Christmas crunchiness for all

Last night, in Screenwipe’s round-up of the year, Charlie Brooker noted various sillinesses about Survivors, mostly either relating to the onset of the initial plague or to the acting tics of the lead characters; Max Beesley’s eye-narrowing, Abby’s smug insistence on banging on about a son we’ve never met and therefore aren’t fussed about, etc. He was spot on, as usual. But I still like it more than anything else that the BBC’s produced for a very long time. At least it doesn’t have any bonnets in it.
I also realised how much terrible nonsense I’ve happily managed to avoid negating my existence by watching. Noel Edmonds! John Barrowman! Luridly coloured quiz shows with a vague political agenda? What hideousness was this? If you sat through too much of this stuff, you’d morph into a pink flashing buzzer with an inane grin plastered across the void where your brain used to be.
One thing I like about Survivors is that for a homegrown production it’s relatively un-crunchy; crunchiness being when a show looks a bit rubbish, like it was conceived and shot by the work experience. The nativity show, however, is an art form that’s wonderful precisely because of its crunchiness. I watched one yesterday. The same three kings costumes come out of storage every year, and are always inhabited with regal dignity, whatever the misbehaving three-year-old at the foot of the stage does to break through the fourth wall. At the end the children were allowed onto the stage to greet Baby Jesus, a real newborn who actually let them stroke him without crying.
In the Christmas issue of The Spectator Rod Liddle is all hot under the collar about some woman who withdrew her child from RE lessons, then protested when he was excluded from the Christmas party: ‘But Christmas is nothing to do with Jesus!’ she allegedly protested.
Actually, she had a point, given that the Christians co-opted the Roman midwinter festival of Saturnalia, just as they adapted the horns of the pagan fertility god for the iconography of the Devil. When you’re establishing a new power base, if you’ve got any sense, you don’t attempt to sweep away what was there before entirely, you seek to employ and control it; and people need a knees-up when it’s cold and dark, and would, then as now, be most upset if it was disallowed.
Now it seems that the pagans have co-opted Christmas back again, or, to be more precise, Commerce, the upstart god of the age, known in infancy as Mammon, has made it his own. (Gluttony and Debauch also get a good look-in.) Or so it may appear, but actually the midwinter feast, celebrated for and by children, their families and tribes, retains its magic regardless of who’s meant to be in charge. The annual ritual of the nativity play, acted out on school stages and in churches the length and breadth of the land, has a gentle power that is succoured by something quieter and more enduring than the incessant tinkle of Christmas musak, something older even than Saturnalia; something that doesn’t need to advertise and couldn’t if it tried.