This is a bit special: a recording of this standard from 1965 by Living Voices, the commercial name for the RCA studio singers. The Burl Ives version we all know had come out just a year earlier, and RCA clearly decided to take advantage of its popularity, and that of other Christmas classics, by putting out this album which, I am delighted to tell you, you can listen to in its entirety here, and I think you should; ideally immediately. If you are in need of comfort today, I’m pretty sure this will help.
Category: TV and radio
Advent song for December 12: River
Well, now. Joni Mitchell’s River is one of my very favourite Christmas songs and I was a bit sad that it’s never been a big enough hit anywhere for a version of it to sneak into my top twenty-four, but THEN I listened to every available version of Santa Baby (with the exception for obvious reasons of Eartha Kitt’s), and it turns out every single cover version is unbearable, with the closest to palatable being from an album called A Very Ally Christmas which seems to be a selection of songs “from, and inspired by” the Ally McBeal Christmas special(s). This version is better than the execrable efforts turned out by luminaries including, but not limited to, Kylie, Madonna, and Mae West – really – but on the same album I discovered this recording of River by Robert Downey Jr (of course), and I like it better than any version of Santa Baby (except the original), so we’re having this instead.
Advent song for December 4: A Winter’s Tale
I nearly posted another ‘song you don’t know by an artist you do’ today, but I have decided instead to bring you a bona fide Christmas classic in the shape of this 1982 hit from David Essex, who like Joey is both from Essex and named after it. Reading up about him in order to find something interesting to tell you, I discover that he played a character in Eastenders for a bit, which is doing nothing to help clear up my confusion of him with Paul Nicholas, who did the same. If I stop to think I can remember which of them was dark-haired and which blonde, although having googled what they both look like now I can’t help thinking they’ve heard about my confusion and are playing a trick on me:
I am aware, too, that Paul Nicholas also troubled the hit parade more than once, but since his four top 40 singles were called “Reggae Like It Used To Be”, “Dancing With The Captain”, “Grandma’s Party” and “Heaven On The 7th Floor” I think we should draw our investigation to a discreet close at this point.
Advent activity #24
There is no instruction behind door number 24 on Edie’s advent calendar: it simply says IT’S CHRISTMAS EVE!, which is true. You probably have either much too much to get done today or nearly nothing to do at all, and in either case you can accompany the doing of it with a Christmas Eve playlist which I have made just for you. It’s a bit wistful in tone, which seems right for Christmas 2020, and it features four acoustic guitar tracks by Will Moore, who is also Edie’s dad (and my brother), which means we’re still sticking approximately to the theme.
The rest of the songs are ones you know (well, you’ll know them all, just not necessarily these versions) and we begin with the John Denver/Muppets version of Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, which is GUARANTEED to make you smile. The video is lovely and below, but listen on Spotify too because the sound quality is much better and the piano is beautiful . (I always said Rowlf was the most talented Muppet.)
Merry Christmas to you, and remember – one day soon we all will be together, if the fates allow; until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow.
Advent activity #8
I’m going to be very lenient in the overseeing of today’s job, which is “BUY DISNEY PLUS”. It’s a perfectly good plan if you live in a house where a lot of Disney is going to be watched over Christmas, and it’s an even better one if some of you are under ten and/or isolating. If those things are not true of your household then I am happy for you to interpret this activity in any way you choose, though it should probably be film-or TV-based if you definitely want to score the point.
(There is a free online screeing of Mogul Mowgli this evening for BFI members, which I have decided will count as my contribution.)
There must be a million Disney Christmas songs, mustn’t there? But I couldn’t think of any, and the ones I found when I googled were sickly sweet and/or featured children wearing make-up, so instead we will go to a Disney-adjacent IP (I mean, of course Disney own the Muppets, because they own everything, but they’re not DISNEY-Disney) for an almost-rendition of Shchedryk, or The Carol of the Bells as it’s better known in English.
(If you hate this version, here is a nicer one.)
