Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 20

 

Flash… ah-ah...

Nostalgia wasn’t really a thing with our parents’ generation, at least not if my own parents were anything to go by. Our dad’s tastes in music certainly harked back to the era when jazz and big band swing had, all too briefly, been the ‘popular music’ of their day, and he had a small collection of records reflecting this interest: but he hadn’t kept any books, toys or ephemera from his childhood – more’s the pity, as my brother and I would have got a kick out of seeing them.

One thing I do remember him reminiscing about was Saturday morning pictures at the cinema: the line-up of cartoons and serials that were regularly screened to entertain a pre-television generation of children. In the mid 60s, when Batman came to television, our dad remembered seeing the old cinema serial version in the 1940s. But the serial he remembered best of all was Flash Gordon. I entertained no expectation of seeing it myself, as it was far too old, and the BBC didn’t go in for that kind of thing – vintage Laurel and Hardy, certainly, but never any of the old cinema serials. Then came Christmas 1976...

By this time, we’d come to expect a few choice repeats from the television networks during the school holidays: for the past two years, BBC1 had shown episodes of Star Trek at Christmas; but this year, the corporation offered up the entire, unabridged Flash Gordon serial, which was celebrating its fortieth anniversary. The serial had been shown in a 2-part abridgement earlier in the year, which may have prompted this full-length festive broadcast, its first complete screening on any UK television network.

Buster Crabbe had first donned the mantle of Alex Raymond’s comic strip hero back in 1936, and returned again in Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1938). Between this and the final entry in the series, Crabbe briefly switched comic book roles to portray Buck Rogers. The serials were all produced by Universal Pictures, and anyone with an ear for soundtracks might have recognised music cues from some of their horror pictures, most notably Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Werewolf of London (1935) and The Invisible Man (1933).

The original comic strip had been running for a shade over two years when Universal’s serialisation first hit the big screen, so this was bang up-to-the-minute stuff. Accounts differ as to the budget for the serial, with claims that it was in excess of a million dollars, but this seems unlikely given the amount of material reycled from earlier movies, both in the form of sets and previously shot footage. Nevertheless, the production design stuck closely to Alex Raymond’s original, and the characters would have been instantly recognisable to readers of the comic strip. Universal had an instant hit on their hands – the film was their second-highest grossing title of 1936, so sequels were inevitable.

Science fiction wasn’t new to cinema – Georges Méliès had wowed audiences as far back as 1902 with his fantasy A Trip to the Moon, but Flash Gordon was the first sci-fi serial for the screen, and its success heralded a wave of futuristic adventures. Not that Flash Gordon is heavy on the space hardware: in fact, it looks rather more like a medieval adventure with a few Roman centurions thrown into the mix. There were lots of fights – around one per episode, with Flash taking on all comers – Ming's soldiers, an 'Octosac' and a thing called an Orangopoid which looks suspiciously like Ethel the chimp from the 1930 Laurel and Hardy short...

Watching from a distance of forty years, one couldn’t help but smile at some of the special effects on show. The whole business of practical effects in movies and television had improved out of all recognition in the intervening years, but I still enjoyed seeing Dr. Zarkov’s rocket ship propelled through the strangely misty void of interplanetary space by means of a couple of sparklers. The sound effects were idiosyncratic too – rocket ships crackled and popped like a backfiring old banger when taking off, and in flight sounded more like an electrical generator than the smooth whooshing sounds we’d grown accustomed to in the Gerry Anderson productions.

The acting was, of course, corny and melodramatic, with the latter quality best exemplified by Charles Middleton’s unforgettable performance as Emperor Ming. He was a regular movie baddie, and had already menaced Laurel and Hardy in a couple of their films. Buster Crabbe was perfectly cast as Flash, and the trio of Earth explorers was completed by Jean Rogers as Dale Arden and Frank Shannon as Dr. Zarkov.

The serial kicked off forty-eight years ago today on 20 December 1976, with two episodes together, followed by another double-up on Tuesday 21st. The serial ran all the way through Christmas, pausing only for Christmas Day itself, with the concluding part shown on New Year’s Eve. Happily, our dad was off work for Christmas week and was able to sit in with us for some of the episodes, reliving a part of his childhood he’d never expected to see again.

