Writing a novel where you’re setting it: My time at Cliveden

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BBC, Books, Hilda Matheson, History, Nancy Astor, Podcast

I’ve been woefully quiet on this blog lately.

Part of that is because I’m using my writing time to write my first novel. First?! Ha! That implies there’ll be more.

It’s on the origin story of the BBC (podcast on that here), and a bit part in that is Nancy Astor. I’m more focused on her secretary, Hilda Matheson, who left Astor (begrudgingly – Astor had to pretty much sack her to make her go) to work for the fledgeling BBC, rising to become the Beeb’s first Director of Talks.

Matheson was the highest-ranking female boss of the company/corporation, and helped invent talk radio as we know it – the ‘Radio 4’ style of clever/interesting/diverse people informing/educating/entertaining. Before her, there were rather dry lectures, but she opened it to include debate and added a conversational style, plus her connections brought Britain’s celebrities of the day to the mic – George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf (Matheson’s own love rival, for the affections of poet Vita Sackville-West). Matheson also worked for MI5 in both World Wars, hired by Lawrence of Arabia during the first one.

I know, right?! What a character. You start writing about the BBC and you end up writing about gay affairs and spying. But then you research Matheson’s pre-BBC boss, Lady Astor… and boy oh boy, keep pulling on that thread.

Nancy Astor, MP, Viscountess, Lady Astor – collector of titles. I don’t know how I’d address her. I’d just curtsy.

Nancy Astor was the first MP to take her seat in the House of Commons, so that’s the chapter of the book I’ve chosen to introduce Matheson and Astor. Nancy was an American divorcee, and you may have seen her name in countless quotes, part of a decades-long mud-slinging roast battle with Winston Churchill. eg.

Astor: “Sir, if you were my husband, I’d poison your tea.”

Churchill: “Madam, if you were my wife, I’d drink it.”

After Nancy Astor’s triumphant maiden speech at the Commons (largely to boos, which was not the done thing for maiden speeches), Churchill was heard to say, “I feel as if a woman has just entered my bathroom and I had nothing to defend myself with, not even a sponge.” Astor apparently replied: “Mr Churchill, you are not handsome enough to have worries of that kind.”

Yet before her parliamentary career, Churchill was a friend to Nancy Astor, joining her lavish parties at her vast country home of Cliveden. After she became an MP – only because her husband rose to the House of Lords (he didn’t want to, and hoped Nancy would only babysit his seat while he got the law changed to return to the Commons) – many politicians snubbed her. Churchill was notoriously cruel with it. When he saw her in a Commons corridor, he’d talk loudly about venereal disease and the like, just to embarrass her.

So while the first Astor/Matheson scene in my novel has them at Westminster, I wanted their second chapter to be at Cliveden, the sprawling estate that Nancy loathed, that her husband inherited from his father William Astor.

I’m en route to a stand-up gig tonight, so pulled into a motorway services to do some writing on the novel. Then realised: I’m not that far from Cliveden…

“I think I’m outside Cliveden” is not what my T-shirt says.

…Cliveden is now a hotel, but the National Trust operate the estate. I sought a tour, and rounded the corner of the house to see a gaggle of tour guides all having their training. What’s the collective noun? A question of tour guides? A gift shop of tour guides? Anyway, there are no tours while the hotel finds its feet again post-lockdown. I left them to their training – early, given there aren’t any till 2022 – and explored the grounds.

It’s not the first time I’ve written part of a book in the place it’s set (although you’ll notice so far I’ve not done much sitting and writing; just some mooching around – still, all helps). When I wrote Hark! The Biography of Christmas, I wrote the chapter on Bracebridge Hall – fictitious English manor house, described by US writer Washington Irving in 1821 as the scene of lost old English Christmases, log fires, carriage rides, games etc – in the same manor house it was based on, Aston Hall near Birmingham. Irving visited Aston Hall as a guest of the Watt family (the lightbulb guy), and was so inspired by their Christmas celebrations that he exaggerated and fictionalised it in his book, which in turn inspired Dickens to write about old Christmas too.

Like Cliveden, Aston Hall is now a place to visit rather than a private property, so I worked on the chapter about its history while sitting in Aston Hall’s very modern cafe – but with a lovely view of the old house, and having just enjoyed an enlightening tour of it.

