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.

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 13

Laurel and Hardy, Christmas and the BBC

“Where would Christmas be without/ Laurel and Hardy…” So sang the band Squeeze on their overlooked festive single ‘Christmas Day’. And where indeed? Back in the 1970s, it seems that no Christmas TV schedule was complete without at least one helping of L&H, sometimes even a complete season of films. But was this really the case, or are we remembering it wrong? I’ve delved into the BBC’s programme listings as far back as they go to bring you the televisual history of Laurel & Hardy – at Christmas. For this review, I’ve considered all broadcasts of Laurel and Hardy during the month of December (although festive seasons would occasionally run on into January).

The BBC didn’t begin showing the films of Laurel and Hardy until 1948. For the record, the Corporation’s first ever broadcast of an L&H comedy was on Thursday 3 June of that year, when the sound short Perfect Day was scheduled at 15.45. The film was just nineteen years old at the time. That same year saw two L&H films shown during the festive season, Another Fine Mess (Monday 20 Dec at 15.00) and the feature film The Flying Deuces on New Year’s Eve at 20.45.

Viewers of 1950 could have sat down to enjoy A Chump at Oxford on Boxing Day afternoon at ten past three, and it got another outing the following year on Saturday 22 December at 17.30. 1952’s L&H offering for Christmas was Swiss Miss, and this broadcast marked the first time that any of the pair’s movies had been shown on Christmas Day itself: presumably, the Alpine scenery was considered appropriate festive fare by schedulers. Four days later, the 1939 feature Saps at Sea went out at 3.00pm. Do two films make a season? In 1952, I think they did...

Swiss Miss got a repeat showing the following year on Monday 28 December, but if viewers were anticipating a trend for Laurel and Hardy on television at Christmas, they were to be disappointed: Auntie didn’t offer up any further festive L&H for another eleven years. When the comics returned it was with their 1937 feature Way Out West (first broadcast back in May 1950), which got the prime spot of 5.30pm on Boxing Day 1964.

Of all Laurel & Hardy films, Way Out West is the title I associate most with Christmas, but I couldn’t have seen this sixty-year-old broadcast even if I’d wanted to, because it was shown on BBC2 – unavailable on our 405-line GEC television set. It was on again the following year, where it was ‘promoted’ to BBC1 on Christmas Day, but ‘demoted’ scheduling-wise to 9.45am. What with the excitement of new toys to be played with, we didn’t bother with television on Christmas morning. Way Out West wouldn’t be on again at Christmas for another nine years when once again it made the Christmas Day schedule for 1974, going out at 12.25pm on BBC1 and this time, I saw it. Christmas dinner would have to wait...

Laurel and Hardy material had been included in all of the compilation films that were put together by Robert Youngson during the 1950s, and beginning in 1965 these became popular fixtures in the Christmas listings, offering rare opportunities to see some of L&H’s early silent efforts – the BBC having ignored the pre-sound era up to this time. For the first couple of years, the Youngson compilations were confined to BBC2, but 1967 saw The Golden Age of Comedy scheduled on Christmas Eve at 12.20pm on BBC1. Over the coming years, it would return to the Christmas listings on numerous occasions.

Through the late 60s, viewers got a smattering of Laurel & Hardy around Christmas time, although the films were regularly shown all year round. Festive examples include The Music Box (Saturday 21.12.68 11.55 BBC1) Oliver the Eighth (Friday 27.12.68 11.45 BBC1) and Hog Wild (Saturday 28.12.68 12.05 BBC1): these were all ‘standalone’ broadcasts where later years would see ongoing seasons.

It wasn’t until 1970 that another Laurel & Hardy feature film showed up in the Christmas schedules: this year’s offering was Blockheads, shown on Sunday 27 December at 12.50 on BBC1, and of all the broadcasts to date this is the first one I definitely remember watching. To give it some context, the film was thirty-two years old and was being shown for the third time, having made its BBC1 debut on Halloween night in 1967.

Christmas broadcasts remained sporadic into the early 70s, with the Youngson compilations providing the only seasonal outing for L&H in some years. The 1936 feature-length Our Relations saw action on New Year’s Eve 1972 at 12.05pm on BBC1, while 1973’s schedules show only Swiss Miss (Friday 28 December, 11.00am BBC1) and The Music Box on the following day at 10.30am.

1974 brought something a bit different as for the first time the BBC acknowledged Laurel and Hardy’s films as a subject worthy of serious analysis. Omnibus: Cuckoo went out on Sunday 22 December 1974 at 22.20 on BBC1. This documentary was a revelation, featuring interviews with surviving stars of the silent movie era and L&H producer Hal Roach Junior, who had outlived his two stars by a decade. It also shone a light onto the team’s very last venture onto celluloid, Atoll K (aka Robinson Crusoeland), shot under trying circumstances in 1950 and memorably described by Bob Monkhouse as ‘a horror film’ on account of the team’s aged appearance.

