Festive spirit

Each year the same thing happens. Each year we’re expected to suspend for a month the exercise of sound musical judgment as we’re engulfed, willingly or otherwise, in a deluge of Christmas Music. All of a sudden, banality in various guises becomes completely acceptable. Every church in the land that hasn’t descended to the satanic realms of happy-clappy mass hysteria and which has a half-decent choir offers its own version of King’s College’s Nine Lessons and Carols in cosy, twinkly, feelgood candlelight, pretending that all is well in the world. All the major concert halls in every large city offer Christmas concerts of various hues, swelling the coffers of entrepreneurs like Raymond Gubbay. Local choral societies give their inevitable Messiahs, capable or not. And all around the country in our nation’s primary schools mums burst into tears at the sight of their precious ones draped in tea towels and singing ‘Little Donkey’ at the Nativity play. (Well might they cry, for they’re witnessing a despicable act of attempted religious indoctrination that in a civilised country like France is probably illegal.)

Piped music in the shopping mall or the pub, always an annoyance, achieves year-long highs on the irritation scale. It’s hard to avoid ‘Jingle Bells’ or ‘O Come, all ye faithful’ sung incessantly by a crooner over a wobbly-voiced choir in an American accent, or Slade belting out that relentlessly, tiresomely upbeat number ‘Merry Christmas’. Meanwhile, we critics receive the usual crop of press releases from record companies extolling the ‘remarkable talents’ of some choirboy or other who, despite his gifts, manages to lead an ordinary life skateboarding and playing footy with his mates. (How amazing is that?) Often the talents turn out to be not very remarkable at all, and the programmes are predictable and saccharine. Hark! the Herald Angels Sing 24/7 at this time of year, and how I wish they’d just shut up and fly away.