we all hold quietly in our hearts – that the present will never live up to the past - becomes ever so slightly harder.

Crikey. Two Bible references and a load of pop-psychology waffle and we’re only four paragraphs in. Might as well be in church, eh readers?

My point (aren’t we?) is that while nostalgia can be fun and comforting, when it starts to makes you resentful, you have to let it go.

That’s why it’s time to stop pretending that Christmas TV is some great collective experience, something makes the nation collectively pause to huddle together around a Radio Times.

Oh yes. This is about what’s on TV at Christmas.

If you want profundity, you’ve come to the wrong place.

Films

BBC1 gave us Toy Story 3 in the 3pm Christmas Day slot. I remember being so excited I could barely contain myself some year in the 1980s when it was Dumbo in that spot, or when it was The Empire Strikes Back.

My kids got Toy Story 3 on DVD LAST CHRISTMAS. They watch it IN THE CAR.

Network television – you cannot compete with the availability of films through other media. So don’t bother. If it’s nostalgia that makes you broadcast “family classics” at set times over the period, in my humble opinion that is BAD NOSTALGIA.

Classic Christmas Specials

What is this supposed to mean to me?

 I have and do enjoy a “classic” Christmas special. When I have been trapped indoors drinking all day and have finally got the kids to go to sleep, I can certainly see the appeal of watching a festive Morecambe and Wise Show or Only Fools and Horses.

But that’s not because it is actually any good. It’s because it’s comfortable and familiar, like an old pair of jogging bottoms. I can smile along without having to think at all, because I’ve seen them all a hundred times before.

It’s not that these programmes actually entertain. Instead they evoke the memory of having been entertained. Which may very well be a completely false memory.

Morecambe and Wise – for example – did their last Christmas special in 1983. I was 7 years old then. What did they mean to me then? Why should they mean anything more to me 30 years later?

Nothing, other than that over the years, culture has implanted the idea in my head that Eric and Ernie are an integral part of the Christmas experience.

Operation Yewtree, by the way, looks rather more likely to eradicate a lot of this kind of ‘70s and ‘80s nostalgia much quicker than any kind of critical reassessment of what our “traditions” mean to us will. 

Because you can’t have Christmas Top of the Pops without a memory of Jimmy Saville bedecked in tinsel, can you?

I notice that Rolf Harris has been swiftly replaced as the narrator of Olive the Ostrich. Innocent until proven guilty, eh Nick Jr?

Modern Christmas Specials

It doesn’t snow at Christmas in this country.

People do not buy the biggest Christmas tree they can find – with hilarious consequences.

Christmas jumpers are only worn ironically.

Why do programme-makers continue to perpetuate these myths about what Christmas is like and what people do at Christmas that are nothing but remnants of Victorian sentimentalism, 1970s bad taste and echoes of what they’ve seen in other Christmas episodes?

Oh Miranda...

How about someone tries to depict a 21st century Christmas that actually reflects people’s real experiences rather than a mid-century fever dream and hope against hope?

Or rather, don’t even bother. Because the TV may be the focal point of the living room – but unless it’s plugged into the Blu Ray Player, the Xbox and the internet – it is just not the focal point of family life any more. 

Boris the Baptist

As you could tell from the London Olympic opening ceremony, we now have a post-modern public culture. We are ironical, eclectic, genre-subverting, fusion-cooking, mixing up Chelsea Pensioners and lesbian kisses. We are high-brow and low-brow at the same time. The only politician who ‘gets’ any of this is Boris. He can mix Virgil and James Bond, a posh accent and street cred, conservative politics and a liberal spirit. Mr Cameron is the moderniser, but Boris is the post-moderniser.

So sayeth Charles Moore in the Telegraph this weekend.

There are many people who understand post-modernism better than me; people who have written whole books about it. And to them I say “Big Mac and fries please”. HA HA.

Whatever it means, Moore is right. For example, the generation which includes the prime minister has its idea of the 1980s defined as much by Five Star as by Margaret Thatcher, and as much by Five Star being called “fucking crap” on Going Live as by System Addict.

And every generation younger than that is similarly drenched in post-modern irony.

We are barely able to take listen to someone making a political or moral argument without writing them off as a fanatic or a hypocrite because relativism has become such a thoroughly ingrained habit.

Can you take seriously someone who sets themselves up as infallible, motivated only by noble desires, dedicated to nothing but public service and bettering the lot of their fellow men?