It really helps get under the skin of what you’re writing if you can visit your setting, let alone be writing about it while you’re there. I’ve read a handful of books and accounts of Cliveden and the Astors, but to visit it and see its scale was quite another thing.

The hotel was for guests only, but I popped my head around the door and glanced at the Cliveden’s entrance hall. It’s not changed much. This was it 100 years ago – the scene that would have greeted Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, and various visiting US presidents:

I popped in here today. Looks exactly the same, only in colour – reds and dark browns. This was it 100 years ago.

The chapel was open for non-hotel guests like me. It used to be a tearoom in the 1800s, but the Astors turned it into a chapel, not for Sunday worship for somewhere to be buried. It’s quite something:

Chapel. Formerly a tearoom.

Nancy Astor was a complex character – heralded as the first female MP to take her seat in Parliament, but better known for what she was anti than what she was pro. Anti-semitic, anti-Catholic, anti-communist – she backed Hitler through the 1930s, and the ‘Cliveden set’ was an upper-class group of appeasement, Nazi-sympathetic toffs who chose the wrong side of history. Nancy regretted her views in 1939, and spent the war trying to atone for her earlier views, helping children and families, just as she had set out to do in Parliament from 1919 onwards – only now she was turning cartwheels and turning her homes into hospitals.

(Some of the above Astor info is from the excellent podcast Gallus Girls and Wayward Women – a great listen.)

Anyway, enough blogging – back to the novel-writing, before I forget all that inspiration and start to write about Lady Astor and Matheson just having a chat in a shop or something. I hope to discover Lady Astor holidayed in Hawaii and had some key plot points happen there – I fancy a trip further afield to write where I’m setting my book…

Nancy Astor and Hilda Matheson are fascinating characters, and I can’t wait to get into them in the novel. If I ever finish it, I’ll let you know all about it here.

In the meantime, my podcast The British Broadcasting Century is telling the BBC origin story – and we’ll get to Hilda Matheson on there… in about 50 episodes time.

Gertrude Donisthorpe: Britain’s first DJ… and one of the world’s first female broadcasters

Tags

BBC, Broadcasting, History, Podcast

Google Gertrude Donisthorpe. I hope you find something.

Because when I just tried it, this is what came up for Britain’s first DJ (in 1917), and one of the world’s first female broadcasters…

…Not a lot. A podcast about her that I’ve just uploaded. An article in the Catholic Herald about her presenting a robe. A TV listing from 1969, when she was interviewed about her work as a radio pioneer. Then it’s genealogy sites for someone completely different.

Yet Gertrude Donisthorpe, one of the first female broadcasters in the world, was arguably the first DJ in Britain, albeit, to begin with, with an audience of just one: her husband.

To redress the balance, here’s a little bit about her, that I discovered researching my podcast The British Broadcasting Century. You can hear much of this on this episode, all about Gertrude Donisthorpe: the Annie Nightingale of 1917.

Gertrude was married to Captain Horace Donisthorpe, and the duo were early radio pioneers. It seems to have been Horace’s enthusiasm, but he quickly swept up Gertrude in too.

In World War I, wireless telegraphy (essentially Morse code) was more common than its upstart younger sibling wireless telephony (ie. speech and, when technology allowed, music). Wireless operators needed training up before heading to the front, so that was Captain Donisthorpe’s job, based near Worcester. Valve radios at the time were very expensive but tricky to operate, so part of his challenge was teaching new recruits how to care for them without breaking them.

After hours, the Donisthorpes would cycle to a nearby field and set up either side of it – to experiment with what this new wireless radio telephony could do. She would speak into a transmitter; he would try and pick up her signals via a receiver across the field. When they couldn’t hear anything, they’d cycle to each other to say so – often missing each other (they really should have set a rule where only one person does the cycling and the other stays put).

She had a test phrase that she’d say, over and over: “A wonderful bird is the pelican, its beak can hold more than its belly can.” One of the first factoids, there you go Steve Wright.

Gertrude would do most of the speaking, and even introduce and play a few gramophone records. So in my mind, that makes her Britain’s first DJ – to an audience of one, across a field, who she’d then cycle to. It was like a meet-and-greet, or an early badly-attended version of the Radio 1 Roadshow.