We didn’t have to wait a year for the next serial, because in June 1977, the BBC rolled out the 15-part Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars on Saturday mornings. I was a convert by now, and made sure to be tuned in. Christmas 1977 brought the final serial, Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, generally regarded as the weakest of the three, before Christmas 1978 brought the 1939 Buck Rogers serial; and with that, the brief run of Saturday morning cinema classics came to an end. They were all repeated over the coming years before disappearing sometime in the early 90s. These days, your best bet is to go to YouTube, where the original serial can be found in its entirety:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrdrha6AX3w 

In two years, that old Flash Gordon serial will be ninety. I doubt it will ever see action again on the BBC,  yet even as I speak, retro TV channel Rewind are mid way through a screening of Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe.

I’ll leave you with this sobering thought: back in 1976, the original Flash Gordon serial was, as I mentioned earlier, forty years old. Today, the 1980 colour remake directed by Dino De Laurentis is even older than that – forty four, to be precise. But I doubt it looks as old to modern eyes as the original Flash Gordon did to us back in 1976.

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 19

 

You'll Go Down in History...

I couldn’t tell you when I first heard Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. As a child, the song seemed always to have existed, and I’d never have given a thought as to its origins or who actually wrote it. A random social media posting a few days ago revealed the interesting story behind this seasonal ditty, accompanied by some original sketches.

Rudolph was the creation of Robert L May, a struggling writer who wrote advertising copy for the Montgomery Ward department store in Chicago. The store had previously given away colouring books to children at Christmas time, but for the 1939 season decided to produce a story book. May was tasked with creating a cheerful, appealing character in the Walt Disney mould, and chose a reindeer for its associations with Christmas. The commission came at a tough time for May: he was heavily in debt and his wife Evelyn was dying of cancer. She would not survive to see the story completed, but their daughter and her grandparents were immediately won over by May’s tale when it was completed in late August. 

A page from the original rough layout from 1939. Note the very modern use of 'er...' 

At this point, Rudolph’s story was told in verse, rather than the song by which it has become universally known. The resulting softback book was an immediate hit with shoppers at Montgomery Ward, with 2.4 million copies given away. Wartime restrictions on paper precluded a reprint before 1946 when its success exceeded the first year of publication.

May was approached by the RCA Victor company who wished to do a recording of the poem, but the copyright resided with his employers, Montgomery Ward. In an astonishingly generous gesture, Ward made over the full copyright to May effective from 1 January 1947. The following year, May, who had remarried, enlisted his brother-in-law Johnny Marks to turn the poem into a song. Recording artists of the day were initially reluctant, but finally, a 1949 recording by ‘singing cowboy’ Gene Autry topped the Billboard charts, selling 1.75 million copies on its first release:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjLTDaCUYuQ

Totting up its many cover versions, the song has shifted 150 million copies over the years and lies second only to Bing Crosby’s White Christmas in all time sales. Crosby had passed on Rudolph when the song was first offered to him, but Autry’s success clearly changed his mind, and in 1950 he committed his own version to shellac.

Once enshrined in song, there was no stopping Rudolph. Within a year he was already recognised as a new cultural icon, with the Chicago Tribune describing him as ‘the first new and accepted Christmas legend since Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.’ With the benefit of hindight, they might have added ‘the first of many’ – but few have had the staying power of that shiny-nosed reindeer.

For many Americans, Rudolph’s apotheosis came in 1964 with the production of an animated TV special first shown on December 6 of that year, and recently repeated by NBC on its sixtieth anniversary. Here in Britain, ITV held the rights to the special, which was shown as early as 1968, albeit with no great fanfare, tucked away in the morning schedule on HTV. The BBC came rather late to the party – thirty years late, in fact, with their first screening coming on Boxing Day 1994. Is a sixtieth anniversary repeat too much to hope for here in Britain?

I like a bizarre fact to end on, so here it comes – when searching for a name for his cute creation, Bob May very nearly settled on Reginald… wouldn’t have been quite the same, would it? 

