Article

Culture

Culture at Christmas

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.

Interview

Culture

Economics

S&U interviews

16 April 2024

5 min read

Can the economy work for the common good?

Adrian Pabst on the economic framework that is universal yet particular about people.

Laurence Fletcher

Laurence Fletcher is a journalist at the Financial Times.

A man talks animatedly looking at the camera while sitting against a wood panelled wall.

Fondazione Centesimus Annus Pro Pontefice.

Adrian Pabst is Professor of Politics at the University of Kent, and deputy director at The National Institute of Economic and Social Research. His lecture on Just Economy? Catholic Social Thought, Mutualism and Roads Not Yet Taken, was a highlight of the Lincoln Lectures series, organised by Together for the Common Good. Financial markets journalist Laurence Fletcher talks with him to discover more about his thinking.

There is no shortage of commentators ready to point out the apparent deficiencies in the UK’s economy. Widespread in-work poverty, poor productivity growth, regional inequality and a perceived reluctance among employers to train up British workers are just some of the accusations that can be levelled.

But finding realistic, workable solutions is more difficult, as successive governments have found. Is the answer to be found in having higher levels of tax and government spending, or lower? Should governments be intervening more, or give more room for free markets to work? With a general election on the horizon, and with issues of economic growth, government spending and taxation likely to feature prominently, such questions are particularly pertinent.

Offering one alternative way of tackling the problem is Professor Adrian Pabst, a political scientist at the University of Kent, who is an expert on so-called Catholic Social Thought. This approach, which was developed in the 19th century and draws from the Bible, focuses on the dignity of the individual, care for others and the common good, with the aims of social renewal. It provides a framework for thinking about big topics such as international relations, the economy and the environment, and Pabst believes it has much to say about our economy today.

Catholic Social Thought “is very particular. It always speaks to the moment. And it’s highly universal because of it,” he said in a recent interview. “This is what the world is like and this is how we must act.”

Pabst rejects both the idea that everything is fine with our economy (“mythical stories about things working”) and the belief that “everything going to hell in a handcart”.

Instead, his approach is to look at some of the apparent contradictions in our economy - strengths alongside related weaknesses. For instance, how can a country be rich but have poor citizens, or have a very high output of goods and services while many people do not partake in them? Or how can many people have become worse off in recent years, even though wages are growing? Or how can the UK boast an “incredible” City of London that is one of the world’s top financial centres, yet have people without access to capital?

“We have to be realistic about where we are - a low wage, low growth, low productivity economy. We can pay people higher wages over time if we increase productivity. That comes from investment,” he said.

Free markets have at times been heralded as either the answer to all our problems by some on the political right, or the cause of so much misery by some on the left. But Pabst’s approach is more nuanced. Markets should not simply be “the engine for ever-greater inequality”. But, crucially, they are not inherently bad in and of themselves, and often the problem is instead down to a market being stacked in one side’s favour.

“Markets are not one thing,” he said. “They are an outcome of ownership, regulation… There is not a problem with markets per se, but it’s the wrong regulation, ownership concentrated in a very few people.

“There are lots of things we can do much better. But if we replace the market with the state, we’d just be doing [communism] and ultimately we’d be poorer,” he added. “The question is, are we putting society first?”

(As an aside, he also takes a more nuanced view on former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who he believes brought both positives and negatives).

Big tech firms are “oligarchies accountable to no-one. It’s simply not a tenable position. They’re like media companies yet they’re not subject to media laws… We’ve allowed them to build private infrastructures. It needs to be tackled.”

So what would Pabst actually change?

For starters, he believes that too much capital is directed towards the wrong purpose, namely financial speculation. While some would argue that speculation plays an important role in the economy, for instance in price discovery in markets or in taking the other side of the trade, say for farmers who want to hedge crop prices, Pabst is keen to see the economy produce “goods and services that have real worth”. Significantly for how society is structured today, he argues that we do not need “a class that lives off assets at the expense of everyone else”.

Other areas also need to change, he believes. Loopholes should be closed to make it harder for companies to use agency workers rather than employing people. Trade unions need to be encouraged and improved. A national investment bank, grouping together the existing, disparate pots of money, could direct capital to sectors and regions where it is needed. As is already the case in Germany, companies and society would both benefit from having employees on their boards.

More economic decisions can be devolved from national government to a local level, but challenges such as climate change or regulating the big, powerful technology companies - which he describes as “modern day plutocracies” - should be tackled at a higher level.

Big tech firms are “oligarchies accountable to no-one”, he said. “It’s simply not a tenable position. They’re like media companies yet they’re not subject to media laws… We’ve allowed them to build private infrastructures. It needs to be tackled.”

And (more of a comment on the US than the UK) he sees little value in companies reporting earnings quarterly, which he said is driven by “short-term profit maximisation”.

Intriguingly, Pabst does not shy away from taking a stance on one of the most divisive issues of our times: immigration.

Catholic Social Thought, he explains, is humane and pro-immigrant. But, to break with what he calls “a low wage, low skill model”, mass economic migration is to be discouraged, because it is detrimental to both the sending and receiving countries.

“[We say] yes to refugees, to asylum. But no to mass economic migration,” he said.

So, going into an election, how likely are we to see things change for the better?

Rather than being optimistic - the belief that eventually things will get better - Pabst is hopeful, because he believes that things could be different, but he is not necessarily expecting it.

“I remain hopeful,” he said. “I just don’t quite see who’s going to do it.”