Article

Culture

Christmas culture

18 December 2023

4 min read

TV’s search for the perfect Christmas special

Sitcoms rely on expectation and conventions. James Cary shares the one rule that gets broken at Christmas time.

James Cary

James Cary is a writer of situation comedy for BBC TV (Miranda, Bluestone 42) and Radio (Think the Unthinkable, Hut 33).

Dressed in camouflage uniforms and makeshift costumes, soldiers create a nativity scene

Bluestone 42 Christmas Special, 2013.

There are rules to sitcoms. I should know. I’ve been writing sitcom scripts for over twenty years. This includes two Christmas specials (Miranda and Bluestone 42). When you start writing a Christmas episode of a sitcom, you look back to Christmas specials you saw as a child. Soon, you are aware that there are certain expectations for a Christmas special. You also realise you can break one of the rules of sitcom.

Before I explain what that is, let me give you the basic rules of a TV sitcom. Essentially you need three things: Characters; conflict; and a confined space. Each episode has a beginning and a middle and end, but the characters must end up back where they started.

The characters in a sitcom are in conflict. They have contrasting viewpoints, seeing the world very differently. And they are confined, unable to walk away from each other because they are family (Think Del and Rodney in Only Fools and Horses), or they have to work together (Think Sir Humphrey and Hacker in Yes, Prime Minister) or they all live in the same suffocatingly small village (Think Geraldine and Alice in The Vicar of Dibley).

Each week, the characters have quests. They conflict. The story plays out in the same reliably predictable but surprising way. Del Boy has another get-rich-quick scheme; Sir Humphrey tries to stop Hacker from changing anything; and the Vicar of Dibley keeps trying to help Alice and the idiots who surround her. That can’t change, even in a Christmas special.

At Christmas, however, you can have your characters go on a journey. That’s quite a popular option. But the journey has to be arduous – like the journey to Bethlehem – and might involve a pregnant woman (think The Royle Family) – like the journey to Bethlehem. But your characters could go on a road trip in any episode. That’s not the rule you have to break.

Your Christmas special might be centred around your character’s own version of what constitutes ‘the perfect Christmas’. These expectations must be met, but the lesson is normally that it’s all about who you’re with, not what you do. In the Bluestone 42 Christmas special, the bomb disposal team in Afghanistan are away from home so trying to have a ‘normal’ Christmas with turkey and a nativity play in which yonder star turns out to be a mortar attack by the Taliban. But they’re in it together.

Family is always important in a sitcom, but doubly so in a Christmas episode. In Miranda Series 2, our comedy heroine wants to do Christmas her own way with her friends, and not spend the day with her embarrassing and eccentric parents. But she learns a common Christmas lesson that family comes first, home is best, and no-one does Christmas better than your own family. Again, this is not a deviation from the normal rules.

So, what rule does the Christmas episode break? It is cast iron law across all genres of television. It’s the Deus Ex Machina. That’s not normally allowed. Deus Ex Machina literally means ‘God from the machinery’. It’s a Latin term for what happens in Greek theatre. Actors representing gods would be suspended above the stage and at the denouement of the play, they would come down and intervene, so that everything is sorted out.

It’s not for a twenty-first century sitcom writer to say that the Greeks didn’t know anything about theatre, but wow. Modern audiences would not stand for this totally unjustified divine intervention. If a character was about to be exposed by the annual Church fete and at the last minute, a thunderstorm out of nowhere rained off the whole event, you would start throwing things at the TV. If a character declared undying love to another and it was not reciprocated, the sudden discovery of a foolproof love potion in the third act would have the producer, director, the cast and even the make-up lady asking for rewrites.

But at Christmas, God comes down from on high. So, in your seasonal sitcom special, you’re allowed a miracle. In fact, the audience are almost demanding a ‘Christmas miracle’. This is the time of year when magic happens.

This miracle normally happens overnight because that’s when miracles happen. The Wise Men followed the star to the witness the child born of a virgin. Given stars were involved, we presume it was night time (although the text doesn’t say so). Marley and three Christmas ghosts visit Ebeneezer Scrooge at night. He is miraculously transformed by the experience.

Christmas is a time when lots of people going to church who normally would not, but the vast majority of people in the UK do not go to church or worship God at Christmas. But the incarnation, that is story of God made flesh in Christ, keeps poking through and turning up whether we like it or not. If we won’t go to church to hear that story, God will send it through waves and wires and onto our screens in TV specials so that we all remember that Christmas isn’t just a time for family and traditions; it is a time of miracles. At Christmas, we allow ourselves the luxury of belief.

Review

Culture

Music

Redemption

2 February 2024

6 min read

Welcome to the revelation, good people

Mumford and Sons team up with Pharrell Williams. Belle Tindall unpacks their new track – Good People.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

Two singers peform together. One in a white suit and stetson claps their hands. The other tilts the mic stand.

Pharrell Williams and Marcus Mumford perform Good People.

Listen to Good People

Whenever I bump into the familiar sounds of a Mumford & Sons song, it’s 2013 and they’re headlining the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury. I can close my eyes and see the whole scene before me; it’s all trumpets and tweed. But when I take a moment, and home in on the lyrics, it’s a different scene that I see. There’s a story in the Bible where a man, Jacob, spends a night physically wrestling with God, it’s all dirt and elbows, the created grappling with the creator. And, occasionally, when listening to Mumford & Sons’ catalogue, I feel as though I’m watching that scene play out. I’m listening to souls laid bare, I’m witnessing people gripping the divine in the dirt. I get the sense that their lyrics have been born of a wrestling match, not a writing session; they’re crafted by people who are limping out of a tussle with truth.