I’d been watching Laurel and Hardy films for as long as I could remember, but the Omnibus documentary was when I began to take a serious interest in their work. The following year, 1975, was something of a watershed moment: the song ‘Trail of the Lonesome Pine’ had been extracted from the Way Out West soundtrack and released as a single, charting in late November and reaching a peak position of number 2 in the Christmas week chart. If it hadn’t have been for a little ditty called Bohemian Rhapsody, Stan and Ollie would have had the Christmas number one…

The single was culled from a compilation album of soundtrack highlights released by United Artists records, which I obtained soon afterwards. Meanwhile, on BBC1, a season of L&H shorts had been running on Sunday afternoons since mid November and would continue through the festive season. The Lonesome Pine clip from Way Out West got shown a lot on Top of the Pops, while the full feature turned up on Saturday 3 January 1976 in a double bill with Helpmates.

A similar season of L&H shorts ran through Christmas 1976, but 1977 brought only County Hospital on Thursday 29 December – it’s there in the diary. But change was afoot: up to now, Laurel & Hardy had been shown almost exclusively on BBC1, with only a couple of exceptions like that 1964 screening of Way Out West. Beginning in the autumn of 1978, the comics found a new home and a new time – 5.40pm on BBC2. Shorts were the order of the day, and the broadcasts continued through the festive season. A further run of shorts appeared the following year and again in 1980 – by which time I had the means to preserve them on video tape.

The L&H features, once a staple of Christmas scheduling, now became thin on the ground. Whilst they continued to appear at other times of the year, by the late 80s one scanned the Christmas Radio Times in vain. A rare exception – and seldom seen at all on the small screen – was The Bohemian Girl, the 1936 film of Balfe’s Irish Romantic opera in which L&H appeared as comic foils. This was shown as a double bill with the short Come Clean on Friday 23 December 1988 at 4pm on BBC2.

By this time, I’d collected VHS copies of most of the L&H sound era films from various BBC broadcasts. ITV held rights to the later MGM/ Fox features, although they appeared only infrequently. What we really needed were some of the classic silent shorts. Big Business, with its festive theme of selling Christmas trees, had turned up on ITV in the early 80s, but on the whole the silent era, spanning some two years of the comics' screen careers, had been neglected by broadcasters.

Then, in December 1990, BBC2 rolled out a season which for the first time included some of the team's silent short subjects: From Soup to Nuts went out on Christmas Eve at 10.15am, with Bacon Grabbers following on Boxing Day at 15.35. The season continued on into the new year, including more silent shorts in the form of Early to Bed (01.01.91, 14.45), and Habeas Corpus (13.01.91, 14.45).

By this time, Laurel and Hardy’s appearances on the small screen were becoming infrequent. The restoration of old prints by Hal Roach studios provided an impetus for further broadcasts through the 1990s, but come 2005 the duo disappeared from Auntie’s listings seemingly forever, with Pardon Us, at 10.20am on Wednesday 25 September proving to be the boys’ BBC swansong.

Today, even with the plethora of digital channels available, it’s next to impossible to find Laurel and Hardy on the small screen at any time of year. One of the few broadcasters that still shows the Hal Roach era shorts is Talking Pictures TV, champion of obscure and forgotten items.

Laurel and Hardy have always enjoyed greater popularity in England than in their home territory, and their enduring appeal over here was thanks in no small part to those BBC broadcasts from the late 40s onwards. Without them, many generations would have been deprived of two comic heroes whose genius deserves to endure into the present century and beyond. And not just for Christmas...

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 12

 

1979 - The Beatles at Christmas

The BBC schedulers were always up for a season of films over the festive season, focusing on the work of a particular artist or director. In 1979, the seasonal spotlight fell on the Fab Four.

Showing a Beatles film over Christmas had become something of a tradition in the first half of the decade, beginning with the 1970 TV premiere of A Hard Day’s Night, on Monday 28 December at 16.05. It was back the following year, this time at 9.40 in the morning, but I saw neither of these broadcasts.

In 1972, the BBC acquired the rights to the Beatles’ second feature film Help! placing it in a prime family viewing slot of 15.30 on the afternoon of Boxing Day, immediately after It’s a Christmas Knockout. This was my first exposure to the Beatles on celluloid and I enjoyed it for the music as much as the Fabs’ wacky knockabout stuff. Boxing Day 1973 brought yet another screening of A Hard Day’s Night and this time we were tuned in. Help! was back for a second showing the following year and finally, on Boxing Day 1975, came Let it Be, earning its UK television premiere.

For the next few years, Christmas was Beatle-free on BBC television, but in 1979 came the best yet: a complete season comprising every movie the fab four had ever been involved in. This was to prove an historic season as it remains, to this day, the only occasion on which any UK broadcaster has scheduled all the available Beatle films in a single season. And on this occasion the BBC2 schedulers aimed for completeness.

The season kicked off on Friday 21 December with a genuine rarity. Magical Mystery Tour had remained unbroadcast since its one and only repeat on BBC2 back in 1968 – the only occasion to date of its having been shown in colour. Ironically, Tim Beddows and myself had seen it a matter of months earlier on an 8mm print hired from a film library. I was expecting an upgrade in quality from the TV broadcast, but in all honesty it was hard to tell it apart from the grainy 8mm dupe.

I’ll digress here for a moment with a reminder that film material deemed to be ‘of broadcast quality’ back in the 1970s simply wouldn’t make the grade today. No film was broadcast ‘clean’– dirt and ‘sparkle’ (dirt on the source negative) marred the image, colour grading was often very poor, and grain was inevitable. In the case of the Beatles’ movies, A Hard Day’s Night, Help! And Yellow Submarine, all shot on 35mm, looked fine on the small screen, but others in the season were showing their age. Not that we cared: the important thing was getting to see them at all.

