Advent #21

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas, Family, TV
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Over the past few months I’ve been getting into The Archers. (After seven decades I thought maybe I should find out what all the fuss is about.) I’m enjoying it a great deal, although just very occasionally it’s difficult not to be reminded of Tony Hancock’s version: “oh dear… they’ve all fallen down that disused mineshaft, etc.”

Last Christmas my brother bought me an extraordinary book, a large format graphic novel, beautifully illustrated in moody black & white, all about Hancock’s life (and death). A mix of biography and fantasy, it was clearly a labour of love for its authors – reflected in the price tag, which I hope bruv managed to get a reduction on!

Every year as Christmas and birthdays loom, Mr Curnow senior (well, senior-er than me anyway) asks for suggestions for presents  – and I have to confess, every year we fail to come up with anything and he’s left to his own devices.

To be honest it doesn’t seem to be much of a problem, and I’m regularly amazed by the things he gifts us. So, for example, Mr Hudson’s Diaries when I was going through my Upstairs Downstairs phase; Septimus and the Danedyke Mystery, evoking great memories of 1970s ITV Sunday afternoon serials; and a vintage book chronicling 10 years of Take The High Road.

It’s as if he’s riffing off the plot of The Evil of the Daleks and using a time machine to bring antique items back from the past into the present day. (Or he has an eBay account, either of those two scenarios would fit.)

It’ll be interesting to see what he’s come up with this year – and to be honest, with all the hard work he puts in, it’s no wonder he deserves the occasional pint.

A pint?! That’s very nearly…

Advent #20

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas, Family, Work
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My Dad recently made the point, although more eloquently than I’ve time to expand on here, that he doesn’t really want or need anything for Christmas.

My Grandpa once made the same point (although we ignored him) as did my father-in-law on many occasions (we ignored him too) – and for that matter, the past couple of years I’ve said the same thing myself. (But have been ignored.)

I certainly don’t feel that I need anything. My Mum, I suspect, may worry that I need more shoes. I’ve only got two feet – slightly above average, but even so there’s a limit to how many I can wear. Meanwhile my wife seems to be obsessed with my underwear—

No, I just mean she keeps looking at my pants—

Oh dear, I should have said, sometimes she rummages in my drawers–

>ahem< My wife, to clarify, has formed the opinion that I could do with some new undergarments in the rotation. I disagree. (As in, I think I have plenty – not as in, I disagree with the principle of undergarments.)

I actually said last year (just prior to being ignored probably) that if I went through the whole of Christmas Day without getting any presents it genuinely wouldn’t bother me. That’s not to say I don’t like presents, far from it. But what I really enjoy is the break from the normal routine.

I don’t work over Christmas, but we do stay open, because after two days off my boss says he’s bored with nothing to do. Personally, even away from work I can usually find something to do – plus there’s the luxury of time at Christmas to be able to do a bit of nothing inbetween all the somethings.

As for Dad, and buying Christmas presents…

Obviously we’ve ignored him. (Sorry.) 

Advent #19

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in 1970s, 1980s, BBC, Christmas, TV
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Not that I want to suggest all I do is watch TV but…

Oh! BUT– actually, maybe I DON’T. Because I’ve never watched Gavin & Stacey!

I may have caught two minutes of it once (Alison Steadman discussing her breakfast I think) but that was en route to something else and I didn’t hang around. Apart from that brief encounter, it’s a show that entirely slipped under my radar. Likewise Count Arthur Strong, Ghosts, Miranda…

For all that we like to bemoan the death of the sitcom, actually it still seems to be in fine form. No, not every show is a triumph – but nostalgia has made us forget that even back in the day, for every The Good Life or Yes Minister there were half a dozen Goodbye, Mr Kents or Sweet Sixteens.

Gavin & Stacey is currently making my radar ping like there’s a U Boat fleet headed straight for me, because a whole load of hype in recent weeks has made it very clear that it’s coming back for one final episode on Christmas Day. It’s the BBC’s big hope for huge festive viewing figures.

Of course, ‘huge’ is different nowadays – you can no longer ever expect to claim that almost half the population of the country has watched something, as they did back in, for example, Del & Rodney’s heyday. TV is now too fragmented, and the days where “Stupid Boy” or “Listen Very Carefully” or “Just the One, Mrs Wembley” or even “You Plonker!” would enter everyday language by cultural osmosis have gone.

But that’s not to say TV is dead (thank goodness). Less high profile, but I see there’s another one-off revival on Boxing Day, with a new episode of “Outnumbered. Now that I AM looking forward to.

Not that I want to suggest…

Advent #18

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas, Confused
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One song which doesn’t get much airplay, oddly, is River by Joni Mitchell.

I don’t know if it was intended as a Christmas song (it was released in June 1971, rather than December) but frankly if you’re going to mention Christmas trees and reindeer in a song you have to accept that sooner or later (almost certainly sooner) we’re going to claim it as ‘Christmassy’.

