Review

Christmas culture

Culture

Film & TV

24 December 2024

6 min read

The twelve days of Christmas TV

What to watch across the festive season.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

At a Christmas party, friend smile, laugh, and collapse in a heap on a sofa.

This is occurin'.

Christmas approaches! We are soon to begin the twelve-day marathon of celebrating the birth of Christ through food, drink, and…collapsing in front of the telly! It is a season of great joy and gladness, but also one of physical and mental exhaustion. To make it all a little easier I have finely combed through the Christmas edition of the Radio Times to present to you the one can’t miss televisual offering for each of the twelve days. Consider this my gift to all the readers of Seen & Unseen; hopefully a little more practical than a partridge in a pear tree.

On the first day of Christmas my telly gave to me…

Gavin & Stacey: The Finale

Christmas Day, BBC 1, 9pm

The first G&S Christmas Special is an annual tradition in my household. My wife and I are guaranteed to watch it at least once in the run-up to Christmas. It is an example of a truly perfect piece of television: masterfully combining the necessarily contrived and mawkish sentimentality of Christmas telly, and the absurdist/realist/deadpan comedy that endeared the series to so many. The comeback Christmas Special in 2019 was a let-down on the night (I had such high expectations) but has grown on me over the years: nowhere near as good as the original, too self-referential and mannered for its own good, but still darn-funny, and acting as a rather sweet meditation on aging and parenthood. Christmas Day is all about family – be it our own family, or the Holy Family of Bethlehem – so why not see the day out in the warm glow of the Shipman-West family.

On the second day of Christmas my telly gave to me…

Zulu

Boxing Day, Channel 4, 3.50pm

This one is personal for me. This is one of the first films I remember watching with my father, around the Christmas season. Glorious cinematography, a pacey plot, an electrifying final set-piece (which, 60 years later, is still more engaging than most of the bigger budget CGI shlock you can see today), a smattering of Welsh patriotism, and Michael Caine doing a posh accent. This is a classic for a reason: the remarkable story of the Battle of Rorke’s Drift combined with a searing and sympathetic exploration of the British class system, ending with a meditation on both the unifying and horrifying nature of war. If you’re suffering from over-indulgence on Boxing Day I can’t think of a better tonic.

On the third day of Christmas my telly gave to me…

Pitch Perfect

27 December, ITV 2, 9pm

The sequels very much delivered diminishing returns, but the original is such a wholesome piece of film-making. A celebration of music, growing-up, sisterhood and girl-power…it is feel-good fare from beginning to end. Anna Kendrick shines with raw singing-star-power, while Rebel Wilson provides just the right amount of comic relief. After the high of Christmas Day, and the slow come-down of Boxing Day, this film is like a warm bath of feel-good aca-enjoyment.

On the fourth day of Christmas my telly gave to me…

Maggie Smith at the BBC

28 December, BBC 2, 7pm

A celebration of the career of Maggie Smith on what would have been her 90th birthday. If that precis doesn’t hook you, then we can’t be friends.

On the fifth day of Christmas my telly gave to me…

The Fugitive

29 December, Channel 5, 4.35pm

I can’t think of many thrillers better than this. From the very first scene this film has you on the edge of your seat asking the most terrifying of existential questions…

WHY DOES HARRISON FORD HAVE A BEARD!?!?!?

The tension only ratchets up from there! Harrison Ford plays the character he was born to play: a slightly gruff man, down on his luck, full of ingenuity, trying to prove that he didn’t murder his wife. Tommy Lee-Jones is similarly expertly cast as the long-suffering law-man who doesn’t follow procedure…no, he feels the case in his bones! The film rips along as such a rollicking pace that you’ll feel like it’s just started by the time it has finished.

On the sixth day of Christmas my telly gave to me…

Rocketman

30 December, Channel 4, 9pm

The music of Elton John is indestructible.

On the seventh day of Christmas my telly gave to me…

Jools’ Annual Hootenanny

New Year’s Eve, BBC 2, 11.30pm

By now this is has become a cross between a National Treasure and a National Institution, and I cannot comprehend people who see the New Year in with anything else on their telly.

On the eighth day of Christmas my telly gave to me…

Airplane!