No, me neither. I am too silly, too overwhelmed by schadenfreude, too lazy – too post-modern – to regard that kind of a template for a human being with anything other than contempt.

Celebrities, on the other hand, are human - all too human.

So along comes Boris, the celebrity politician, and he is literally able to have a crowd of thousands chanting his name, surrounded by flags and flames – like the 20^th Century NEVER HAPPENED!

If everyone didn’t think Boris wasn’t serious, that would have been terrifying. So what was is he?

Boris Johnson is not a “one-off” or someone to whom the political rulebook doesn’t apply - he is a mutated virus. Along with Louise Mensch, he is the prototype of the next generation of celebrity politicians - he's John the Baptist for whatever kind of Jesus is coming next. By approaching us as celebrities, they are penetrating the defences we have put up against “politicians”.

They are reframing the terms of political discourse. The political parties are surely watching their apparently unique charisma at work and attempting to work out how to bottle it and routinise it. The question is, when the medium changes, what messages will we suddenly become susceptible to all over again?

The Second Seal is Opened

T-343: Isn’t it warm for January? Usually, West Yorkshire is frozen under an inch-thick carapace of ice at this time of year. COINCIDENCE? I don’t think so.

Well, if this is the end of the world, I must say it’s preferable to another winter of (i) being unable to drive up or down our road and (ii) having to walk everywhere very carefully, looking like I’ve bobbed meself.

I've not spotted any other portents of the end times, bar the unusually mild weather. 

I did see a seven-headed beast rise from out of the sea the other day. But when I thought about it later I realised it was a seagull trying to lift a plastic bag out of the canal. 

Dooooooh!!!

Rhapsodies of Bohemia - pt3

Neville Chamberlain once washed his hands of Czechoslovakia by calling it “a far-away country of which we know nothing”.

As such, I like to think that these three blog posts about my recent trip to Prague are working to prevent such appeasement of any future Hitler.

By making you not know nothing about it, and in fact know something about it.

The Czech Republic, that is.

Czech Technology

I shouldn’t really have been surprised by this (because it happened to me in France as well), but the first thing I did on getting out of the airport was to try and check my emails - and of course, I couldn’t get the internet on my phone. So I had to hold out for a WiFi network.

Naturally, I was very uneasy until I got online. God knows how anyone managed to go on holiday in the past. Or to places where they don’t have WiFi.

Anyway, pursuant to my remarks about the Czech language I was a little disconcerted when faced with the Czech keyboard. Now I know that other countries have different keyboards. But if ANYONE knows where the @ symbol is on the Czech keyboard, please let me know. In order to log in to my email, I had to Google “at symbol”.

Just another reason not to have all those silly accented letters in your alphabet taking up valuable keyboard space.

Czech culture

Ever seen this little chap? 

If - like me - you used to watch the eerie foreign cartoons on BBC2 around teatime circa 1983, you may have a vague recollection. If not, he’s called Krtek (which means “mole”) and as far as I could tell, he is the single most popular thing in the entire Czech Republic.

Perhaps one in every three shops and market stalls in Prague stock every kind of Krtek merchandise you can imagine.

On our last day there, I was starting to think this mole was a little too popular when I spotted him on the front page of a daily newspaper.

But it turned out that his creator, Zdenek Miler, had died that day. Very sad, because in just three days I had become a Krtek fan too.

Alongside Krtek, Prague is overrun with Kafka-kitsch and the occasional Svejk – but no one comes close to the mole.

In conclusion

Elvira and I had a great time in Prague. To be fair, we would probably have had a great time anywhere without the kids, but the location definitely contributed. Prague is easy to get to, (relatively) cheap, safe, simple to navigate, beautiful and fascinating. I give it two thumbs up, and despite the piss-taking in the foregoing three posts, I am now a firm fan of the Czech people and the Czech Republic. 

But after our foreign trip it was nice to come back to the kids and to Boston and see the familiar signs of home.

Must try harder

Last night my lovely wife Elvira of Castille took me out for a birthday meal. It was splendid. We saw some massive bottles of champagne in a special room...

Now, the normal sized cork in a bottle the size of a dustbin was interesting, but it's the names that interest me the most.

These bottles were probably Nebuchadnezzars or Methuselahs. Biblical characters, right?

So (...drum roll...) where in the Bible does Magnum appear?

Lo, he did drive around the walls of Jericho seven times in his red Ferrari, and he did smite the Midianites before turning to the camera and raising an eyebrow. (Higgins, 3:16)

I'll get my coat.