On Leslie Baily’s Scrapbook for 1917 radio programme in 1967, Gertrude said: “My first broadcast was from a bell tent in a field near Worcester. My part in this experiment was strictly unofficial. I sat on a sugar-box in front of a transmitter, which would now be considered a museum piece. It had a bath of oil for cooling the one and only valve. At first we simply had conversations between two stations, about a mile apart.”

“If I heard nothing, I would take my pushbike and pedal to the other station, where I would often find that my husband had gone on his bike to my base, by a different route! Still, we did quite often make contact over the wireless, and I suppose my husband got quite a lot of technical knowledge from these experiments. Later we broadcast gramophone records, and recitations to amuse the troops at training centres, at Malvern and Droitwich. This was also strictly unofficial!”

As the experiments continued, the Donisthorpes played a few wireless concerts, three evenings a week, for the local military camps. So the audience increased. It’s unknown who spoke for those concerts, but my best guess would be that Gertrude still did much of the talking, as Horace’s interest was in how it sounded: her the presenter, him the producer. Their musical transmissions could be heard in Droitwich, Malvern and Norton. Throughout, they were experimenting, tweaking and trying to perfect the art and engineering behind this early broadcasting – ‘broadcasting’ as a word was yet to come in, for another five years.

Radio at this point was intended to be point-to-point communication, a way of sending and receiving a message between two people. The Marconi Company saw their future in charging for these messages. It was only the technology’s Achilles’ heel – that the transmissions were ‘leaky’, that others could ‘listen in’ – that meant that broadcasting was accidentally invented. Christmas Eve 1906 was the first radio entertainment broadcast for wider listeners, given by Reginald Fessenden (hear more about it on the first episode of our podcast) to ships near Brant Rock, Massachusetts.

A few years after the Donisthorpes, radio amateurs were entranced by experimental transmissions from Marconi’s Chelmsford workshop. To begin with they were recitations of railway timetables, till the ‘listeners-in’ asked for more entertaining tests to take place. Perhaps a newspaper, then maybe a song or two. That would require more nuanced microphones and ultimately more powerful transmitters – but Marconi engineers like Captain H.J. Round and William Ditcham were eager to try.

After a few false starts – including an opera broadcast from Dame Nellie Melba that was so successful that the British government banned radio broadcasts for fear of interfering with military communications – 1922 saw Britain’s first regular broadcast service, when Marconi’s was granted a licence to keep the moaning radio hams quiet. Captain Peter Eckersley was in charge, and when he seized the mic one day and was effortlessly entertaining, radio caught on in a big way. Hear more of his early broadcasts here. Eckersley’s genius and the ambition of his radio rival Arthur Burrows led to the establishment of the BBC; Eckersley became Chief Engineer, Burrows became Director of Programmes.

As for the Donisthorpes, Horace dabbled with the idea of broadcasting the closing night of a West End musical, just as the BBC was forming in the summer of 1922. It was to be based on the popular trend of listening to live performances via home telephone (the Electrophone), that had been popular since 1895. Alas Donisthorpe’s negotiations came to nothing. The BBC formed without him and he joined Marconi’s. He gave the occasional guest talk on the BBC in the late 1920s, on ‘wireless and the sea’ and the effects of an eclipse on radio transmission.

Gertrude was a guest on In Town To-night, a popular radio talkshow (the Graham Norton Show of 1934). In 1953 she contributed to Those Radio Times for the Light Programme, alongside Beryl Reid and Max Bygraves. (Bygraves incidentally is the performer who’s nearest the same age as the BBC – he was born just a few weeks before the first BBC broadcast.)

She gave one TV interview that I know of, for a 1969 BBC2 programme on the wireless entertainments that pre-dated broadcasting, called Yesterday’s Witness: Breaking the Silence. It’s not on iPlayer or Youtube… yet.