Magical Mystery Tour had, of course, been a Christmas item when first unveiled back in 1967 – to the consternation of critics and the viewing public who simply couldn’t fathom what the Beatles were up to. Surely Sgt Pepper had dropped a few hints? Paul McCartney responded to criticism at the time by explaining that the film had suffered from being shown in black and white, but this was a specious excuse as the UK had colour television on only one channel, and colour sets were an expensive luxury far beyond the means of the average Beatle fan.

Returning to 1979, MMT’s third BBC broadcast was followed on Saturday 22 December by Help! but the real rarity came the following day. The Beatles at Shea Stadium hadn’t seen the light of day since 1966 and hasn’t been broadcast since. Much of the footage, restored and properly graded, found its way into the Anthology project of the 1990s, but at time of writing, the film still hasn’t been fully restored in its original presentation. The BBC’s copy was quite faded, but made for fascinating viewing. I’d only ever seen The Rutles’ take-off of the Shea Stadium gig, and my knowledge of the original was confined to a few blurry stills. Now at last was a chance to see – and hear – what all the fuss was about. Much of the soundtrack (if not all of it) was reportedy ‘improved’ at EMI studios before the film was allowed out into the wild, so what we hear on the soundtrack is not necessarily what the audience would have heard on the day, where mass hysteria drowned out the band’s performance.

I’ve never been entirely convinced by Yellow Submarine – it has fake Beatle voices, a soundtrack comprising a few of the Fabs’ lesser musical moments (‘All Together Now’/ ‘It’s All Too Much’) and it’s a cartoon. It had been shown twice by the BBC, in 1974 and 1976 before this Christmas Eve broadcast. Fortunately, the movie’s best original track – ‘Hey Bulldog’ – was present; the BBC used a British release print for transmission, but the American copy had omitted the sequence.

Pride of place in this season of festive fabness came on Christmas Day afternoon at 3pm when A Hard Day’s Night was shown for the fourth time. As the first and undoubtedly the best Beatle flick, it easily merited this prime slot in the schedule, which also marked its first outing on BBC2. By comparison, Boxing Day’s broadcast of Let it Be was something of a comedown – as indeed it always has been. This grainy print (which, I believe, later passed into the hands of Tim Beddows) would be the film’s last ever sighting on British television until a fully restored version was rolled out on Disney+ a few months back.

Given its completeness and the inclusion of genuine rarities, The Beatles at Christmas (as the BBC2 season was dubbed) remains unsurpassed in the annals of Beatle broadcasting. It’s the kind of Christmas scheduling that one still wishes for when flicking hopefully through the pages of yet another Radio Times double issue – but I fear we’ll be disappointed.

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 11

 

A Special Edition for Christmas...

It’s such a time-honoured tradition that it scarcely seems worth a mention – the seasonal episode of your favourite series, broadcast during Christmas week, often on the day itself. It goes back almost as far as television itself, but only really got going in the 1970s.

The trouble with Christmas episodes, as far as broadcasters are concerned, is that they don’t fit nicely into a run of repeats, which could end up being scheduled at any time of year. If there’s a Christmas episode in the run, what do you do? Omit it, ignore it or take the trouble to schedule it at the appropriate time of year? In America, where episodic television series are sold into syndication after their network debuts, this would have been something of a headache. There certainly were Christmas episodes of television series as far back as the 1950s – I’ve seen an example of Jackie Gleason’s The Honeymooners, dating to that era – but not all series played the festive card. Of the 144 episodes of The Phil Silvers Show (aka Sgt Bilko), produced from 1955 to 1959, there isn’t a single Christmas episode. Granted, there are a couple where the platoon is snowed in by blizzards, but at Fort Baxter it’s a case of, to paraphrase Narnia, ‘sometimes winter, never Christmas.’

Here in Britain, we’ve got used to Christmas Day television: the schedule will invariably comprise family films, a brand-new children’s animation, and ‘Christmas episodes’ of everything from Dr. Who to Call the Midwife. These Christmas Day episodes aren’t always set at Christmas, though, a fact which I’ve often found disappointing – such episode are ‘special’ only in terms of their length (over an hour for a standard sitcom) and the transmission date. To me, a bona fide Christmas episode has to be set in the festive season. This, of course, presents production teams with obvious problems: most Christmas episodes tend to be filmed in the summer or early autumn, and any location work immediately gives the game away: I’ve seen so-called ‘Christmas’ episodes, purporting to take place during December, where the trees are still in full leaf. So it’s easy to understand why some of them avoid a seasonal setting.

Looking back through some BBC listings from the very early 60s, the Christmas week line-up usually featured a sitcom or two, although not in the profusion that we see today. As for drama series, it was rare indeed to find festive episodes that far back, with one of the first examples I can find coming in 1961 with Maigret’s A Crime for Christmas, broadcast on Boxing night.