The 1964 stop-motion animation, beloved of Americans but less well known in Britain

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 18

 

Coathangers for Christmas

Everyone of a certain age remembers it – Blue Peter’s ‘Advent Crown’, a concoction of coat hangers, tinsel and fork handles – sorry, four candles – that the programme’s presenters made every year in the run up to Christmas. You can see Christopher Trace showing how it’s done in this clip from 1965, the second year in which the festive decoration was featured: Here's one I made much earlier

Trace would be gone from the programme within a couple of years, but his Advent Crown lingered on.... and on. In 1967 it was the turn of John Noakes to have a go, and his efforts provided a photo-feature for that year’s Blue Peter Book, ably assisted by Patch the dog.

Even in the 1960s, health and safety was a consideration, with Chris Trace urging viewers to use flameproof tinsel – I wonder how many accidents it took before they added that particular caveat? Even then, those candles didn’t look exactly secure and could easily have dropped off.

He seems less concerned with the idea of youngsters chopping the ends off wire coathangers, leaving some nasty sharp edges to cut little fingers. And exactly how many viewers had access to ‘ordinary 14 gauge galvanised wire’ or even knew what it was? I’d struggle with that even today: do they sell it in B&Q?

The Advent Crown was to Blue Peter what the Daleks are to Dr. Who – presenters came and went yet still the old bit of festive tat was brought out year after year. I suspect they may have stopped doing it some time ago, which is hardly surprising. One forum discussion suggests that the tradtion had lapsed for a while before returning in 2014, but since then, who knows? I’m quite sure that the BBC’s H&S Police impounded the last Advent Crown long ago.

For all the years that Blue Peter trotted out this seasonal tradition, I wonder exactly how many viewers went to the trouble of making their own Advent Crowns? We certainly didn’t, and I can imagine the reaction if I’d suggested it. The problem with so many of those Blue Peter craft efforts was that you needed to plan ages in advance. Valerie Singleton made no end of stuff using old lollipop sticks, but to amass enough to build something like a bunk bed for your ‘soldier doll’ (we can’t call him Action Man, this is the BBC), or worse still, a log cabin, you’d have needed to consume a lolly a day all summer for about two years. It’s the same problem here: your mum probably needed all those old wire coat hangers, and who would happen to have four old lids from jars of mayonnaise or salad cream just lying around conveniently waiting to be turned into candle holders? I’ve searched online and I’ve found only two examples of home made Advent Crowns done by a couple of bloggers. Of course, to use the old adage (that I just made up), no Google hits does not equal zero, I dare say there may have been some enterprising Blue Peter viewers who made their own Advent Crowns (or got their parents to do it for them) without a) photographing the results or b) sharing them on social media five decades later. 

There’s one final consideration to be borne in mind: if you buy a Christmas decoration and it burns the house down, you’d probably be able to sue the manufacturer. If you make your own and a conflagration results, don’t expect Lloyds of London to cough up.

Light the blue touchpaper and retire to a safe distance... John Noakes plays with fire, circa 1967

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 17

Presents from the Past

Back in my childhood, there always seemed to be a ‘must-have’ toy every Christmas. One year it was Corgi Toys’ famous model of Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang: I wanted this more than I wanted to see the film (which, in fact, I didn’t). In 1967 it was a thing called ‘Johnny Astro’ which was essentially a fan and a balloon masquerading as an outer space lunar landing toy. In 1965 it was anything to do with the Daleks, or Thunderbirds. History repeated itself in the early 90s when the ‘Thunderbirds Tracy Island’ became the most coveted toy at Christmas 1992, to such an extent that Blue Peter presenter Anthea Turner showed young viewers how to make one of their own using household junk. Long after I’d ceased to take an interest in contemporary toys, I was still aware of the frenzy that could ensue when the year’s most popular toys fell victim to demand outstripping supply – during the 1980s and 90s, you could depend on seeing a new example every year: Transformers’ Optimus Prime – Cabbage Patch Dolls – Tamagotchis. I’m not sure I’ve seen any examples of this trend in recent years, but you can bet it hasn’t gone away.