As for other early female broadcasters, 1910 saw radio hams such as Mrs M.J. Glass of San Jose and Olive Heartburg of New York. Perhaps the world’s first female DJ was Sybil Herrold in San Jose, who introduced records from 1912 on her husband Charles Herrold’s experimental radio station. The brilliantly named Nancy Clancy was a 16-year-old announcer on WAHG in New York in 1924. On this side of the Atlantic, the early BBC included Cecil Dixon as our first radio ‘Auntie’, broadcasting for children, while Helena Millais was arguably Britain’s first broadcast comedian (here’s a video in which I introduce a recording of her act). Pioneers such as Elise Sprott and Hilda Matheson are BBC names I can’t wait to tell people about on the podcast.

I’m grateful to Dr Elizabeth Bruton, curator of Technology and Engineering at the Science Museum, for furnishing me with the Donisthorpes’ full names (Horace’s is a beaut: Captain Horace St John de Alva Donisthorpe. There aren’t many of those nowadays).

I’m glad she’s helped set the record straight on Gertrude Anne Andrews, who was born 1895 and died 1980, just as Gertrude set records straight, then played them, 105 years ago. I hope the next time I google her, the name of Britain’s first DJ will be broadcast a little more widely.

The British Broadcasting Century Podcast is available from all good podcast outlets.

My new podcast: The British Broadcasting Century… Subscribe now!

Tags

BBC, Broadcasting, History, Podcast, radio

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-qx928-deb1a0

Been a while, podpals!

This is a blatant plea to come and join my new podcast, The British Broadcasting Century. I’ll be geeking out about the origins of the BBC, radio and life as we know it, for a dozen or so episodes (in series 1; then who knows how many thereafter).

This is an extended trailer, with a few bonus clips just for being loyal podcastees here on A Paul Kerensa Podcast/The Heptagon Club.

But to catch the new one, you’ll need to subscribe to it, over at https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-british-broadcasting-century-with-paul-kerensa/id1516471271

and find us on Facebook.com/BBCentury

Stay safe & keep listening…

The Queen’s Speech & The King’s Speech: 13 Top Messages of the Top Royal

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BBC, Christmas

It’s Christmas Day! It’s lunchtime. Turkey sits heavy in our tums or on our plate. In Britain that means one thing – our monarch is about to speak to us and give an awkward smile.

While you wait, or realise you’ve missed it, here are some regal highlights of that very thing, since it started seventy years ago…

• 1932… Britain’s first royal Christmas message, by George V. He wasn’t the first monarch to broadcast one – the Dutch queen beat him by one year. But he’d been pressured by the BBC’s John Reith for a decade – and only relented after being given a tour of the BBC studios, a couple of free radios, and assurances that the new global British Broadcasting Corporation would reach parts of the British Empire that the previous, national, British Broadcasting Company couldn’t reach. In his first nervous broadcast, he sat in his favourite chair at Sandringham, and fell through the seat of it.
• 1935… George V’s fourth and final festive speech reassured a nation still suffering in the Great Depression, continuing to promote the nostalgic British Christmas.
• 1936… was speechless, because Edward VIII abdicated just before Christmas.
• 1937… Edward’s brother George VI had a legendary stammer, famously depicted by Colin Firth in The King’s Speech. Completing his first Christmas message only increased the warmth of the public towards him. In it, he claimed to be unable to match his father’s broadcasting skill, but his message of hope against the “shadows of enmity and of fear” was well-received in a fragile world.
• 1939… After no speech in 1938 came a vital wartime broadcast. Princess Elizabeth suggested that her father quote from the poem “God Knows” by Minnie Louise Haskins:

  “And I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year,
  ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’
  And he replied,
  ‘Go out into the darkness, and put your hand into the Hand of God.
  That shall be to you better than light, and safer than a known way.’”

• 1952… Princess became Queen, and Elizabeth II became the third British monarch on the festive airwaves, broadcasting from the same chair and desk as her father and grandfather before her.