New Year’s Day, ITV 4, 9pm

This is the funniest film ever made. That is an indisputable fact, whether your metric is quantity or quality. The jokes come at a machine-gun rattle, and every single one hits their target! Absurdism, slapstick, wordplay, and the straight-face of Leslie Nielsen…THE FUNNIEST FILM EVER MADE!

On the ninth day of Christmas my telly gave to me…

Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World

2 January, BBC 2, 10pm

Russel Crowe deserved to have this film be the start of a worldwide phenomenal franchise; especially as Patrick O'Brian left us with twenty novels to work from. Crowe embodies Captain Jack Aubrey perfectly – oaken and noble and solid. Teaming him up with Paul Bettany for the second time is a masterstroke, as they bicker and play-off each other like old friends. There is action, emotion, intrigue, drama, and naval tactics. What isn’t to like?

On the tenth day of Christmas my telly gave to me…

The Silence of the Lambs

3 January, ITV 1, 10.45pm

Anthony Hopkins serves us up plenty of leftover Christmas ham with his performance. His Hannibal Lecter is intelligent, sophisticated…and essentially and pantomime villain. His Hannibal is hammy with a capital H! Please don’t misunderstand me, I enjoy the performance and the film, but it isn’t a patch on Brian Cox’s bone-chillingly subtle, understated performance in Manhunter. Anyway, this is a terrifying film in the best way possible. Putting Hopkins aside, the performances are all spot on: Jodie Foster gives us an ingénue who’s vulnerability is both a weakness and her greatest strength, and Ted Levine is indescribably creepy as serial-killer Buffalo Bill. After ten days of Christmas lulling you into a soporific stupor, this flick is the icy wake-up you need!

On the eleventh day of Christmas my telly gave to me…

The Graduate/Rain Man

4 January, BBC 4, 9pm/11.20pm

Early-career Dustin Hoffman or mid-career Dustin Hoffman: take your pick. The is no wrong answer.

On the twelfth day of Christmas my telly gave to me…

Aliens

5 January, ITV 4, 9pm

The rarest of creatures: a sequel which surpasses the original. Sigourney Weaver is iconic, and is the prototype for all future female action heroes. James Cameron takes Ridley Scott’s original claustrophobic horror masterpiece, and morphs it into a war-movie to rival ‘Saving Private Ryan’. It is a superb adrenaline-rush of a film. At the end of twelve days we can all echo Bill Paxton’s immortal words: Game over, man! Game over!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

BONUS GIFT…

Carols from King’s

Christmas Eve, BBC 2, 6pm

One of the finest examples of Anglican liturgy, perfectly combining atmosphere, music, and scripture. I’ve written a little article explaining why the service of Nine Lessons and Carols is a treasure we must not lose.

Read now

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Article

Awe and wonder

Culture

Digital

Music

22 January 2025

5 min read

The rave: a last bastion of hope?

Was the Brat summer the last chance for rave culture?

Isaiah Morris

Isaiah is a visual artist and writer.

The anniversary party.

Rhythm Section.

The Rave is a site for communal epiphany, a burst of divine revelation. Illegal raves and alternative club culture seeps into the popular imagination, informing it in ways unbeknownst to most. But it wasn’t until last Summer’s Brat (Charli XCX) landed on the global charts that people began questioning the importance of Rave and Club culture again. Is our Brat the herald of a new golden Rave dawn? I think not.

However, undergirding the Rave is something far more profound, perhaps even religious. Raving suggests that the world might be otherwise, and it does this through a temporary release from this world’s demands. What might this say about our cultural moment?

Coordinating the Rave’s aesthetic is the dance between the DJ and ravers, accentuated by the practicalities of a decent sound system, lights, and a bit of fog. Inaugurating Rave’s epiphany, though, are the diverse motions of bodies to a singular beat. Techno reduces digital sounds to their basics and then pushes that to its boundary. Circumventing the rigidity of technology’s logic are the gestures of human spontaneity on the dance floor. The rave asserts that technology doesn’t have the last say over human life.