Toy manufacturers didn’t mess about when it came to promoting their products: back in the 60s and 70s, any new toy for Christmas would be relentlessly plugged during the advert breaks in children’s television. Somewhere, I have an off-air recording of a commercial break from the weeks leading up to Christmas 1967, and the aforementioned Johnny Astro is up there vying with adverts for Meccano and a thing called the ‘Chad Valley Close and Play’, a simplified record player aimed at children. The BBC were even guilty of this, in examples of ‘product placement’ that wouldn’t be permitted today. Blue Peter often ran features on the season’s most innovative toys – I can remember seeing Corgi’s James Bond Aston Martin given a plug when it first appeared, and they were always adding new rolling stock to their model railway. Another year, the presenters demonstrated a new toy called ‘Computacar’, which drove itself along in response to a die-cut card that manipulated the wheels from below – a ‘self driving car’ decades before they arrived in the real world. Of course, the manufacturers were never given a namecheck, but once you’d seen the toy, you knew exactly what to ask for from Father Christmas: job done.

I still have my original Computacar from all the way back in 1969: in fact I’ve got two, because my brother and myself were bought one each. These presents from the past have survived along with a surprising amount of other toys from Christmases gone by. A lot of them were accessories and equipment for Palitoy’s famous Action Man – a space capsule dating to 1967 or thereabouts, and two vehicles from around the same time; and of course there were any number of board games. Of the latter, one that stands out in my recollection is a thing from around 1971 called ‘Haunted House’, a game that involved various practical tricks and hazards in a similar vein to the perennially popular ‘Mouse Trap’ (which is still going strong after more than sixty years in production). Christmas 1973’s big new board game was ‘Escape From Colditz’, cashing in on the BBC’s immensely popular POW drama. The game, devised in part by former Colditz inmate Pat Reid, was so realistic it could conceivably have lasted as long as the war itself. You started on Boxing Day and would be lucky to have finished a single game by New Year.

Back in 1965, one of the big toys for Christmas was a superior form of bagatelle game, ‘Three Keys to Treasure’, from American manufacturer Louis Marx and Company. It was designed in the manner of a full-sized pinball machine, and compared to the other bagatelle toys I owned was much bigger and more impressive. It even stood on legs. The object of the game was to succeed in placing balls into three special pockets which enabled the unlocking of a plastic mechanism. Once all three ‘keys’ were unlocked, one was able to access a rotating prize wheel mounted at the top of the table, within which were various tiny trinkets of the type usually found on charm bracelets.

‘Three Keys to Treasure’ survives to this day, although the plastic mechanisms have long since ceased to function, and the whole spring-loaded firing mechanism is broken. A few years ago, I decided to try and find a fully functioning example, and was able to source one on eBay (above) for not too much money. Having found it, surely I could consign the old broken one to the bin? Well, not really. It may be broken, but it’s the actual one I was bought for Christmas fifty-nine years ago…

Not all toys survived after being rendered useless. Another Christmas present from that same year was a bowling alley set called ‘Bowl-a-Strike’, produced by British toy manufacturer Chad Valley. You fired a wooden ball at a series of tenpins suspended on metal rods. As each pin was hit, it flipped upward. Literally minutes of fun guaranteed. Despite being a relatively robust item made principally from wood and metal, this got disposed of a long time ago, but should I wish to own another, they turn up fairly frequently on eBay, which is where I found the below image.

I’d like to be able to identify the oldest toy I had bought for me at Christmas, but while I still own some staggeringly ancient examples including a wooden abacus, a plastic baby’s rattle and a tin drum, they could have been bought for me at any time, and might even have been ‘hand-me-downs’ as some of them look old enough to be from before the war. One toy that survived for decades until finally being disposed of during clearance of my parents’ house was a plush rocking horse which I believe went all the way back to Christmas 1963 or 64. Along with it, I was bought a cowboy outfit, elements of which are still around somewhere.