The following year saw in a new tradition: rather than complete episodes of popular series, short sketches of ten to fifteen minutes’ duration would be bundled together, with links from an avuncular presenter, in this case Eamonn Andrews. Although in later years the accent would be on comedy, this first edition of BBC Television’s Christmas Night With the Stars, lasting ninety-five minutes, found room for music spots from the likes of Russ Conway, Kenneth McKellar and Adam Faith; variety in the form of Billy Cotton’s popular Band Show; light drama from Dixon of Dock Green: and even an edition of Juke Box Jury – albeit the latter was, according to the Radio Times, a comedy sketch featuring characters from sitcoms Citizen James and Hugh and I.

ITV did something similar, with their ‘All Star Comedy Carnival’, a kind of fun-size grab bag of sitcom goodies which peaked in the early 70s with contents including On the Buses, Please Sir! Doctor in the House, Father Dear Father and a host of others. By the early 80s, though, this festive tradition was all but played out, with its last gasp coming on Monday 27 December 1982. BBC1’s The Funny Side of Christmas was exactly like its 70s counterparts, a line-up of short Christmas sketches from the likes of The Two Ronnies, Yes Prime Minister, Last of the Summer Wine and Butterflies. I remember watching this at the time and being surprised at the inclusion of a Reginald Perrin sketch – there hadn’t been a Reginald Perrin series since 1979, which suggested that this particular festive segment had been lying on the shelf for some time. Equally head-scratching was the BBC’s decision to repeat the compilation on Monday 22 August of the following year!

Whilst many series have celebrated Christmas on numerous occasions, the best of the festive episodes tended to do it once and once only: there’s only one Christmas Good Life, and it couldn’t have been bettered. Equally, there’s only a solitary seasonal episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, unique for the one and only appearance in the series of Rodney Bewes’ beard. Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em served up a bona fide set-at-Christmas extended special in 1974, but the following year’s episode was poor stuff by comparison, much of it being taken up with a drawn-out segment featuring David Jacobs encountering some of Frank’s attempts at DIY. The series’ third Christmas special was one of the ‘not set at Christmas’ variety and focused on Frank taking flying lessons, but still failed to live up to the standard of that first year.

Porridge clocked up two – 1975’s No Way Out saw a planned Christmas escape while the following year’s edition, The Desperate Hours had Fletcher caught up in a hostage situation, while Steptoe and Son didn't get a Christmas episode until the show was more than ten years old – then two came along at once. Last of the Summer Wine, on the other hand, just kept on churning them out. An early example, A Merry Heatwave had the characters celebrating Christmas in the summer – writer Roy Clarke must have thought he could have his Christmas cake and eat it.

Dr. Who has presented Christmas episodes on numerous occasions since its return in 2005, some of them snow-covered, others not: but the Doctor’s first brush with the festive season came all of fifty-nine years ago. It happened that on this particular year, 1965, Christmas Day fell on a Saturday, and Saturday was Dr. Who day. The production team therefore decided to interrupt the ongoing epic The Daleks’ Master Plan with a lighthearted romp that saw the series regulars involved in a brush with the law before a madcap chase around a silent film studio. To cap it all, William Hartnell broke the fourth wall, raising a glass and wishing a merry Christmas to everyone at home! Opinion is divided as to whether this was planned or ad libbed, but given that the programme was recorded in advance of transmission, an unwanted ad lib could surely have been edited out. The episode no longer exists, but you can view a reconstruction from off-air photos here:

Dr. Who: The Feast of Stephen

Gerry Anderson’s puppets, on the other hand, did what they were told. His Supermarionation series clocked up three Christmas episodes, beginning with Stingray, whose festive edition was first broadcast on 20 December 1964. Thunderbirds also managed a Christmas edition, first seen by viewers in the ATV Midland region on Christmas Day 1966. I happen to remember Christmas Day 1966 very well – it was a brilliantly sunny day, the first time I’d ever seen blue skies at Christmas – and while I can remember the bicycle I had bought for me and various other presents, I’ve got no recollection of Thunderbirds featuring anywhere in the mix. Quite likely, given the nature of Christmas Day, it got overlooked, and I don’t remember being aware that there even was a Christmas episode of Thunderbirds until some years later. 

Captain Scarlet and Christmas simply weren’t a good mix: the tone of the series was just too dark to admit of a Christmas edition, although there were a couple set in snowy landscapes that often seemed to get broadcast close to the festive season. Joe 90, however, with its warmer, character-driven feel went all Christmassy the following year with an episode that feels almost like a puppet version of the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas.

And with that, puppets and Christmas parted company. The Secret Service would have been a natural, but with only 13 episodes in the run, there wasn’t room for a seasonal outing for Father Unwin. Gerry’s next Christmas episode wouldn’t come until 1983's Terrahawks with the episode A Christmas Miracle, going out on Christmas Eve.

As viewers drift away from conventional broadcast television to streaming services, will the tradition of Christmas episodes continue? Almost certainly: the addition of a bit of snow and holly to any popular TV series will no doubt remain popular for as long as Christmas itself continues to be celebrated. One day, though, perhaps not far off, there may no longer be such a thing as a ‘Christmas Day schedule’ and viewers will simply pick their festive viewing from an on-screen menu. This, of course, will mean an end to another festive tradition, that of the Double Issue of the Radio Times. For more on that story, have a look back at my blog entries of last year:

https://sundayinoldmoney.blogspot.com/2023/12/christmas-at-radio-times.html

"I bring you tidings of great joy... put another bag on." Frank Spencer does the nativity, Christmas 1974

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 10

 

What's in Your Cracker?