  

• 1957… saw the first televised message: “It’s inevitable that I should seem a rather remote figure to many of you… but now at least for a few minutes, I welcome you to the peace of my own home.” Like the first radio broadcast, Elizabeth assured her audience that timeless values mattered more than new technology. There was an amusing crossed signal too; over the Queen’s words, an American police officer was heard to mutter, “Joe, I’m gonna grab a quick coffee.”
• 1959… had the first pre-recorded message, to be shipped abroad in advance. Wherever you were in the world, you could now hear the message at an appropriate time on Christmas Day.
• 1969… had no speech due to fears of oversaturation, a er a year of royal documentaries and ceremonies. It was reinstated in 1970; the public loved the royal broadcaster, as did the technicians, who nicknamed Her Majesty “One- Take Windsor”.
• 1992… The sixtieth anniversary of the royal message was Elizabeth’s self-professed “annus horribilis”: two of her sons’ marriages ended, Windsor Castle suffered a fire, and tabloid interest in the royal family reached new highs (or lows). As if to prove the point, The Sun newspaper published a leaked version of the speech two days early. For the previous five years, naturalist and broadcaster David Attenborough had produced the speech; maybe he should have stayed on.
• 1997… was the first speech broadcast online.
• 2006… was the first royal Christmas podcast.
• 2012… was shot in 3D – without the customary reassurance that timeless values matter more than new technology. A version in Smell-O-Vision has yet to appear.

   

  Amazon bestseller Hark! The Biography of Christmas is available now.

It was Christmas Eve, babe: 23 epic Christmas Eve-nts from the Nativity to Nakatomi

Tags

A Christmas Carol, BBC, carols, Christmas, Dickens, Truce, Washington Irving

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the past, we’ve been busy doing all sorts of key, important, vital, ridiculous, epoch-changing things on this day.

The below dates are partly harvested from my book Hark! The Biography of Christmas but also from my time-frittering website The Movie Timeline. (Oh and Wikipedia and Google and things, but we never need acknowledge them, right?) In reverse chronlogical order, here’s what happened – in reality and in movie-land – on December 24th…

1995 – In the film Toy Story, on Christmas Eve ’95, Andy receives a puppy named Buster. His baby sister Molly receives a Mrs Potato Head.

1990 – John McLane foils a terrorist attack at Dulles International Airport, Washington DC… THE VERY SAME DAY that in Chicago, young Kevin McAllister stops two burglers from robbing his house via bunch of ingenuity and no care for the welfare of others (according to Die Hard 2 and Home Alone)

Yippee-ay-Merry Christmas

1988 – John McClane battles international terrorist Hans Gruber in the Nakatomi Tower. The same day that TV boss Frank Cross is visited by the Ghosts of Christmas. AND the same day that Evelyn Salt’s parents are killed in a car accident. (You may not have seen Salt. But hopefully you’ve seen Scrooged and Die Hard…)

1968 – Back in reality, the crew of the Apollo 8 become the first see the dark side of the moon (not the Pink Floyd album) – here’s the message they transmitted, which included readings from Genesis (not the band).

1945 – George Bailey of Bedford Falls decides that yes, life is worth living, because it’s a wonderful life.

1944 – The first US performance of The Nutcracker by the San Francisco Ballet, who’ve performed it every Christmas Eve since. Most ballet ticket sales each year are for The Nutcracker.

1941 – Churchill and Roosevelt light the White House Christmas tree for last time for 3 years, due to wartime energy restrictions.

1922 – In the BBC’s first year of transmission, the first original radio drama is broadcast on Christmas Eve: ‘The Truth About Father Christmas’, starring ‘Uncle’ Arthur Burrows.

1918 – King’s College Cambridge relaunch the Nine Lessons and Carols after the Great War. Ever since, they’ve ‘owned’ it, broadcasting it when technology allowed – even without the stained glass during the Second World War, and without the name ‘King’s’ attached so that the enemy couldn’t quite place where it was coming from.

1914 – One of the most famous Christmas Eve events, the Christmas Truce of the Great War sees French, English and German troops unite in No Man’s Land – largely thanks to the widespread recognition of Silent Night/Stille Nacht. Without the English troops recognising the Germans singing it, there might not have been that moment of peace, handshakes, tobacco trading… and football the next day. I’ve got plenty more on this event in my book, or on this post.

1906 – A great unsung hero of broadcasting, Reginald Fessenden gives the first transmission of any radio entertainment programme on Christmas Eve 1906. It’s a one-man impromptu carol service courtesy of this Canadian inventor and amateur violinist. He transmits a demonstration to ships’ radio operators (“sparks”) from Brank Rock, Massachusetts. Instead of the usual Morse code weather updates and time signals, receivers hear a brief burst of Fessenden reading Luke’s Nativity account, performing “O Holy Night” on violin, singing “Adore and Be Still”, and playing Handel’s Largo on vinyl. He signs off wishing his audience (not knowing if he had one) a Merry Christmas and asked that if anyone has heard him, to get in touch about the quality of broadcast. Sparks on ships from hundreds of miles away wrte to him of its success – and a little crackling is always expected at Christmas.

