No fireworks, no Jools Holland, just Andy Stewart...
Unless you live in the middle of nowhere, 2026 probably started with a bang. Fireworks have become a New Year tradition in Britain: this year they were popping at random all evening before the midnight barrage got going at around five minutes to twelve. From where I live, I can look out across the town from a high vantage point, which affords the spectacle of seeing everybody letting off their fireworks at once, across a span of two or three miles, looking almost like a co-ordinated display. This year, there seemed more than ever. But it wasn’t always like this.
Fifty years ago, if you wanted to see fireworks on New Years’ Eve, you’d have had to be in a major city, where there might have been a few organised displays at midnight. But in smaller towns, and out in the suburbs, the year turned in wintry silence. No one let off fireworks in their own gardens, and if they did, they’d have been in a minority. For one thing, pyrotechnics were only sold to the public ahead of November 5, so there’d have been none in the shops. Those who felt like celebrating the new year with a bang would have had to hoard a supply from Guy Fawkes Night. But the reality is that people didn’t bother. Maybe they went in for it in Scotland, where New Year (or Hogmanay) has always been a bigger deal, and was often accompanied by fiery displays – although these were not usually fireworks as such.
The whole ‘fireworks at midnight’ thing only really took off at the millennium. This was the first time I could recollect seeing (and hearing) fireworks being let off to celebrate a new year, and on this occasion it was understandable: we weren’t just welcoming in a new year but a whole new millennium. But come December 31 in the year 2000, the whole thing happened again – and has been happening ever since.
Growing up, New Year’s Eve never really struck me as a great occasion. On New Year’s Day, our mum usually did another Christmas dinner (sometimes comprising left overs from the first one), but on the whole, the night before was no big deal. From the age of ten, I was allowed to stay up to see in the New Year – my 1972 diary mentions it – but this didn’t amount to much more than watching Big Ben strike midnight on television. There were no big celebrations in our house – our dad, being a semi-professional musician, was always out on New Year’s Eve, which for any musician is traditionally the best paying night of the year. Sometimes, he was accompanied by my brother, leaving my mum and myself to see in the New Year on our own.
Only once or twice do I remember our observing any kind of New Year customs – I was sent round the house to re-enter by the front door, in the tradition of ‘first foot’ (the first to enter a dwelling on January 1 was, according to tradition, dark haired, and should carry items of food, drink and fuel. We had a gas fire so that ruled out coal, and I can’t remember drink being involved – just half a loaf of bread). Other years, we’d simply be in front of the television where some kind of Hogmanay entertainment would be presented – usually involving, pipes, drums, country dancing and Andy Stewart, British television’s go-to Scottish entertainer.
Another televisual New Year tradition was the Old Grey Whistle Test’s famous ‘pick of the year’: although this didn’t get started until 1974, and wasn’t billed as such until the following year. The first year’s edition (beginning at just after midnight on 1 January 1975) was billed in the Radio Times as ‘Rock Till Two’, and seems to have been more akin to Jools Holland’s annual Hootenanny with guests performing live in the studio and a look back at some of the past year’s highlights. Next year, there were no live acts on the night, and the programme became an annual round up of clips. The tradition was kept up until New Year’s Eve 1987, when Bob Harris presented the very last edition of the now retitled ‘Whistle Test’, a five and a half hour marathon edition including live performance, documentary items and a raid on the archives. New Year’s Eve 1988 featured a concert by Eurythmics and a David Bowie programme, whilst the following year presented a round-up of the decade in rock music, followed by an Arena programme ‘Heavy Metal Heaven’. Certainly not the kind of thing I’d have stopped up to watch. By now, BBC2 had established a tradition of rock music to see viewers into the New Year: 1990 brought a Rolling Stones concert, and 1991 the classic ‘rockumentary’ This is Spinal Tap. But what all of these programmes lacked was a countdown to midnight, ushering in the New Year.