Around 1965 – it might have been earlier or later – I pulled a Christmas cracker and out dropped what looked like a plastic bat. It was black, had two ‘horns’ in the centre, and wings on either side. What on earth was it? I think our dad probably demonstrated how to use it: it was a plastic moustache, and the ‘horns’ were there so you could fix it into your nostrils.

These daft novelty items – still manufactured to this day – were but one of any number of pieces of plastic tat you’d find in the average Christmas cracker, alongside rings, small combs, cowboys and even a kind of useless magnifying glass. These days, plastic is the antichrist, and there’s actually a petition on Change.org to ban the sale of Christmas crackers with plastic tat inside them, which strikes me as being somewhat joyless and Scrooge-like: I mean, it’s not as if they’re going to be flushed down the toilet to pollute our waterways and oceans. Are they?

Anyway, if they’re not going to our oceans, then where exactly do the old Christmas cracker novelties go? I’ll tell you the answer to that: I’ve got them. There’s a drawer in my dining table into which I put any cracker premiums when Christmas is over. In there, you’ll find items such as miniature playing cards, doll-sized notebooks and pencils, interlocking metal puzzles and no end of tabletop spinners.

In a previous post I mentioned our so-called ‘rummagy boxes’ whose contents comprised a whole host of Christmas cracker toys. Going through them, I would always turn up tiny playing cards which I knew dated to around 1966, and many different examples of the plastic bat-moustache. Christmas crackers must have supported a whole industry out in Hong Kong. Alongside the obligatory toy, you got a ‘motto’ or cheap joke on a tiny scroll of paper and a tissue paper hat, time-honoured traditions dating back a century or more.

Contemporary cracker toys, 2013-2023: compare them with the 1960s and 70s items below.

It’s fairly well known that the first Christmas crackers were invented by British baker and confectioner Tom Smith as a means of reviving a flagging range of sweets, initially using quite small wrappers. Smith was inspired by a crackling log on the fire to add the ‘banger’ element, which meant upscaling his original design somewhat. The bon-bons were eventually replaced with small trinkets, and the cracker as we know it today had been born.

You get what you pay for with a box of Christmas crackers. Anything under a tenner, and you can expect the familiar round of plastic tat; between ten and fifteen pounds, you might find a small metal comb or puzzle of some kind, maybe a couple of dice, or a random metal object that appears to serve no immediate purpose. Over twenty pounds, and I think one is entitled to expect a better standard of novelty, but the sky’s the limit where crackers are concerned, and super deluxe contents push prices towards the stratosphere.

Of all the items that ever dropped out of a Christmas cracker, the most useful to me by far has been a set of tiny screwdrivers, of about the right scale to be used by Brains out of Thunderbirds. Despite their size, they’re fully functional and have been put to good use on many occasions, tightening the unusually tiny screws you sometimes find on guitars, or pairs of spectacles.

As to the jokes, they seldom rise to the level of The Beano. For the best Christmas cracker joke, we have to look to the festive edition of The Good Life, Silly But It’s Fun (1977) wherein one of Tom Good’s home-made crackers memorably contained the information that ‘the ooh-ah bird is so called because it lays square eggs’, utterly mystifying its recipient, Margo Leadbetter...

In my childhood, crackers were invariably wrapped in crepe paper, but today they're more likely to be thick cardboard, which doesn't always break as easily. The banger remains exactly as it always was: two thin strips of card, coated at the join with a tiny amount of gunpowder – yes, actual gunpowder. The amount is so small that only a modest amount of heat is required to set it off, and the friction of pulling the two halves apart is always sufficient. So now you know – there's gunpowder on your festive dining table...

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 9

 

Snow on the Masthead

No self-respecting comic ever missed out on the chance to do a celebration number, and Christmas was always a time to expect festive issues. Normally, these would appear on the week in which Christmas Day fell, but occasionally you might find some seasonal editions the week before and even the week after Christmas when a few titles went in for New Year numbers.

My first encounters with Christmas comic numbers would have been in the early 60s, when we were bought various nursery titles such as Playhour, Teddy Bear, Pippin and Playland. Not only did the characters have Christmassy adventures (invariably set in snow-covered winter wonderlands), but just to make the comic extra special, the masthead was usually decorated for the season, maybe adding a sprig of holly or two and of course that all-important covering of the white stuff.

I was minded to wonder when this tradition got going – British comic papers don’t go back much beyond the turn of the last century, with one of the earliest being the adult satire Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday. Ally is credited as having the first Christmas comic number back in 1884, but the masthead was devoid of snow – the font was rather too slender and cursive to allow for much of an accumulation in any case. The earliest example of snow on the masthead I’ve been able to find was Jester & Wonder, cover dated 17 December 1910, and illustrated in one of Denis Gifford’s impeccably researched volumes alongside various other examples from the same era, including Firefly, Merry and Bright and Chips. The comic weekly Puck even offered its readers a ‘Grand Xmas Double Number’ in 1913, anticipating the Radio Times’ own festive tradition by fifty-six years.