Our dad was unstinting in his generosity come Christmas: in addition to his day job, he worked as a semi-pro musician, an activity which he referred to as ‘earning pennies for toys’ which is a pretty accurate description. It also kept him away from home on some evenings in the week, often as many as four or five nights, so the toys we were showered with every Christmas were in part by way of atonement.

Every year brought a ‘main present’, something substantial and quite expensive. One year it was a pedal car, another year a bicycle, or a guitar, or a deluxe set of Lego. In addition to this, we got all manner of smaller presents, many of them (like the Computacar) duplicated so that my brother and I could have one each (avoiding potential arguments). I can still point to many of these old toys and say, to within a year or so, when they arrived.

Around fifteen years ago, I photographed collections of presents from Christmas past as an advent project for Facebook. Scroll down and you can see the entire gallery:

1965/ 1966

1967 (albeit Action Man is a modern reproduction)

1968 – not sure on the Zeroids, they may be from a year or so later

1969

1970 (Star Trek is actually from 1969)

1971

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 16

 

The Christmas Jumper. Who Started It?

Christmas jumpers – not so much a fashion statement as a naff novelty item. It’s next to impossible to go out at this time of year without being subjected to some particularly tasteless examples of knitwear, all of which, without exception, look like pages from Ceefax circa Christmas 1980...

... so where exactly did the ‘Christmas Jumper’ get started?

For a time, I thought I’d invented it myself. Back in the mid 80s, I began to notice sweaters in red and green motifs being sold around this time of year. Thinking the colour scheme looked festive, I bought a couple of examples. These were absolutely not being sold as ‘Christmas Jumpers’ – the term didn’t even exist – and they definitely did not feature Christmassy motifs such as holly, fir trees, redindeer and suchlike. They just struck me as looking ‘a bit Christmassy’.

I had, of course, been sold the idea by the retailers involved – stores like Top Man and the recently arrived Next – and compared to what would come later, those early sweaters were models of discretion, even if they did commit the cardinal fashionista’s sin of combining red and green in a single design. Nevertheless, you didn’t see many people wearing them – the big spike in sales of festive knitwear wouldn’t happen until much later.

These seasonal sweaters were, I think, a development of a trend for ‘cool’ knitwear that had emerged in the early 80s. Jumpers in certain colour schemes and featuring certain motifs – skiiing and snowflakes were popular – had become must-have fashion items around 1983. The most desirable colour scheme was burgundy and grey, but yellow and grey was also popular. You saw them on pop stars of the era, particularly those wishing to cultivate a ‘cosy’ or ‘cuddly’ image like Haircut One Hundred. Paul Young’s debut album shamelessly used the burgundy and grey motif for its cover design. This was definitely a ‘thing’, to use an expression we didn’t have back then.

So when those Christmassy colours were added to the mix – I’d put it around 1984 – it was simply fashion retail running with an established trend and trying to put a subtle, festive spin on it. There was no sudden explosion in Christmassy knitwear, just a slow ‘drip-drip’ of seasonal colours that began appearing on the rails in this era.

I wondered what the internet had to say on the subject and found a number of worthless and specious articles (one of them in a national newspaper which should know better) that were badly researched (not researched at all, in fact) and used the subject as an excuse for some sarcastic observational humour. Wikipedia offers us something a bit better, but a lot of the ‘facts’ in its own article on Christmas Jumpers are based on hearsay and supposition. Val Doonican and Andy Williams get namechecked: both of them were known for their taste in knitwear of a certain stripe, and both presented many a Christmas TV special over the years. So were they responsible for giving birth to the Chistmas Jumper as a cultural phenomenon? 

Absolutely not. I can find only one image online of Andy Williams wearing a ‘Christmas Jumper’ and he’s an old man – definitely not a picture from the 1980s or 90s. And while Val Doonican can be found wearing many a patterned cardigan, there are no examples that can be singled out as having the DNA of the Christmas Jumper. Did people follow their example and rush out to buy festive knitwear? No. I’m not saying that they didn’t help to sell a lot of cardigans and sweaters to a certain demographic, but we have to look elsewhere to find the initiators of the Christmas Jumper in its modern incarnation: assuming we can find them at all.

