Screen burn

In mid-November an Indian chauffeur taking me to Broadcasting House made a detour to show me the Christmas lights in Regent Street. He wished to share the pleasure that they gave him and it was with glee that of the shops he used the terms ‘top class’ and ‘posh’, when to me the street seems almost as tawdry as the ghastly trek from Marble Arch to Oxford Circus. Dissembling, I went through the motions of agreement, thanked him for the treat, and fell into deep melancholy at the thought of yet another Christmas and all that it no longer means to me.

The real Christmas — the Christmas of a Christ Child adored by ox and ass, by humble shepherds and by the Magi with their presages of grief and crucifixion, celebrated with joyful Masses from Monteverdi to Rossini and with Gospels in the language of King James — is an essential and treasured part of my cultural heritage, and it matters not at all that belief now eludes me, for the beautiful liturgy speaks of fundamental human truths and, in the right places, the music touches that part of a man that he may think his soul. The nullifidian jollifications of a Christmas that is not even pagan or animist are contemptible, nowhere more so than on the television screen.

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In terms of entertainment we must expect of Christmas television nothing that is aesthetically or intellectually nourishing, and nothing is more predictable than that programmes we know from dire experience to be fatuous, inane or banal (and perhaps all three) will be regurgitated with a festive gloss of snow and ice, red noses and a reindeer. Most such bogus programmes were, no doubt, made months ago in the warm glow of glorious autumn, and everything about them, from the snowflakes to the jollity, was nothing better than the professional conjuring of television executives whose duty it is to suppress imagination and maintain the cliché and the status quo.