Reasons to be cheerful: part 1 in a series
Obviously, if I’d known at Christmas what I know now, my “things to be happy about” series of advent posts would have included things like “the pubs are open” and “supermarkets sell toilet roll” and they would have been much easier to write. But we’re not called Glad All Over for nothing (yes OK, it’s because of Crystal Palace, but if the official CPFC song was, I don’t know, Bring Your Daughter To The Slaughter then I wouldn’t have named my blog after it) and so in these exceptionally trying times I am going to do my best to start bringing you doses of good news, fun links and just cheering things, however small.
And also, things to do when you can’t leave the house! A couple of weeks before This All Started I found myself randomly watching an old episode of Death In Paradise and then somehow helplessly watching episode after episode, completely entranced. Death In Paradise has been going for almost ten years, a fact I only know because the original writer, Robert Thorogood, was the brother of my then-boss who told me his brother had only set it in the Caribbean so that he could go to the Caribbean. This seems entirely sensible to me and it obviously worked, because the next best thing to going to the Caribbean is looking at the Caribbean from afar, and since looking at things we like from a long way away is the new normal I think you should follow my example and watch it all on iPlayer. (But don’t follow my example of starting with S4, because I don’t know why I did it and now I don’t know what series to watch next. Just watch them from the beginning like a normal person.)
I should warn you that it is racially problematic (the comedy characters are all black; murder victims and murderers all white) and every episode follows exactly the same formula (though this in itself is also sort of comforting, especially when you find yourself saying the lines along with the characters), but it is so sun-filled and light-hearted that I can just about forgive it its many flaws, because watching an episode and seeing all of that outside is very much a tonic for being stuck on the sofa in a cold and grey Greenwich.
(Although the best thing that’s happened so far this week was going to the park yesterday and staying socially distant from my sister, but being allowed to say hello to the dog. Outside is outside, after all, and there is, as you know, literally nothing better than a dog.)
An experiment
Can you do me a favour? It’s for a thing. Below are two clips of middle-aged men dancing. One is less than two minutes long, the other is less than three minutes long, so in total I promise I don’t need more than six minutes of your time, unless you feel compelled to write a comment, in which case I will read it carefully and almost certainly reply. In the meantime, could you vote for whichever clip you like better? There is also a “neither” option in case you have an objection to middle-aged men dancing, for which I couldn’t blame you at all.
Option one:
Option two:
Now vote!
Bogglebox
Do you remember that old joke about the child (in some versions he is German, but I don’t think that’s essential) who doesn’t speak until the age of nine, when one evening at dinner he says “not enough salt” and his amazed parents say “you can speak! Why have you never spoken before?” and he says “Until now everything was satisfactory”?
Well, that’s where I’m at, more or less. Glad All Over has always been a blog about nothing, largely powered by my occasional need to rant about Things That Pissed Me Off. And nothing much has pissed me off recently, or at least nothing that merited more words than could easily fit into 140 characters. But a recent lifestyle adjustment has turned me into someone who watches TV, and it turns out there’s loads on TV that pisses me off. Yay!
Proudly topping the list is The Apprentice, which I have managed to avoid for the last decade, whilst still knowing quite a lot about it. I don’t know why I find its innate cynicism more offensive than that displayed by, say, The X Factor, except that X Factor has as a redeeming quality its contestants, who are by and large sweet and charming and easy to root for. (My favourites so far, in case you need to know, are Fleur and Andrea.) The Apprentice features famously awful people so there is nothing to distract me from the fact that it’s a horrible, lying, ugly programme. It teaches us that the way to get ahead in business is to be a bully; to relentlessly push one’s own agenda and to ignore or trample on anyone who gets in the way. That may well work for some people in some contexts, but it makes the world a nastier place, and having had more jobs than most I can assure you that being polite, respectful and knowledgeable works too, and doesn’t result in half the workforce being signed off with stress.