Googling ‘Christmas Jumper 1960s’ and even 1970s brings up only contemporary images, so I think we can rule out both decades as having had any influence on the trend. Knitwear has always been popular as a gift for Christmas, but if you don’t get your festive sweater until Christmas Day itself, you’ve already missed out on half the party season. The Christmas Jumper as a phenomenon begins in the pre-Christmas round of works dos and drinks parties, which is when these hideous garments are brought out of mothballs every year.

Wikipedia’s article on the subject namechecks TV presenters Gyles Brandreth and Timmy Mallett as having popularised the idea of the Christmas Jumper, ‘during the 1980s’ without citing specific examples, which strikes me as being a bit vague. Another article I found online mentions the knitwear being worn by characters in situation comedies of the 1980s, again without naming a single instance. It also refers to the city of Vancouver’s claim to have been the birthplace of the ‘ugly Christmas sweater’, where a themed party has been held at the Commodore Ballroom since – er – 2002. Bah, humbug! This won’t do at all!

Back to Wikipedia, where, again without any evidence to back up the claim, their article states that Christmas Jumpers are ‘often seen as a hand-made present knitted by an elderly relative’ which is not only a ludicrous generalisation but is bordering on ageism. They go on to inform us that the Christmas sweater was ‘seen as a gag gift’ during the 1990s and 2000s. But by whom? This is one of those Wiki articles that seriously needs taking to task. I need to see a magazine article from the era before I’ll accept anything as wooly as this (you see what I did there?) Typically, Wikipedia is poor on statistics on any subject that pre-dates its own emergence as an informational touchstone (15 January 2001, if you must know), and their article reaches firmer ground when it gets to the present century. The most interesting statistic on offer is the observation that Amazon reported a 600% increase in sales of Christmas Jumpers in 2011. So what happened in 2011 to account for this remarkable spike? Did it just occur at random or was there a kind of pop cultural ‘blue touchpaper’ involved? I don’t have time to do the kind of deep delve research this requires, and it may well turn up nothing in any case. So we’ll simply have to accept that, for whatever reason, there was an outbreak of Christmas Jumper madness thirteen years ago.

It was around this time that I went to our firm’s Christmas ‘do’ where we were all encouraged to come in a Christmas Jumper, so we can take it from this that the trend had been popularised over the preceding few years. Bridget Jones’ Diary (2001) includes a scene in which the character Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) is seen in an embarrassing sweater with a reindeer design – very similar to some of the crass examples that would soon be available in the shops. Clearly, this was an important moment in helping to promote the idea of a naff piece of knitwear worn to a Christmas party.

But who really started the ball rolling? Was it Gyles Brandreth? I can find plenty of pictures online of him wearing Christmas Jumpers that most of us wouldn’t be seen dead in, but they’re all recent photographs. A much younger Gyles can be seen in some truly hideous items of knitwear, but they don’t feature festive colours or designs.

We have to delve much further back to find the real ancestors of today’s Christmas sweaters. Images I’ve found online reveal that Christmas patterns were seen on knitwear as far back as the 1950s – perhaps even earlier – but here’s the thing: if you wanted one, you had to knit it yourself (or, preferably, get someone to knit one for you). Roger Moore modelled for knitting patterns before he was famous, but sadly I haven’t been able to find a picture of him in a Christmas jumper. I did, however, turn up this image (below) that is clearly the actor Peter Arne, appearing on a knitting pattern from, at a guess, the late 1950s.

So there we have it: not exactly a definitive answer, but an improvement on Wikipedia’s guesswork. From DIY knitters to Amazon best sellers, the Christmas jumper is a well worn tradition (see what I did there) that will – regrettably, perhaps – almost certainly endure into the forseeable future and beyond. One thing I can guarantee, though: if people are still wearing them in 2124, they’ll still look like 1980s pages from Ceefax.

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 15

 

The White Stuff...