One comic always seemed to consider itself above such festive frippery – you’d never have known it was Christmas to judge from the covers of TV21. In 1967, the editor caved in and ran to a snowy scene featuring Captain Scarlet’s SPV and a panel wishing readers a Merry Christmas, but it was the only time in the comic’s history: curious considering that Gerry Anderson’s television series often went in for Christmas episodes. Other adventure papers were rather more inclined to adopt a snow-lined masthead if nothing else, with titles like Tiger, Lion, Pow! and Smash! all showing evidence of sub-zero precipitation around their title blocks.

Eagle usually managed to add a few holly wreaths and a sprinkling of snow to its Christmas week cover, even if Dan Dare rarely acknowledged the time of year – he was usually out in space somewhere, and it’s unlikely the Mekon went in for yuletide festivities on Venus.

My first sighting of a Christmas number of a British ‘funny paper’ came in 1970, when my brother and myself were bought the Beano and Dandy. Both of these have survived, and are excellent examples of seasonal comic celebrations, the Beano especially so.

Of the 1970s’ crop of comics, Look-In went all snowy in December 1971 with a Christmassy scene courtesy of cover-artist-in-residence Arnaldo Putzu, but Countdown kept up the austere tradition of TV21: no snow, no holly, nothing. TV Comic did better with its covers, whilst IPC’s titles were guaranteed to have snow and all the trimmings come Christmas week.

Scroll down for a gallery of covers, sourced from my personal collection (click on the images for a larger version):

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 8

 

“’Tay Christmas till I say so.”

So runs a familiar internet meme of recent years, accompanied by the grinning, rubicund face of the spirit of Christmas past himself – otherwise known as Noddy Holder. Spend a quarter of an hour in any supermarket around this time of year, and you’re sure to hear Slade’s evergreen Christmas hit being played in the background. When you do (and you will), take a moment to reflect on the fact that the song is now fifty-one years old, which is the equivalent, in 1973, of listening to a song from 1922. We were singing carols of more recent vintage than that in our school choir.

So, imagine yourself in a supermarket at Christmas 1973. If a fifty-one year old song came on the tannoy, who might have been singing it? Well, the top selling artist of 1922 was one Fanny Brice, closely followed by Paul Whiteman and Al Jolson. Would any of those songs have been familiar to listeners fifty years later? Surprisingly, yes: the chart includes ‘Toot Toot Tootsie (Goodbye)’, ‘The Sheik of Araby’ and ‘Way Down Yonder in new Orleans’. Conclusion: Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas Everyone’ has joined the pantheon of popular music standards: but we knew that anyway.

What we don’t find in that hundred-and-two-year-old top fifty are any Christmas records. Not that there weren’t any around – a few Christmas hits from 1922 include ‘When the Christmas Chimes are Ringing’ by Lewis James, and Ernest Hare’s novelty waxing ‘Santa Claus Hides in the Phonograph’ (not a song so much as a recitation with a brief rendition of ‘Jingle Bells’). So Noddy and co weren’t exactly breaking new ground.

In recent years, the race for the Christmas number one has become a tedious face-off between talent show winners and downloads, and the bar for quality (never very high) has been brought almost to the ground by some particularly worthless endeavours. Was there someone called manbaby or similar? I neither know nor care.

Back when Slade were current chart-toppers, the idea of a Christmas single still had a certain novelty value. There had been a flurry of entries around the late 50s and early 60s, courtesy of Harry Belafonte (‘Mary’s Boy Child’), Nina and Frederick (‘Little Donkey’) and Adam Faith (‘Lonely Pup in a Christmas Shop’), but since then artists had shown no interest in yuletide waxings. It was all about to change.

Slade’s Christmas single was the icing on the cake of what would prove to be the band’s most successful year – they’d already scored two number ones and a number three hit – but it would be the band’s last release to hit the top spot. When it entered the charts on 15 December 1973 – straight in at number one for the third time that year – I doubt any of us thought it would still be getting regular airplay half a century later. Noddy’s rationale for doing the record was simple – people needed cheering up in a time of economic doom and gloom: strikes, runs on the pound, power cuts, you name it. Did he see it as a potential pension fund? Possibly not, although the thought may well have occurred to fellow Midlander Roy Wood, whose ‘I Wish it Could be Christmas Every Day’ began with the jingling not of sleigh bells but a cash register. Roy knew exactly what he was doing. Wizzard’s Christmas confection stalled at number four, but has been doing very nicely ever since.

Two glam rockers going head-to-head with Christmas pop songs was bound to have repercussions, and they arrived the following year in the shape of Mud, whose dreary Elvis-by-numbers knock-off ‘Lonely This Christmas’ secured them the number one spot in 1974. Hard on their heels came the Wombles’ ‘Wombling Merry Christmas’ and further down the festive charts we find Showaddywaddy’s lumpen effort ‘Hey Mr. Christmas’ and Gilbert O’Sullivan’s pensive (and predictable) ‘Christmas Song’. The lid was off the bottle of Christmas pop and the contents were fairly fizzing up the hit parade…

For me, 1973 was the year of Slade: I even had a poster of the band on my bedroom wall. But I was about to lose most of my interest in contemporary pop on account of something that happened during that festive season: the BBC showed the Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night on Boxing Day morning, the first time I’d seen it. I knew the Beatles well enough from back in the 60s, but it was only now that I began to take a more serious interest in the band and their music. By Christmas 1974, glam rock (which was dead in the water anyway) would be kicked into the long grass, and my presents included no fewer than three Beatles LPs.