So it’s an unpleasant show, but it also treats us, the audience, like idiots. I am actively embarrassed every time Lord Sugar is presented like God, as though he isn’t as beholden to the production schedule and technical requirements of making the show as anyone else involved. I don’t mind being lied to in the name of entertainment so long as an attempt is made to make it entertaining, but this isn’t. It’s just silly. And practically speaking, the tasks are ridiculous. In last night’s show candidates were asked to come up with an item of wearable technology and pitch it to buyers from John Lewis, J.D. Sports and Firebox. I mean, honestly, can you think of a single item, wearable or otherwise, that those three retailers would all stock? So the premise was ridiculous and the criteria for success a nonsense. The week before, the winning team (and why split them, in this day and age, into a men’s team and a women’s team, FFS?) made something like £50 more than the losers, who were subjected to a torrent of contempt bordering on abuse as a result. £50. It’s a joke of a show. And if you were to ask the founders of the most successful companies launched in the last couple of decades whether their primary motivation was to make money, I doubt a single one of them would say yes. Here’s Mark Zuckerberg in a letter to shareholders two years ago:
“Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services. And we think this is a good way to build something.”
Anyone who thinks Alan Sugar is a better role model for success in the world of business today than Zuck probably deserves to – well, to be on The Apprentice.
I mean, I don’t mind silly TV shows. At the moment I am particularly enjoying The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Come Dine With Me and Gogglebox, all of which, in different ways, shine a light into something real and human and vulnerable. Shows about people need real people in them, and nobody and nothing in The Apprentice is real.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to install the X Factor voting app.
24 hours in radio
Radio is just about the best thing in the world. It’s free, it’s made brilliantly well on the cheap by people who love it, it’s the original social medium (we were doing phone-ins, requests and community events before the web existed), you can do it while cooking or running or commuting, and – even though some stations and presenters boast listeners in their millions – it’s still the most intimate and immediate medium of all.
With the advent of on-demand listening and the explosion in ways to get hold of audio content radio has more competition than ever, but it’s still doing what it does better than anyone else does it, and it is still uniquely placed to deliver an experience that your Spotifys and Last.fms can’t get anywhere near – a personally-curated listening experience hosted by a trusted, human, person; the opportunity to be introduced to music you might never have heard about otherwise, to become an active part of a community both virtual and real, to have a friendly voice accompanying you as you drive through the night or fight insomnia. Radio is just about the best thing in the world.
So in case you are not a radio listener, or in case you are one of those radio listeners who sticks devotedly to the same station at all times, I have put together a listening guide for a day’s worth of radio featuring some of my favourite programmes, as well as some ways to get more from radio than you do today. Even if you just try one of these shows, I think you’ll be glad you did.
Breakfast
I have listened to just about every London-based FM station first thing in the morning over the years; starting in the eighties with Capital, then moving on to KISS, XFM, Magic and Virgin Radio (now Absolute) before eventually settling down to Radio 4’s Today programme, which I endured for several years before deciding I didn’t need to be made that angry that early in the day. So these days, to keep my blood pressure down, I start the day with Chris Evans’ Radio 2 breakfast show (6.30-9.30am), which has enough news and sport to keep me interested, but is also funny and chatty and has songs. It’s the biggest breakfast show in the country, and in this case nine million people aren’t wrong.
Late morning
This is the one I’m most excited about sharing with you, because unless you are a cab driver you may never have spent much time listening to LBC, but James O’Brien (10am-1pm) is just simply the best broadcaster I have ever heard – thoughtful, interested, not afraid of silence or of awkward moments. He starts each show with a fifteen-minute monologue on the subject of the day, and listening to him talk on, seemingly unscripted, never gets old (he would, I am sure, do very well on Just A Minute). Then he goes on to host the only phone-in show I know in which people’s opinions are genuinely changed as the conversation develops. He is the very opposite of a shock jock, and he should be on twenty-four hours a day.
Lunchtime
I know we haven’t had much music yet but bear with me, because for your grown-up Radio 4 shot of news World At One (1-1.45pm) is a far better and less hysterical bet than the Today programme.