It's in the rules... Christmas equals snow. Never mind that you're unlikely to see any here in Britain around the festive season. I'm in my sixty-fifth year and I can recall only a handful of Christmases when there was snow on the ground, the last of them now fourteen years in the past. I've always found it perverse that the bookmakers' definition of a white Christmas demands snow to fall from the sky on December 25th – even if it's only one flake. Rubbish. A proper white Christmas should be defined as lying snow on the ground on Christmas Day, whether it's still falling or not – because it's the asethetic that's important.

Dickens usually gets the blame for the adoption of snow as part of the iconography of Christmas, and he was only describing what he saw himself – he happened to be living during an era that has since been characterised as the ‘little ice age’ when winters were notably colder and snowier here in the UK. Now we live in an era of global warming, so should we expect fewer white Christmases? The met office have already (rashly) predicted it as a possibility for this year, but when it gets to December, forecasters become like parents trying to encourage their childen to believe in Santa Claus. I’ll believe it when I see it.

Either way, snow is now indelibly associated with the festive season, and if you happen to be making a film set at this time of year, this can present you with a problem. Getting the real thing is next to impossible, unless you’re shooting in a guaranteed snowy location, and in the absence of genuine snow, film makers have fallen back on various special effects tricks to create the impression of blizzards and Christmassy scenes.

Faking up snow for the cameras goes back to the dawn of movie making. Early Hollywood methods employed substances including cotton, flour and salt: but the LA fire department, recognising the fire hazard inherent in cotton recommended an alternative, fire-resistant substance. White or chrysotile asbestos was, believe it or not, sold under various brand names including ‘White Magic’, ‘Snow Drift’ and ‘Pure White’, aimed at movie productions, where it was employed widely until the 1950s. You could even buy it for use in the home. Movies including The Wizard of Oz, White Christmas, It’s a Wonderful Life and Holiday Inn all made use of white asbestos to create the effect of falling snow. 

I'd get out of that stuff if I were you – asbestos snow falls on Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life.

Back in 1930, Laurel and Hardy’s short film Below Zero used a variety of techniques to give the impression of falling and settled snow, and asbestos was probably one of them. Although there’s no record of the methods employed in the production (which went before the cameras in late February/ early March of 1930), we can hazard a few educated guesses. The snowballs which hit Ollie in the face are clearly made of some kind of food product: ice cream, mashed potato or creamed rice: you can see the stuff trickling down his cheeks in little white rivulets, exactly the way that snow doesn't...

To achieve the effect of falling or settled snow, film makers have used any number of white crystalline substances. Salt was an obvious answer, but others have included borax (soap powder), gypsum and even ammonia crystals. It could be a risky business: Lon Chaney died after ingesting ‘fake snow’ on a movie set, and the cast of Space:1999 suffered adverse reactions to chemical snow blasted at them during the filming of an episode set on an ice planet. More benign alternatives, commonly employed in theatrical productions, include feathers, shredded paper, breakfast cereal and potato flakes. 

The trouble with all forms of fake falling snow is that the dry materials generally used on film sets simply don’t behave like the real thing: instead of accumulating, they just blow around on the ground. Settled snow was usually achieved using foam. There’s lots of this on show in RKO’s Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life. The studio’s special effects head, Russell Shearman, went to the trouble of developing a new process to achieve the snow so essential to the production, using a combination of foamite (fire-fighting foam), salt, soap flakes, sugar and water. Although it looks passable on screen, you can tell it’s not the real thing: ‘chemical snow’ doesn’t have the density of real snow, being comprised essentially of bubbles as opposed to crystals: and crystalline substances have always yielded the most convincing artificial snow effects on screen.

The Shining may not be a Christmas movie, but it has some of the best fake snow effects I've ever seen. Back in 2014, during redevelopment work at Elstree studios, contractors discovered a lot of bags of white powder, which when analysed, was found to be one of the products used to create the snow scenes in Kubrick's production. Formaldehyde foam, which hardens on contact with the air, was used to build up huge drifts which were then coated in salt to create the essential crystalline effect.

Fake snow isn’t always confined to the studio: many productions are obliged to deploy it on location. Today’s concern for the environment demands eco-friendly processes using ‘food grade’ materials that will decay naturally: 'bio-degradable snow' if you will.  On miniature sets, different materials are required to achieve the correct scale when faking up blizzards or lying snow. Gerry Anderson’s productions probably employed baking soda and salt and achieved some convincing effects. Brains even does it himself in the Christmas Thunderbirds where he contrives to shower Tracy Island with artificial snow. 