It wasn’t just me, either: after their incredible success in 1973, Slade began to slip, although they made a creditable number 2 later the following year with ‘Far, Far, Away.’ Leaving the UK to try and crack America (without much success), the band lost sight of their fanbase, many of whom defected to a certain tartan scarf-wearing Glaswegian ensemble, and hits were suddenly harder to come by. The feature film Flame (released in January 1975) didn’t help, with its downbeat portrayal of the seedier side of the music business. The band Flame may have been a fiction, but when they split up at the end of the movie, it might as well have been the real thing – as some fans inevitably perceived. Flame was a daring move – up to then, pop music films had mostly been lightweight nonsense – but what Slade really needed was a cheerful Carry On-style romp rather than a dour, darkly-lit exposé of pop’s crass commercialism.

Luckily, they had secured their financial futures for eternity back at Christmas 1973.

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 7

 

Queuing up the Stairs...

In the 1960s, Birmingham was well served with Department Stores – Lewis’s, Rackhams, Greys, The Co-Operative, The Beehive. Come Christmas, each of them had its own in-store Santa in his grotto, keeping up a seasonal tradition that got started back in 1890 in Brockton Massachsetts. It was here that store owner James Edgar came up with the idea of dressing up as Father Christmas and giving out presents. Unsurprisingly, his idea was a huge success, and by the turn of the century many American department stores had followed his example.

By the time I was being taken to see Santa in his grotto, the staging had become quite elaborate: in 1964, Lewis’s store presented a tableau of characters from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, a display which I must have seen, although I have no recollection of it. I’m not sure that the grottos didn’t occasionally run to a live reindeer or two, although how they would have got them up to the fifth floor is anybody’s guess. If you were lucky enough to live in London, you could have seen Christmas grottos in the 1960s featuring some more contemporary characters including the Magic Roundabout, the Daleks and Thunderbirds, but ours were mostly traditional affairs.

The deal with Santa’s grotto was simple: you paid at the entrance and in return you got a brief audience with the man himself, and a present – always wrapped, so you didn’t know what you’d been given until you left. Santa usually kept two bran tubs beside his throne, one filled with presents for little girls, the other for little boys. You had to trust him to know which gender you were: and he didn’t always get it right. One time, in the Beehive (a fairly tatty emporium of middling to cheap goods), a bespectacled Santa (clearly an imposter) asked me if I’d like something to make myself beautiful. I was wearing a hood, so he couldn’t see my boy’s haircut – even so, I didn’t think I looked that much like a girl. I had to pull down the hood to show him his mistake. And don’t think that was the first time… back in 1964 (at a guess), another Department Store Santa palmed me off with a present for girls – a dolly in a bath. I can still see it as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. The doll, a kewpie-sized thing, with no clothes on, resided in a pink plastic bath (I remember being secretly impressed by the tiny plastic taps). The whole package came in a cardboard carton done up to resemble black bathroom tiles, with a transparent top through which dolly could be seen in all her glory. Our dad thought this was the most hilarious thing ever, and for years afterwards would refer back to the incident of the ‘dolly in the bath.’

Sixty years ago it may have been, but I can still picture the setting in which I became the unwilling recipient of that dolly: it was on the upper sales floor of Lichfield’s Co-Operative department store, and Santa’s throne had simply been plonked down in the soft furnishings section, surrounded by rolls of carpet, arm chairs and occasional tables. I’m not saying there mightn’t have been a few token drifts of cotton wool snow, and maybe a bit of red and green crepe paper on show, but it was a decidedly cut-price affair compared to the elaborate settings you got in Lewis’s.

For a long time, I was encouraged to believe that Lewis’s Santa was the real deal. He certainly looked the part (though the beard was probably false) and his jovial, avuncular voice could have won him a voice-over gig selling Mr. Kipling cakes. His grotto resided on the store’s fifth floor, and such was the clamour to see him on a typical Saturday in December that one ended up queueing up the staircase for half the morning. The store remained open until around 1990 and once, towards the end of its existence as a trading entity, I found myself on that same stairwell where we’d waited our turn to see Santa all those years ago.

Lewis's department store, Birmingham, decorated for Christmas

Bringing a bit of order to the proceedings was Santa’s ‘minder’, a green costumed, top-hatted Dickensian-styled character called Uncle Holly. For some reason, he always put me in mind of Hughie Green. Uncle Holly kept a watchful eye on the queue of eager children and justified his existence by doling out badges, the wearing of which made you an honorary member of the ‘Uncle Holly Circle.’ I still have several examples of these badges: they kept the same design year in, year out.

Uncle Holly wasn’t unique to Lewis’s – Selfridges’ on Oxford Street had the same character, of very similar appearance, who also gave out badges featuring his own image, but as far as I can Google, these were the only two examples. Unsurprisingly, he’s remembered by only a few people, judging from the forums I’ve seen online, and his name seems to have been appropriated in a ghost story of more recent origin, possibly conflated with the pagan ‘green man’ of folklore.