1880 – The first Nine Lessons & Carols takes place in Truro Cathedral, the idea of Bishop Benson – who also had the idea for classic Christmas ghost story, The Turn of the Screw. More on him and the service on this blog post here.

1865 – Ku Klux Klan forms. The less said about that the better, but insert your own joke about a White Christmas here.

1843 – Scrooge is visited by apparitions and sees the light. Dickens didn’t mention the year of the events, but many film adaptations but it as that very Christmas the Dickens released it. Oh and seven years earlier on Christmas Eve…

1836 – Jacob Marley dies. He’s as Scroogish as Scrooge, but he dies before seeing the error of his ways, so he’ll wander the spirit for seven years, then haunt Scrooge and play compere to three exciting ghosts. No idea why he waited seven years, but maybe he was waiting for Scrooge to get properly miserly, or waiting for Dickens to write him up.

1822 – “‘Twas the Night before Christmas, and all through the house…” …of Clement Clarke Moore, preparations were readying. We don’t know if he gave his children this poem on Christmas Eve on Christmas Day – but this poem was written just one day earlier by the Hebrew scholar.

1820 – Around this year, the writer Washington Irving experiences a Christmas Eve at Aston Hall in Birmingham, with the Watt family (whose name would adorn lightbulbs one day). Irving writes it up, exaggerates, spoofs and harks back to Christmas of old, in a travelogue tale ‘Christmas Eve’ as well as other festive writings. He talks of the old tradition of twelve days, of an uninspiring season of Christmaslessness, of the warmth of winter holiday celebrations, of the joy of carriage rides and fireside games, of the benefit of looking back to old customs… Irving explains mistletoe and its kissing custom to Americans, and tells of an English Christmas of church, carols, nostalgia and rosy-cheeked children. Dickens later reads this and is inspired to write of the Cratchit family Christmas in A Christmas Carol. So yes, the cosy rosy English Christmas was sold back to us by the Americans. More on Irving and Dickens here.

1818 – Another classic Christmas Eve moment: when church mice (apparently) ate through the church organ of an Austrian village church, causing the priest and the organist to write a new song against the clock, to debut at Midnight Mass that night. The man who came to fix the organ then saw the song written down, and took it with him around other churches as he travelled. Your organ breaks? You get it fixed, you learn Silent Night, that’s the deal. More on it and other carol origins here.

1777 – James Cook discovers Christmas Island. During Christmas! What are the chances…?

1223 – St Francis of Assisi stages the first live Nativity scene, with a stone Jesus, his Franciscan monks as shepherds… and hopefully an audience if the rural Italian villagers turn up (they do).

1166 – King John is born. It means that when he reigns, he’ll celebrate Christmas AND his birthday in a blow-out of a feast, that will inspire and enthuses hungry monarchs to come.

100 AD – Midnight Mass starts being celebrated on Christmas Eve roundabout nowish. But in secret, in homes. (The smell of the incense probably gave it away though.)

1BC/ADish – Well, more than likely somewhere in the decade around then, Joseph and Mary arrive in Bethlehem, but find little room available due to the census dragging all of J’s extended family to the locality too. So they end up in the lower room, or the cave, or the cowshed…

…and the rest is history. The rest is his story…

Hark! The Biography of Christmas is available now.

 

The Christmas Radio Times, the British Broadcasting Christmas & The Star Wars Holiday Special

Tags

BBC, bing crosby, Christmas, Radio Times

Christmas isn’t Christmas without… presents, according to the opening line of Little Women. But according to little me, the answer was the bumper Christmas edition of the Radio Times. So now this year’s has hit our shelves (shows I’ve worked on in there? Miranda Hart hosting the Royal Variety Performance, ITV, Tue 19th December… and Not Going Out, BBC1, Christmas Eve. As you were…), our seasonal historical tour now stops at the TV schedules.