Some of the best miniature snow I’ve ever seen was in a wintry edition of Postman Pat (above) where the stuff really does mimic the appearance and texture of real world snow. It was most probably wet salt. 

One of the few films I can bring to mind that’s set at Christmas and includes real snow and ice is On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, locations for which were shot in Switzerland during October, November and December of 1968. Although the production was favoured with snow, the season’s fall had been weaker than usual and filming ran 56 days over schedule as a result. Despite the profusion of real snow on screen, there were still a few scenes that required fakery. Salt was used in one sequence, and foam in another.

Today, there are all manner of products sold for model makers wishing to create artificial snow, but you can do it yourself quite simply and safely using baking soda mixed with hair conditioner, or alternatively shaving cream. Just don't eat it, kids...

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 14

 

"BBC World is a Christmas Pud..."

So says my diary entry for Christmas Eve 1977 when the BBC unveiled the latest in what would prove to be an enduring line of festive logos.

You’ll notice the date: Christmas Eve was traditionally when these seasonal logos were unveiled, and they were usually gone by the day after Boxing Day, whereas this year the festive ident, featuring the ubiquitous Wallace and Gromit, kicked off on the first of December, around the same time that another Wallace was kicking off online…

Back in 1977, the idea of a Christmassy ident for the BBC was nothing new. I’ve seen examples of low-key festive makeovers from the 1960s such as this early effort...

...but it wasn’t until the 70s that the Corporation’s graphics department started to get properly into the spirit of Christmas.

1974 and 75 were variants on the same idea: a kind of mechanical snow backdrop behind an augmented BBC globe, and 1976 saw the globe replaced by a glistening snowflake, but these were as nothing by comparison with 1977’s comical Christmas pud. How we laughed…

Now, finally, the lid was off the ‘Christmas logo dressing up box’. That same year, BBC2 went all Christmassy with a rotating arrangement of red perspex figure 2s (above). 1978 saw the pud yield place to a rotating Santa Claus face, while the following year brought a rotating diorama of carol singers. Imagination took a year off in 1980, when the diorama appeared again, this time with a group of skaters. The latter was the first example of these festive idents that I managed to capture on videotape, having caught it prior to a Christmas night screening of Fawlty Towers. I dare say the tape has long since been consumed by mould, but I wasn’t the only one to record it, and examples are out there online (see below). This same year, I also accidentally recorded most of a festive trailer previewing programmes for Christmas, which popped up ahead of the Christmas Shoestring. 

Meantime, BBC2 were doing their own thing, with a series of not particularly imaginative but asethetically pleasing idents based on snowflakes: these were to be seen in 1979 and 1980, before BBC1 nicked the idea in 1981, forcing their sibling channel to adopt a ‘holly and candles’ motif...

Whatever the state of the art of video graphics in the late 70s, these Christmas idents remained ‘real world’ mechanical models for some years to come. These animated robins date to 1985 and were up against an exotic pink and blue creation over on BBC2 which shows signs of electronic effects creeping in.

I’ll end this run through the idents of Christmas past with BBC1’s effort of thirty-eight years ago, which I hated at the time and still do. I’ve seen this animated fir tree sequence somewhere in the last ten days or so, but I couldn’t tell you where. There’s something slightly sinister about fir trees coming to life and dancing and the colour scheme wasn't particularly festive either.

Below, and shamelessly nicked off YouTube, you'll find a handy guide to every BBC1 Christmas ident of the past fifty years. They start with a certain naive charm before proceeding into naffness, tweeness and tediousness. After a certain point, you can sense the dead hand of a committee making the design decisions... I'll sound like Scrooge for saying it, but I still think 2015's anthropomorphic sprout marked a low point in Auntie's Christmas makeovers (and I can't believe it's all of nine years ago either).

But enjoy them for what they are (or were) – the televisual spirit of Christmas past.