Mumford & Sons – Marcus Mumford, Ben Lovett and Ted Dwane - seem to have largely grown out of their 2013 selves. But, if their new single is anything to go by, they haven’t grown out of wrestling their lyrics into existence.

From the first line until its last, this song has but one message to proclaim: change, the redemptive kind, is at hand.

Good People is the first track that they’ve released in five long years, and offered up in partnership with the mighty Pharrell Williams, it has been lorded as the collaboration that nobody saw coming. Speaking of the collaborative process, the band wrote that,

‘...this song came together fast. Like, in a day. We haven’t relied on immediate instincts like that, really, since the very early days of our band. It has felt fast and loose and really, really fun.’

The additional presence of Native Vocalists, a six-piece choir hailing from Native American Tribes within the northern Great Plains, makes this track a mosaic of musical influences. But we should have expected this, Pharrell’s insatiable creative curiosity has taken him to some unexpected places, an alternative-folk song is merely his latest destination. What’s more, it is a destination that he has come to by way of gospel music, and it shows, both in style and lyrical substance.

Of course, the song is peppered with the band’s signature religious language – there’s plenty of references to night and day, light and dark – all of which could have slid off a page of the Bible. Plus, Jesus is outright quoted in the second verse. It’s pretty obvious that the Biblical authors have their fingerprints all over this intriguing song.

But that’s still not what has caught my eye. Not quite.

Rather, it’s the message that this song is announcing, and where such a message might just derive from. Because, from the first line until its last, this song has but one message to proclaim: change, the redemptive kind, is at hand. Things are about to get better.

The chorus goes like this:

good people been down for so long
(Welcome to the revelation)

and now it's like the sun is rising
(Welcome to the revelation)

good people been down for so long
(Welcome to the revelation)

and now I see the sun is rising

It is the inevitability of this change, which is emphasised over and over again, that has me so intrigued. This change, the details of which are masterfully omitted (meaning this song can exist as a hopeful meta-anthem, free from the confines of prescriptive context), is as unavoidable as the sunrise. This change cannot be hindered, just as the breaking of the dawn cannot be hindered. One can stare at the midnight sky, enveloped by darkness, and still know with complete assurance that the sun will return. Morning will come; it is a certainty, which is an incredibly rare thing.

Subsequently, this song isn’t a call to arms, Pharrell’s backing-vocal response to Marcus Mumford’s words is not ‘welcome to the revolution’, but ‘welcome to the revelation’. It is a call, not to make the change happen, but to witness it happen – pointing its audience not toward action, but toward hope. Hope in a redemption that is inevitable and a prevailing goodness that is written into the fabric of reality. It will come, it will be. And this subtle, yet salient, detail places this song in a very specific category of hopeful anthems. It sits with the likes of:

Sam Cooke, who in 1964, declared that:

‘it’s been a long time coming, but I know that a change is gonna’ come. Oh, yes it will.’

Or Lauryn Hill, who wrote in 1998 that,

‘everything is everything. What is meant to be, will be. After winter, must come spring. Change, it comes eventually’.

These songs, written in the middle of the night, speak of the coming dawn.

Which got me thinking, what taught us to do that? What taught us to believe that if it’s not good, it’s not the end? That if it’s not redeemed, it’s not over? What taught Sam Cooke, amid such injustice and violence, to have such a defiantly hope-filled message to declare? What taught Lauryn Hill to simultaneously lament over the struggles faced by black, inner-city, communities in America, and yet affirm that ‘after winter, must come spring’? And what has taught Mumford & Sons, and Pharrell Williams for that matter, to announce that after such a ‘long night’, they can see that 'the sun is rising’?

On what grounds can we possibly believe such a thing to be true?

It's a big question. Perhaps one of the biggest. And while I’m weary of declaring that I have the answer (at least, on anyone’s behalf but my own), I certainly have a theory. And I feel relatively confident putting it forward, considering his words pop up in the second verse of Good People.

My theory, perhaps unsurprisingly, is Jesus; the ‘light that shines in the darkness’, the one that we’re told darkness has not, and cannot, ‘overcome’. The one whose entrance into the world was, as the Biblical story goes, as preventable as the dawn (these themes sound familiar to you?). The one who, for thousands of years, has had communities of people looking into the darkness and declaring ‘I beg to differ’.

My theory is that Jesus taught us to believe redemption to be true. The things he did, the things he said, the things he fulfilled, but more than that – I think it is his death, and ultimately, his re-established life. I sense, in these songs, a hint toward the great story which underpins every other story. I hear the reverberations of Jesus’ resurrection in these lyrics.

I’m just not convinced that we’d be so sure that redemption will get the final say if something, or rather someone, hadn’t shown such to be the case. And so, I suppose what I'm ultimately suggesting is that any 'revelation' that this song intends to welcome us into has a distinctive flavour of Jesus about it.

I wonder whether Marcus, Ben, Ted and Pharrell would really believe that if something isn’t good, it isn’t over, had Jesus not taught them to.

Watch Good People Live

Good People was first performed live at Pharrell Williams' Men’s Fall-Winter 2024 fashion show for Louis Vuitton. Williams is the creative director at the fashion house. Nativist Vocals perform first, followed by Williams and Mumford & Sons.