The first Radio Times Christmas cover: The family turning away from the Yule log, which was on its way out, and to the box in the corner, which was on its way in.

The first Christmas Radio Times was published on 21 December 1923, three months into the magazine’s run, and had its first colour cover. It included an article by Lord Riddell entitled “Modern Witchcraft”, and a defence by BBC boss John Reith in defence of broadcasting, suggesting benefits such as the chance  for all to “delight in ‘Hunt-the-Slipper’ or ‘Hunt-the-Thimble’ to musical accompaniment – and no one out of the fun at the piano! …The loud-speaker is such a convenient entertainer. He is so ready to oblige when wanted, so unassuming when other sport is forward. He doesn’t feel hurt if a cracker is pulled in the middle of a song, or offended if the fun grows riotous during his performance.”

Reith declared this “the first wireless Christmas” – after all, cities were being added gradually, so now Cardiff, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Bournemouth, and Sheffield joined the party. The BBC’s New Year broadcast that year was the first time that Big Ben’s chimes were heard outside of London.

The year before though was actually the first wireless Christmas. On Christmas Eve 1922, the BBC broadcast the first original British radio drama: ‘The Truth About Father Christmas’, starring ‘Uncle Arthur’ Burrows, who became Britain’s first newsreader that year. The 1922 Christmas schedule also featured the first religious broadcast in Reverend John Mayo’s Christmas message (probably preaching to more people than anyone else in history at the time):

“I have come from my church in Whitechapel situated amidst all the noise and the turmoil and the dust and the slums – all that Whitechapel connotes; and it is my privilege through the wizardry of Mr Marconi to speak, as I understand, to many thousands of people. Surely, no man has ever proclaimed the Gospel from such an extraordinary pulpit as I am now doing.”

On New Year’s Eve, a live bagpiper concluded with “Auld Lang Syne”, and at that exact moment the British Broadcasting Company became the British Broadcasting Corporation. At the time it had 30,000 listeners but just four employees. The Illustrated London News reported that “the invention of broadcasting has immensely extended the power of music to diffuse the spirit of Christmas. The range of carol-singers’ voices, hitherto restricted to the limits of a building, a short distance in the open air, has been increased by hundreds of miles.”

1924’s Christmas Radio Times

Other early festive radio highlights included a play, ‘Bethlehem’, live from a Cornish field – the first British drama broadcast outside of a BBC studio. And of course Britain’s first royal Christmas message; John Reith spent a decade convincing George V to give one, and His Maj only relented after a free radio set to try out the new media outlet, a visit to the BBC studios, plus strong encouragement from Queen Mary and the Prime Minister. On his first nervous broadcast, he went to sit on his favourite chair in a makeshift studio at Santadringham House (as he foolishly didn’t rename it), and fell straight through the seat.

Fifty years later, TV reached peak viewing figures. Since Netflix, tablets and Snapchat, the viewing figures of the 1970s to 1990s have become unsurpassable. In Britain, the “highest evs” (just trying to speak yoof) were shows like comedian Mike Yarwood’s 1977 special (the highest viewing figures for any Christmas Day show at 21.4 million) and Morecambe & Wise (a still very respectable 21.3 million). For Britain’s largest single TV audience of all time, see Only Fools and Horses’ 1996 Christmas special – 24.35 million people watched Del Boy and Rodney finally become millionaires.

Elsewhere on the schedules, a modern-day British Christmas wouldn’t be complete without Raymond Briggs’ heart-warming The Snowman, a Top of the Pops recap of the year, and a timely reminder from EastEnders that our family Christmas isn’t as bad as it can get. Their 1986 special was the most-watched TV show of all time (over two viewings – so Only Fools trumps it for the at-the-time audience).

Then there’s the seasonal variety special, from stars like Bing Crosby and Val Doonican, Christmas jumper-clad, crooning, with special guests aplenty. The format was never better sent up than in Knowing Me, Knowing Yule with Alan Partridge, broadcast live from a replica of Alan’s Norwich house.

“Ahohoho!”