The first time I ever heard it was in an episode of Ally McBeal (if you want to carbon date which series, it was between ‘death of Billy’ and ‘OMG Bon Jovi’) and was sung by boyfriend de jour, Robert Downey junior – and I assumed it had been written specially for the episode.

Anybody with a long memory (and no doubt a despairing look) may recall earlier examples of my musical ignorance, never having heard of John Lennon until his death for example. Similarly I’d never heard of Joni Mitchell – so in that context I guess it’s not surprising that I didn’t realise a song I’d never heard before was written by a singer I’d never heard of either!

Fast forward a few years, and of course Joni Mitchell has become inextricably linked with Christmas (whether she likes it or not) by dint of another song appearing in ‘that Emma Thompson scene’ in Love Actually. THAT was the first time I’d heard Joni Mitchell’s name… although given how they talked about her, I assumed she was dead.

I wasn’t disillusioned of THAT until a news story another few years later reporting that she was gravely ill – and while obviously it’s stretching it to call that ‘good news’ it did at least demonstrate she was still alive, so…

In conclusion, I guess – I really don’t know music at all.

(But I know what I like!)

Advent #17

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in 1970s, Childhood, Christmas
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One thing I miss about being a child at Christmas, is the Selection Box.

Obviously there’s no law against getting one as an adult – but it’s a very unlikely present to receive, or if you do get one it’s probably meant to be ‘ironic’. I don’t mind ironic chocolate (it’s the dark stuff I can’t stand) but it’s not quite the same as the simple, unadulterated pleasure of having spent twelve months being warned of the dangers of too many sweets, only to not just hit the mother lode but actually be presented with it come Christmas.

I’m a child of the seventies, so of course our Selection Boxes were slightly, um, adulterated not just by perennial party pooper the Bounty, but also by the now-thankfully discontinued Topic – cursed with a catchy slogan forever proclaiming it as the answer to the question “What has a hazelnut in every bite?” (Or rather, one of TWO answers, the other of course being “a hazelnut” and NOT, as a friend in secondary school tried to convince me, squirrel s**t.)

Other than that, I seem to recall Curly Wurly and Mars being the big stars, alongside stalwarts such as Twix and the Double Decker – if comparative newcomers such as the Wispa ever reached selection box status, it was after my time.

Obviously I can hardly stress enough, this is simply an exercise in nostalgia. It’s important to make that clear because the danger of mentioning how much you miss getting a selection box at Christmas when there’s still a week to go, is that one runs the risk of everybody suddenly deciding to buy a selection box, with the result that I might end up with, well, with a whole selection of them.

Gosh. Goodness. Dear me. I certainly hope THAT doesn’t happen…

Advent #16

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas, Moaning
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It’s time to get something off my chest. Namely, the Twelve Days of Christmas.

I don’t like it.

I don’t like the tendency for people to sing “GoldEN rings” instead of “Gold” – I don’t like the debate about whether twelve is drummers drumming or lords a-leaping – and I don’t like novelty celebrity versions. No, not even Julie “And a de-li-cious chocolate éclair” Andrews.

I mean, I probably OUGHT to like it. The song is just a list – and I’m a Doctor Who fan and we LOVE a list. Oh, but except that it isn’t just A list is it? It starts off as a list of birds (other than five, for no fathomable reason) but then at about seven or eight the author ditches that and starts yammering on about maids and pipers instead. A bit like the ‘play within a play’ business which Shakespeare totally forgets part way through The Taming of the Shrew.

But what I most especially dislike, is this modern trend of claiming that the poor benighted recipient gets TWELVE partridges (in TWELVE pear trees). OK, at a push I will accept that IN THEORY the song says that – but we surely haven’t spent all these years patiently explaining to the fundamentalist Christians that it might actually be an allegorical tree and that there never was a talking serpent; just to get all militant about the wording of this wretched carol.

In the old days, it was taken as read that this was a daily recap and that there was only ever one partridge, all the way up to only one batch of twelve drummers. And only five, NOT forty, golde– gold rings.

Anyway, I’m now off to take some deep breaths. And that’s all I have to say.

On the sixteenth day of Christmas.

Advent #15

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas, Family

My wife and daughter are in a gang. They’re not part of the white slave trade, and they don’t suddenly burst into song as if they’re in West Side Story, but still, nevertheless, they have a gang. (The gang also has a WhatsApp group but then, who doesn’t?)

There are, I think, eight of them – although it is a fact that I’ve seen seven of them in various combinations, but have never seen the eighth. I’ve seen a photo but nowadays that’s easily faked, so frankly it could just be a massive wind-up to make me think there’s another person involved. (A bit like when people tried to convince me John Nettles had moved in down the road from us.)

Regardless of all that nonsense, today the seven-or-eight of them are going out for lunch together. A bit like a Christmas Works Do but without the niggling business of having to be at work together for the preceding eleven months.