At the Rave, those traditionally on the margins of society become the center: a temporal expression of eternal longing, momentarily experienced as a shared catharsis and liberation. The dance floor is a bulwark against an increasingly de-ritualised and dehumanising society. It is a testament to the body being a medium for hope. Whether an intoxicated body or, in a growing trend, a sober one, it is the human fleshyness which takes priority. Both options respond to how one might cope with and confront the technological barrage.

Techno began as a language for African American youth, finding a future amidst the industrial ruins of Detroit. In our late modern moment, Rave culture acclimatises the body to the persistent sound of our technological age. It subverts the dehumanising tendencies of digital culture: mass impersonal media and abstracted global conversations. Instead, a momentary online connection is used to gather offline. When you’re there, you’re not concerned about telling the world. It is an attention to the present moment.

The Rave harbours a liminal threshold between appreciation for this life and the longing for some next one.

Worryingly, some have warned that clubs will dwindle to their knees this decade, squeezed out by neighbouring property developers or no longer economically viable amidst the cost-of-living crisis. The only thing being pushed out, however, is the possible resistance to a particularly greedy homogenisation of culture. In dislocating alternative discourses of ritual, we simultaneously assert that human bodies only have one particular “rhythm”: the rhythm of ceaseless economic expansion.

The Rave resists an uncomplicated acceptance of technology’s gift. Its goods are re-scaled to an embodied celebration of life.

In Raving (2023), McKenzie Wark expands upon this, saying, ‘Techno, not as genre but as technique, lets digital machines speak. Not unlike the way jazz lets analog instruments speak… Sounds at the limit of what the machine or the instrument can do to get free. Blackness in sound as the technique of making the thing free to sound off as itself and to take the human with it, into movement, into feeling, into sensation.’ Rave’s sound quite literally brings technology’s language to the end of itself.

For some, raving is what holds them to life. For others, it’s a momentary release from it. Whilst our bodies cannot exceed techno’s interchange with technology, we do learn how to harness the potential humanness within it. The Rave harbours a liminal threshold between appreciation for this life and the longing for some next one. In twisting its technological medium into a more human configuration, rave culture participates in hope.

Back in 1965, theologian Jürgen Moltmann wrote, ‘Hope’s statements of promise, however, must stand in contradiction to the reality which can at present be experienced. They do not result from experiences, but are the condition for the possibility of new experience… They do not seek to bear the train of reality, but to carry the torch before it. In so doing they give reality a historic character.’ While Moltmann is writing concerning Christianity and the crucified Christ, his framework for thinking about hope is helpful. Hope never occurs outside of history. The Rave embraces this historical moment and attempts to inhabit it as a contradiction.

Recently, I went to Rhythm Section International’s tenth-anniversary party at EartH, Hackney. Rhythm Section was founded as a music collective and is still curated by Peckham’s own Bradley Zero (BZ). Known globally, its parties and label imprint span techno, house, jazz, funk, spoken word, and RnB.

I first danced to BZ’s DJing at a record shop in 2018 while still living in Melbourne. The beauty of this particular community is that it provides a bridge for what Wark identifies: just as jazz brings analogue instruments to their limits, techno does the same for digital. As experienced recently at EartH in Hackney, Rhythm Section tries to push digital and analogue sounds to their threshold across the night. In contrast to the pure techno rave, BZ’s selection causes a polyphonic liberation. Joy is found through the instruments slapped just as much as in the DJ faders pushed.

This joy was evident in the diversity of ages and cultures present. “Mature heads” danced alongside students; some swayed, while others vogued. Without spaces such as these, where else can we celebrate the diversity of human responses to the same sound?

My concern with club culture’s demise is that those places of contradiction are swallowed up by a faux vision of “smoothness”. We replace spaces of alternative being with sameness. A diversity of aesthetics is converted into another apartment complex. We make room for the novelty of Brat but not the culture she draws upon.

Rave culture attempts to redefine the dominant technological language of our day, making the body its lens and not the periphery. By privileging the human body, Rave’s hope acknowledges profound discontent with the world but understands that all “escape” is temporary. This re-calibration enacted in Rave’s ritual de-escalates the supposed importance of technology’s ceaseless expansion. Thus, it exposes a more profound longing, one where it will be an eternal dance that deepens the love of life by going ever deeper into the particularities of individual bodies and their movements.