For the format at its worst, see 1978’s Star Wars Holiday Special. Never-repeated lowlights include: Dynasty’s Diahann Carroll performing an erotic fantasy song for Chewbacca’s dad Itchy, and Princess Leia’s musical finale adding Wookiee “Life Day” lyrics to the Star Wars theme. This, not The Empire Strikes Back, was technically the first Star Wars sequel, though George Lucas said of this hopeless Jedi menace, “if I had the time and a sledgehammer, I would track down every copy of that show and smash it.” Bad luck, George – even if you attacked all the clones, the Internet has awakened.

“This aren’t the songs you’re looking for…”

So when you’re enjoying the new Star Wars film in cinemas this Christmas, remember that forty years ago we had to make do with wonky Wookiees…

Hark! The Biography of Christmas – now an Amazon bestseller – is available now. The perfect accompaniment to the Christmas Radio Times on any coffee table.

Hark! Do you hear what I hear…?

Tags

BBC, Books, Christianity, Christmas, Hark, Miranda, Not Going Out, Religion, Sitcom, Top Gear, Writing

Oh my, it’s been while since I blogged here.

Two and a half years since I posted here about the end of Miranda and Not Going Out – so what’s happened since?

Well Not Going Out has come back, in a new scenario. We’re writing the umpteenth series of it now. As for Miranda, there are rumours in the paper every few weeks that it’s coming back, every time one of the cast breathes and it sounds a bit like ‘We’re in talks’. Who can say…

As for me, I’ve been gigging a-plenty (including a new medically biographical stand-up show I’m performing at Camden Fringe this weekend as I write this – tickets available folks! Come on down, Sat 26th/Sun 27th Aug 2017…).

And I’ve been writing for more TV, including TFI Friday, Buble at the BBC, The BBC Music Awards, and a rollercoaster series of Top Gear: a crazy five months under the spotlight of the tabloids, culminating in everyone on the bus voicing opinions on the precise ideal volume of Chris Evans’ voice/T-shirt. I arrived with Chris and left with him. Amazingly, given the press interest at the time (even making the front pages, as well as countless Murdoch media grumblepieces), I’ve not had one journo get in touch asking for my experience on it. They were delightfully printing how “an unnamed source told us Presenter #1 shouted at people in this meeting” and “another unnamed source told us Presenter #2 doesn’t share food and his favourite food is sandwiches”. I’m astounded that no one’s even bothered to get in touch to ask if any of it was true. Then again, who needs truth once the article’s out?

Ah, speaking of articles, that’s why I’m here.

Another thing I’ve been doing is writing a Christmas book. For a couple of years now, I’ve been researching and writing Hark! The Biography of Christmas – you can of course pre-order it by clicking on its title just there in the line above. Would you? Thanks.

It’s simply the history of Christmas, told via the 12 dates of when I think Christmas became a bit more like our modern version of it. The whole of Christmas is here: origins of crackers, tinsel, turkey, holly, White Christmas, panto, Scrooge, Santa, carols… Why we think of our Christmas as a snowy time (it’s to do with the ice age, the young Dickens and Frankenstein), a time for charity (it’s to do with Boxing Day, the older Dickens and Cornish tin mines), and a time for family (it’s to do with trains, Gotham City, and the word ‘knickers’). There is of course plenty of church (a Nativity with no donkey, no innkeeper and possible dozens of wise men) and plenty of commerce (the world’s first Santa’s grotto? East London). There’s even a farting jester, The Simpsons, Daphne Du Maurier’s scary dad, and Englebert Humperdinck (not that one).

In fact I don’t think there’s anything of Christmas I’ve left out. I’m waiting for someone to read it and tell me what’s missing.

The book’s out mid-September, but as I say, very much pre-orderable now. I’m having two (I know, greedy) book launches – in Guildford on Sun 1st Oct and Holborn, London on Wed 11th Oct. If you’d like to come to either, email this special email address for details to get on the list – it’s free but ticketed, and both will include festive nibbles and a whistlestop tour through Christmas history from yours truly. Oh, and book signings galore of course. “Perfect stocking-filler!” Not my words – the words of Miranda Hart.

So.

The reason I’ve resurrected this blog…

To drip-feed Christmassy articles/extracts between now and Christmas. Festive delights a-plenty will follow in subsequent posts. For now, it’s still August, so I’ll have some respect for the season and not start till September. But come September 1st, the festive floodgates will open… and the blog’s going to be the Christmassiest place on the planet.

Merry Summer!