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.

Explainer

Culture

Digital

30 July 2024

5 min read

How tech harvests our humanity

The second in a three-part series exploring the implications of technology.

James Lawrence

James is Canon Missioner at Blackburn Cathedral. He researches technology and theology at Oxford University.

In the first article, I painted a picture of the ordinary person using modern technology, for example, social media on a smart phone. I noted that advocates for modern technology seem to have two basic principles: that technology is natural and neutral. In this next article I want to introduce the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and show how he pushes against these two basic principles and invites us to think again about modern technology. Heidegger’s instinct, as a twentieth century philosopher, is to be suspicious that things are not as they seem, he casts his suspicious gaze over modern technology and sees a way of being that technology encourages that exists underneath the technologies that we use every day.

What Heidegger wants to show us about modern technology is not related to specific concerns about particular technologies but instead a general suspicion about the ‘essence’ of technology, or, you could say, the spirit of technology. He doesn’t want us to immediately jump to pragmatic questions about how to use technology, as if the primary question is how to make any given technology better or more moral. Instead, Heidegger wants us to take modern technology together as a whole and ask, “What is the essence of this?” Heidegger’s contention is that “technology is not an object or set of objects, nor a way of handling objects with tools, but a form of being the world. It is not something we choose to refuse, but the environment in which modern humans come into existence.”

Heidegger argues that underneath any piece of tech that we might use in our day-to-day lives, technology at its core has already completely changed the way that we as a society understand and interact with the world and everything in it. We live in a technological age and as members of a technological society and so we have been shaped by (to use Christian language, we have been ‘discipled’ by) the spirit of the age to see the world around us. Heidegger suggests that we now see the world as broken down into useable bits that can be categorised and reformed to suit our needs. As Mark Wrathall puts it, the essence of technology is to train us to “experience the world as calling on us or drawing us. To transform everything into stock pieces, so that they can be placed into a vast inventory of options.”[2] Growing up in a technological society means that we see the whole world as an Amazon warehouse a place of seemingly limitless options that can be called upon depending on our needs and quickly delivered.

A piece of technology such as the smartphone points to a wider ‘spirit’ of technology which intends to position everything, even human beings, as replaceable resources within a larger system.

The central word that Heidegger uses to describe the essence of technology is gestell which is not an easy word to translate into English, but two possible translations would be ‘positionality’, or ‘enframing’. His point is that the essence of technology is to remove objects, people, and things from their natural environment and position them so that they might become useful, a resource, available for our manipulation. When Heidegger says that the essence of technology is gestell he is pointing to the way that modern technology extracts objects from their contexts and turns them into a quarry to the plundered. There are of course obvious ways in which humanity has always extracted resources from the natural world: we have always quarried for energy (coal, oil etc) or chopped down forests for wood. By claiming that the essence of modern technology is gestell, Heidegger wants us to notice that in the modern world, it’s not just quarries or forests that we mine for resources but now anything and everything can be turned from being a singular object in the world into a recourse for extraction. Everything has become what Heidegger calls “standing reserve.”

Think again of a smartphone, it is just one of the billions of devices that sit on shelves or, having already been purchased, live in someone else’s pocket. Inside each device are thousands of transistors and circuit boards each of which again are stockpiled in warehouses ready to be replaced if needed or used for some other purpose. Your phone is connected to a network of nodes each of which can be replicated or replaced if needed, no node is unique. Your latest phone has no unique or prize relation to you, it’s just the latest upgrade which will be recycled in a year or two when the next upgrade becomes available. The person from whom you bought the phone is equally replaceable, just a faceless employee completing a set of controlled and pre-arranged tasks that are designed to be completed by anyone and no one in particular. Likewise, you as the consumer are considered to be little more than “standing reserve” by the companies that supply you with your smartphone and access to their networks. One of many millions of nodes in their system that has been analysed so that your preferences can be expertly mapped to the range of services that they provide. Within that system, you are completely replaceable. A piece of technology such as the smartphone points to a wider ‘spirit’ of technology which intends to position everything, even human beings, as replaceable resources within a larger system: “Every item within this standing reserve is reduced to a position, actively waiting to be called on. Heidegger insists this is no judgment on the radio, the internet, or the smartphone user. It is just the way in which the essence of modern technology interacts with humanity… Heidegger provides a diagnosis of our modern age and the way in which we humans have placed ourselves under the sway of modern technology, as a resource standing within a network which seeks, ultimately, to place, represent, and think of every entity as an object within an all-encompassing system.”

Let’s return to the original thought experiment at the start of the first article: a mother playing with her child, who immediately reaches for her phone to capture the moment when her child does something particularly cute. An advocate for modern technology, like Steve Jobs, may look at that interaction and see only the benefit: a mother wanting to remember a beautiful moment with her child extends the capacities of her brain using a digital tool to aid her memory. But Heidegger would be more suspicious, he would look at that moment and argue instead that the essence of technology is to turn everything, even a precious moment with a cute baby, into a resource to be used at a later date. The unique moment of joy and delight between parent and child becomes caught and codified such that it can be found and replayed at will or easily replicated to send to others. At the extreme end of the spectrum are so-called content creators who reduce themselves to just another resource to be harvested on social media.

So that is Heidegger’s diagnosis of our technological age, in the final article in this series we will consider Heidegger’s solution and consider what a particularly Christian response to Heidegger’s diagnosis might look like.