I’m not sure I’ve ever been in a gang, certainly not since the turn of the century, although very occasionally I get involved (or at least, get briefly caught in the gravitational pull of it all). A bit like Elliot Gould in Friends, popping up from time to time, good-natured but bewildered. Wearing a funny hat in ‘The One With Liz’s Garden’ for example, or as the butt of the joke in ‘The One With The Cardio T-Shirt’.

I know, of course, being serious for a moment, that not everything in life can be compared to American sitcoms – so as they enjoy their lunch together, I’d just like to wish a merry Christmas to all eight (might be seven) of those Golden Girls.

Cheers!

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Advent #14

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas, Family, Pets
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A year ago today, our daughter got her dog. He was a rescue and came with some issues, both physical (he is, as Peter Cook put it, deficient in the leg department to the tune of one) and mental, in that he was very wary around men. Because of the latter I kept my distance, and all I really saw of Rikki during that first week was two timid eyes staring out from a nest of blankets in his cage.

The timid eyes, and indeed the cage, have long since gone (although the nest of blankets has if anything grown) and he doesn’t ever let his missing leg slow him down – quite the opposite in fact, my theory being that he’s like a bicycle and needs to keep up a certain speed otherwise he’ll just topple over.

Yesterday he decided to wake my daughter at 5am to frighten her with his ragged breathing and rapid heartbeat. In theory we were having our annual trip to Exeter Christmas Market (this year going by train, which in my naïve way I thought I could probably spin 300 words out of (“…when I was a boy I always wanted to drive one…” etc)) but a mid-morning railway journey to the city became instead a pre-sunrise car journey to the vets.

Mind you, the two experiences aren’t entirely different (going Christmas Shopping or going to the vet, you already know you’re coming home poorer) and in fact as it happens we’ve all of us more or less finished our Christmas Shopping so we were only really going to Exeter for a mix of tradition and browsing (and hopefully food).

And for Rikki, Christmas has come early – they’ve sent him home with a huge bag full of goodies. (To be taken three times a day.)

Advent #13

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas, Family

Stop me if you’ve heard this one, but this afternoon we put up two-thirds of our tree.

Or rather, and as previously threatened, my daughter’s tree, relegating ours back to the top of the wardrobe. In obstinate defiance of my own decorating style she’s not only gone full tinsel, she’s also gone coloured lights.

We usually have a chuckle when recalling how my mother-in-law disapproved of them; but it is a fact that just this very lunchtime the Jeremy Vine Radio 2 show was discussing the hot topic of mortgages refused because the property in question is haunted – bringing up the very real threat that Joyce might haunt us for our poor choice of lights. The radio discussion made me envisage an estate agent’s version of Miracle on 34th Street where instead of proving the existence of Father Christmas they have to prove that ghosts are real. (Who you gonna call? The Halifax!)

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Of couse, as anybody who knows me will be fully aware, I like to keep myself up to date on the latest cutting-edge innovations in Christmas tree technology (or at least, I have an awful lot of baubles) and I’ve observed that a big hitter this year is a sort of tree-shaped pyramid of lights which sits in the garden and what I can only describe (having consulted the OED) as coruscates.

There’s a very fetching green and white one around the corner from us, and last night coming home with the dog I saw that one had arrived just two doors down – and to my surprise I found myself suggesting (albeit only to the dog at this early stage) that maybe we should get one next year. This from a person who gave  up on outside decorations in about 2002. Maybe I’ve finally seen the light?

Advent #12

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in 1980s, BBC, Christmas, Doctor Who, TV

Not that I want to suggest all I do is watch TV, but…

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Still working my way through the season 25 boxset, I’ve just finished The Greatest Show in the Galaxy. Part 3 has half a claim to being a Doctor Who Christmas Special, back in 1988 when there wasn’t any such thing. Or at least, it went out inbetween Christmas and New Year, due to the ‘unexpected’ late start to the ’88 season (caused by the Olympics which, to be honest, shouldn’t really have snuck up on anyone).

Fortunately – I’m sure the Pertwee massive would like me to say ‘serendipitously’ – this particular story, with its madcap cast, its scary clowns, its circus setting and its general air of silliness is a good fit for the Christmas period; and part 3 has some great moments, from Bellboy’s ‘death by clown’ to Ace’s assessment that the Doctor is “just an aging hippy”.

Back in the day we were out when it aired so our VCR was duly programmed to record, something I found easy at 17 but would probably struggle with at 53. And because you could never quite pin down the exact start-time of anything, it was set to record with a very healthy margin of error.

Consequently, until the advent of the BluRay release this year, my copy of the story was still from that off-air VHS, meaning part 3 was preceded by a good ten minutes of Terry Wogan’s special interview with the legendary Jimmy Stewart.

All these years later, I’m afraid I no longer have my off-air tapes. And sadly neither Jimmy Stewart nor Terry Wogan is still with us. On the other hand, I can report that, at sixty-one and still fighting fit, the greatest show in the galaxy is doing just fine.