New Year’s Eve 1992 on BBC2 was an anomaly – music made way for comedy in the form of Monty Python, Rab C Nesbitt and Sandra Bernhard – but if this was an attempt to establish a new end of year tradition, it was to prove short lived. 1993 brought the first of Jools Holland’s annual Hootenannies, and he’s been a fixture on New Year’s Eve ever since. The programme maintains the pretence of counting down to midnight, but is always pre-recorded.
My diaries mention ‘seeing in’ the New Year pretty well every year from 1972 onwards. I recall seeing a fair few of the Whistle Test compilations, but occasionally I was lured away by other entertainments such as BBC1’s Welcome 1977, a variety compilation featuring New Year’s greetings from Kojak, Starsky and Hutch and Petula Clark amongst others (including the inevitable Andy Stewart). For three years from the 70s into the 80s, my mum and myself were invited to a neighbour’s New Year party, which was a quietly sedentary occasion populated by elderly relatives. One year, I entertained them all with an impersonation of Jake Thackray…
From 1980 onwards, my New Years Eves were generally spent in a pub or at various friends’ houses where the entertainment was only marginally less sedentary than that offered by our neighbours across the road. None of them was specially memorable, and they now appear as a blur of quiches, pop quizzes, dull games, ham rolls and the chimes of Big Ben. The one thing that was conspicuously absent from all of them was fireworks…
Pop culture has, on the whole, failed to celebrate the New Year in any form beyond the ephemeral entertainments of the evening itself: one tends not to find New Year episodes of sitcoms, whereas Christmas episodes abound. Charles Dickens, who did a lot to popularise the idea of the festive season being memorialised in literature, actually wrote more New Year tales than specifically Christmas stories, but the tradition has never really taken hold in the era of film and television.
When it comes to pop music, the Christmas chart topper has long exerted a hold on the popular imagination, but no one seems to care what’s number one at New Year – which perhaps is for the best. Pop songs aimed at New Year are few indeed – I mentioned one example in a recent blog: ‘Hoots Mon’ by Lord Rockingham’s XI was clearly pitched at the Hogmanay party crowd. The most famous example of a hit for New Year is, of course, U2’s ‘New Year’s Day’, but hardly anyone else has followed their lead. John Lennon added ‘and a happy new year’ into his famous Christmas hit, and George Harrison had a bash back in 1974 with ‘Ding Dong Ding Dong’, but it hardly set the charts alight, which perhaps served as a deterrent to anyone else considering a ‘song for New Year’. Pilot’s ‘January’ (1975) was about the month rather than the first of the month: and Wings’s ‘Mull of Kintyre’, which annexed the Christmas number one during the festive season of 1977 made no lyrical reference to either Christmas or New Year – though the song’s massed bagpipes made Macca’s festive intentions quite clear.
Comics have occasionally gone in for New Year covers, with the snow on the masthead still frozen in place from Christmas, and characters depicted making and breaking New Year resolutions. A quick trawl through my modest collection of comics produced two New Year examples, both from 1972: and whilst there were plenty of references to the season in IPC's Knockout (above), the Beano, hailing from Dundee, only managed this Dennis the Menace strip: elsewhere, it was business as usual for the regular characters.
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| Dennis the Menace stages a New Year Revolution in the Beano, January 1, 1972 (click to enlarge) |
In England if not elsewhere, New Year has always been the poor relation of Christmas, the last gasp of the festive season, the last date on which the Radio and TV Times bother to decorate the mastheads in their festive double editions. But Christmas itself owes its date to New Year's Day, chosen for the Christian calendar to compete with the pagan winter solstice on 21 December, and conveniently located exactly seven days before New Year. These days, that means many people have a ready made excuse to take a whole week off. New Year’s Eve is the last chance to party before reality kicks in again and everyone goes back to work. Until 1974, January the first was an ordinary working day in England (the Scots had it as a Bank Holiday since 1871), so there was perhaps rather less incentive to stay up late and set off fireworks… which, of course, nobody did.
Happy New Year!