The Christmas season has begun on a sour note in our household. We received a novelty advent calendar through the post: a tie-in to a forthcoming film. I removed all 24 of the little chocolates behind the doors, ate them in two or three handfuls and threw away the calendar. It was still 29 November. This heresy caused some dismay and now, in a cloud of shame, I’ve had to go out and get a new one.
Like all grown-ups, I find my inner Scrooge grows every passing year and can’t help thinking Christmas isn’t what it was. We haven’t had a decent Christmas film since Bad Santa and Elf from 2003. Someone should tap into the lucrative Christmas disaffection market by making a brutally challenging “origin myth” movie about the actual life of Saint Nicholas in fourth-century Turkey.
Benedict Cumberbatch should play the lead. The big scene from his life comes when a malevolent butcher (a part for Toby Jones, surely) lures some children into his house, kills them and puts their remains in a barrel, intending to sell them off as meat. Saint Nicholas rocks up and raises the children from the dead with his prayers. But then – and here is where the origin myth kicks in – we see the children’s blood stain Saint Nicholas’s cloak red.
Traumatised by this evil, he neglects his appearance and forgets to shave; his hair turns white; alcohol abuse turns his cheeks red; he starts wearing a bobble hat (also stained blood red), and to forget the trauma he develops a habit of laughing mirthlessly and roaming around breaking into houses. To reassure terrified children, parents have to pretend that this scary man has brought the toys that they themselves have provided. The title is Yule Pay.
My other film idea is Bad King Wenceslas: A Boxing Day Nightmare, starring Will Ferrell as the king, and Benedict Cumberbatch as the poor man gathering fuel.
Crack shot Dave
Britain is intensely interested in class and TV programmes like Benefits Street and Posh People: Inside Tatler, which are best summarised as laughing at the proles and laughing with the toffs. So we are all intrigued at news that the prime minister got armed police to seal off some woodland near his Oxfordshire home so he could shoot pigeons there with his 12-bore shotgun. He managed to bag a couple, according to the newly published diaries of the Telegraph’s Scottish editor, Alan Cochrane, to whom the prime minister confided this triumph over dinner. Whether he ate them is not recorded.
Mr Cameron is apparently forced to target pigeons because it is no longer expedient for him to pursue his real passion – more of a passion, probably, than the dull, compromised world of politics – of deer-stalking. He is reputedly that rare breed of marksman who can kill two such animals in one go using a “right-left” technique. Shooting pigeons is not an activity in which we are all in it together – you need constabulary to fence off the land – but apparently it relaxes Mr Cameron wonderfully. Without those dead pigeons, he would not be doing his job as well as he is.
Tony, Cherie and a lost smile
Coinciding uneasily with Gordon Brown’s retirement as an MP, Tony and Cherie Blair have released their Christmas card, much analysed and mocked, of course, online. I am as obsessed as everyone else, particularly with the unexplained strip of red material in the lower-left of the frame, apparently attached to Cherie’s frock. But the weirdest thing is Tony’s mouth: set in that fang-baring alpha grimace that he now does in lieu of a smile. I remember 1990s Tony, with his great cheesy Cheshire-cat grin – irritating to many at the time, but human, all too human. Now the pressures of associating with the super-rich and super-powerful have strip-mined this natural facial gesture of normal, recognisable humanity.