As to the presents we got from those department store Santas, the one thing they all had in common was their cheapness. One of my personal favourites was a red plastic racing car of vaguely futuristic appearance. As you can see (below), I still own it to this day. But Santa’s gifts weren’t all as good as this: I recall a motor racing game which was essentially just a lot of cardboard with a plastic spinner that you had to guide around a printed track. The size of the box fooled you into thinking you’d come away with something substantial. Another present from Santa’s grotto was a traditional puzzle called the ‘Tower of Brahma’ (also known as the Tower of Hanoi). This consisted of a pile of small coloured discs of different sizes, and three plastic spindles. The object of the game was to move the discs from spindle number one to spindle number three, preserving their original order and only moving one disc at a time. After a few attempts, I managed to reason it out... or maybe I followed the printed solution included in the box...

Department stores were always the traditional place to meet Santa, but they have largely vanished from our city centres, forcing Santa to decamp to the likes of garden centres and shopping malls. Do today’s internet-savvy children even believe in Santa any more, when they could easily go online and discover the truth? I was definitely a believer, until the age of eight or nine: but close to Christmas in 1971, I discovered an Airfix ‘Pontoon Bridge Assault Set’ in our airing cupboard: I’d seen it in a mail order catalogue and had put it on my Christmas list – so how come it had got here so early? I was ten, after all, and should probably have cottoned on by that age, although I'd begun to have my doubts. At least I didn’t have to hear it from Terry Collier who thoughtfully left it until Christmas Eve to inform his pal Bob Ferris that ‘Santa Claus is dead’...

TERRY: I did not say that. I merely said he’d never been alive to begin with.

BOB: No you didn’t – you said he’d been gored to death by his reindeer.

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 6

 

A load of old baubles...

Look at any set of images online, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that Christmas baubles are like snowflakes: no two are the same. This was certainly the case in the days when such items were decorated by hand, but even then manufacturers usually had a few design templates to follow. The earliest examples were spheres or teardrops of hand-blown and painted mercury glass, sometimes decorated with glitter, but despite their extremely fragile nature, they can survive for decades, through the simple fact of being brought out only once a year. I still have many of the same baubles that my mum and dad bought back in the very early 60s.

Baubles are often extremely tacky in appearance, with manufacturers often running to excesses of decoration. For me, there’s a kind of happy medium, where the design is just enough to look attractive without being over the top. And ideally, they’ll want to have a kind of vintage flavour. The best way to get this is to buy vintage, which can be an expensive proposition. 

As mentioned in a previous post, Woolworth’s was the prime place to buy Christmas decorations, although all good department stores would have offered a large selection. You can spot those old Woolies’ baubles a mile off, assuming the original box is still present. It was a simple lidded affair of white cardboard, divided up inside into nine or twelve sections in which the baubles sat like eggs, protected by tissue paper. Our Christmas baubles became like old friends: there were three specific designs in the set – the first were matt white spheres whose lower halves had been dipped in shiny coloured lacquer – gold, red or blue. Above this came a row of hand painted dots and stripes, and the lacquer, when dried, was decorated with various flourishes. The second type again came in three colours – pink, pale blue and pale green, and were decorated with star patterns, some of them outlined in gold glitter – very 1950s. The third type, which were my favourites, were large white spheres encrusted in white glitter, with small indentations highlighted in shiny coloured lacquer. Several of the old baubles have long since gone to dust, the earliest casualty being the 'blue star' bauble, victim of the cat’s attack on the Christmas tree circa 1964. Fragments of it could still be found in the bottom of the box many years later. Around ten years ago, I found a replacement on eBay, but to say it’s fragile is a decided understatement. There’s a small hole in the glass, revealing exactly how thin it is. I mentioned eggshells above, but this is of an even finer consistency, something like 0.05mm compared with the 0.3mm of a typical eggshell…

Our earliest tree decorations also included a number of ‘indent’ baubles, usually teardrop-shaped, which had large shiny concavities on their surface. Getting these to face front is always a challenge when decorating a tree. Sadly, Binkie (the cat) did for all of them, which is a shame as I found them particularly attractive.

To me, those old decorations became iconic, and I would sometimes spot examples on other trees when we went visiting friends or relatives, noting interesting (to me) variations in colour and design. Our primary school put up a Christmas tree in the hall, which included some miniature versions of the white baubles I liked so much. It took me years to find an example.

Vintage baubles are very popular on eBay and Etsy, but buying them comes with the hazard of transportation. Fine if the seller is local and you can pick up yourself, but hardly ideal if the baubles have to be sent out by mail.

Today’s sets have limited appeal to me, although I occasionally look out for any retro styles that hark back to the 50s or 60s. Around 1980, I was pleased to discover a brand new set that were a perfect match for the old ‘star’ design and had clearly been copied from the original, but these proved to be a one-off. Colour-themed trees have become popular in recent years, and whilst these can look extremely attractive if done well, a properly vintage tree should follow no particular colour scheme – gold, red, blue, green, white, anything goes. But of course, it’s all a matter of personal taste. I find our old Christmas decorations nostalgic because I grew up with them – but one man’s nostalgia is, to another, merely just a load of old baubles...

Some of the vintage decorations on this year's tree: the blue and gold star designs look like they came from the same set but were in fact purchased nearly twenty years apart.