Is This Christmas Music? Part Eleven – Watch ‘The Nativity’

So how can a celebration of the art of the Christmas single, which has defended the use of simplistic seasonal iconography, struck a blow for purveyors of production-line pop and overlooked the presence of a sidesplittingly tacky saxophone, become so suddenly enamoured of a barbed and acidic assault on the very concept it endorses? Well, erm… hey, look over there! At http://www.tv.cream.org/, to be precise. Scan down the BBC1  listings of the fantasy Christmas Day television schedule, and, no doubt provoking a rush of nostalgia that would send Kate Thornton into paroxysms of aimless recollections about ‘fingers on lips’ and those big televisions with shutters over them (actually, as it’s the season of goodwill, maybe we should leave off her for this issue and pull her under the mistletoe for a quick Christmas Day Armistice-style session of temporary kissing and making up… rest assured that there’ll still be sufficient scope for the obligatory Peter Egan gag, though), you will see that the second item is the edition of fabled BBC Schools show Watch! (see, told you we’d get back to them eventually, even if there is still nothing known about Joe And The Sheep Rustlers) that told the story of the nativity. This was a first-thing-on-Christmas-morning favourite for many years, and yet has remained virtually unseen and unsullied by the professional boringness and non-opinion of the clip show-dwelling likes of Paul Ross and Peter Kay, so it’s only right that a couple of toasts are raised in its honour here.

Presented by James Earl Adair, a man who appeared to have originated from the same factory that produced Mike Smith and the members of long-forgotten Stock, Aitken and Waterman protégés Big Fun, and the none-more-late-1970s layered hairstyle of Louise Hall-Taylor, Watch! was a curious mixture of arts and crafts, songs, dramatised sequences and laughable visual effects, all of which combined to tell a running story. Amongst those covered were those of Robinson Crusoe (“…all alone, all on his own… far away on an Island”), Moses (“Pharaoh Pharaoh listen to me, you must set my people free, but Pharaoh, Pharaoh he said no”, or, if you will, “Heave! Heave! Heave men of Israel, heave at the rope and tighten your grip… you slave all day in the blazing sun, an Israelite’s work is never done”), King David (“Saul! Saul! He was a bad man! Saul! Saul!, he was a madman, Saullll… there were voices whispering in his hear, and the voices filled King Saul with fear, this is what he seemed to hear: ‘that man, David, he’s a threat, catch him, catch him in your net…’”), evolution in general (“we’re going to hang out the algae on the washing line…”), and of course the nativity. The latter took the form of a crudely animated representation with conical paper puppets, accompanied by Hall-Taylor’s primary school teacher-like narration and interspersed with songs. As such, it was a natural choice to go on the first of three Watch! albums, released by BBC Records in 1978, where it occupied a whopping ten minutes of the first side; quite a bold move in the immediate post-punk era when epic length prog-rock concept pieces were generally frowned on. So while said conical paper puppets have been consigned to join the Ragtime spoons and their Watch With Mother contemporaries on the haziest fringes of the collective memory of a generation whom apparently only ever watched Bagpuss while growing up, the curious can at least dig out the original soundtrack to refresh their distant memories.

Opening with a sound effect of clip-clopping hooves and Hall-Taylor’s introduction to “one of the most famous stories in the world”, the storyline of The Nativity is so well-known and so faithfully adhered to here that the actual narration – which it must be said is presented in a surprisingly unpatronising manner – is barely worth commenting on. What are worthy of comment, however, are the songs. Most of them are original compositions, but the first to appear is the traditional carol Little Donkey, here given a lilting calypso-like bassline and a change in musical stresses and emphases that managed to wring genuine passion out of the chord changes. There is a vague prog-rock feel to this performance – not entirely dissimilar to Greg Lake’s festive musings, in fact – and this is continued in the really quite remarkable Have You Ever Felt Lonely?, which in the original programme accompanied the conical Mary, Joseph and donkey being turned away from various places of cardboard biblical lodging. The song builds in intensity throughout as the story progresses, starting off as an affecting hushed whisper (most poignant on the wonderfully cold-hearted and ghostly chorus of “you can’t come in”), with the minor chord-based slide guitar and organ joined halfway through by an equally downbeat vibraphone and wah-wah guitar. The final verse, in which they find a stable and Jesus is born, is lent extra weight by a well-judged key change, and the song switches into a major key for the final line “open your heart and let him come in”. As with the retooled folk-psych heard in the early 1970s editions of Play School and the equally impressive Philly Soul stylings detectable in the songs from Ragtime, it is really quite a revelation to discover that music of such compositional and instrumental depth was routinely (and possibly even casually) churned out for ephemeral television programming aimed at children. It really does make you wonder what else is out there gathering dust in some rarely consulted archive or other.

The exceptional music just keeps on coming. The journey of the Three Kings (and a quick mention should be made here of the extraordinary BBC documentary of a couple of years back that set out to prove that Melchior, Balthazar and Kaspar really did exist, and found some really quite startling evidence to support this theory) is accompanied not by their traditional anthem but by Follow The Star, a yearning number cut from the same musical cloth as Joe Cocker’s With A Little Help From My Friends and indeed Bill Oddie’s parody thereof but with that chiming vibraphone wheeled out once again, that in a rare move strives to provide some semblance of an explanation of what ‘myrrh’ actually is. At the story’s conclusion, Have You Ever Been Lonely? is reprised in jubilant singalong style as Clap Your Hands And Be Cheery, a rousing and stirring number marred only by an extemporising clarinet that sounds for all the world like a pale transatlantic imitation of that Waitresses-bothering saxophone. It is this song more than any other that is lodged in the memory of anyone who ever saw the full televisual version, owing to a shot in which the chorus of “there must be room” (replacing the melancholy “you can’t come in”) was accompanied by the hugely ill-suited sight of a conical paper puppet intent on spreading the good word approached a door that was far too small for it to have fitted through.

ON THE NINETEENTH DAY OF CHRISTMAS… Clap Your Hands And Be Cheery, it’s a sizeable portion of the Watch Nativity!