Afternoons
Absolute, Virgin as was, competes with Magic as the station whose musical tastes most closely match my own, but Absolute is (it pains me to say) a little bit cooler, and Andy Bush (1pm-5pm) is a good and funny presenter. They promise no song repeats between 10am and 5pm, so you can while away the afternoon knowing you won’t be subjected to the same Taylor Swift song once an hour.
Drivetime
…but if Magic is more your bag, then the time to listen is 5pm to 8pm when Angie Greaves, one of the UKs only standalone woman presenters (we are mostly on the radio as sidekicks, sadly), presents a mixture of music and features through which her warm personality shimmers at all times.
Evenings
We haven’t had any classical music yet, and if you’d like to add some to the mix then switch over to Radio 3 in the evenings for Live In Concert (times vary), which this week features live performances of works by Shostakovitch, Stravinsky, Britten, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Dvorak, among others.
Late nights
I’m going to offer you a choice here, depending on your mood. On XFM John Kennedy’s Exposure (10am-1pm) is the station’s showcase for new music and the closest it gets to the XFM of old. Over on Planet Rock, though, the mighty Alice Cooper hosts three hours of rock classics interspersed with interviews and anecdotes. I’m not always a fan of celebrity radio presenters, but Alice is an inspired choice.
Overnight
Should you be awake between 1am and breakfast time, the World Service is the place to be. The calm, unfrantic style of presentation – which I assume arises from the fact that many listeners don’t have English as a first language – is very soothing, and the station’s remit allows it to cover stories which you simply wouldn’t get anywhere else.
Honourable mentions
These are the shows which don’t fit into my prescribed day of radio listening, but which you should listen to anyway.
KISSTORY (11am-12pm) is KISS’s old-school hour. There’s nothing like hearing the dancefloor classics of your youth to liven up a dull morning.
The Archers (R4, 1pm and 7pm). You may be able to get into it: I still haven’t managed it, but I continue to try, because the people I know who love it love it SO MUCH. I have learned the names of at least four characters, so perhaps I’m getting there.
Radio 4’s comedy slot at 6.30pm is very much a mixed bag, but if you haven’t ever listened to Just A Minute or I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue then you must certainly remedy that very quickly.
Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review on 5Live (times vary) is a once-a week affair, and I’m never sure when it’s on, but that’s OK because instead of listening live I download the podcast, which has extra bits, and listen to it later in the week.
And, brilliantly, now more than ever you can listen at a different time from when something is broadcast, so you never need miss anything, and you can download podcasts and listen to them offline, and you can listen online or via mobile apps so that you no longer need to be in Glasgow to listen to Clyde 1 or in Manchester to listen to Key 103, or even in the US to listen to NPR: my favourite podcast, other than Kermode and Mayo, is Click and Clack’s Car Talk, which – being a US phone-in show about cars – doesn’t on paper sound like something I should enjoy, but actually I really, really do.
You can also listen online via aggregator services like TuneIn – which is a bit of a confusing mess, but gives you access to thousands of radio stations from all over the world – and UK Radioplayer – which works beautifully and gives you access to all UK radio stations from one place, so it’s the perfect starting point for your day of radio discovery. Now, get listening.
Spooky dreams
You know those times when one coincidence follows another, and you suddenly get the groundless notion that the threads of your life are more closely and weirdly bound together than you thought? And then it turns into a really vivid dream, and you get reality and your dreamworld confused?
No?
It started with Primo Levi (who, by the way, is the one writer who makes me want to stop writing, because he writes so beautifully that I think I might as well give up trying). I picked up Other People’s Trades, a collection of his essays, as we were leaving for Naples last month, because you’re not allowed to read your Kindle during take-off and landing, and I thought I might as well read something Italian. When we got home I broke off and started reading the Kindle again, so I’ve been progressing through the Levi in fits and starts, and on Sunday I started to read an essay called The Language of Chemistry, which reminded me that Levi was a scientist as well as a writer – specifically, a chemist (and if you haven’t read it, you must immediately go and read The Periodic Table, which I think includes his most beautiful writing of all).
Later that day, after dinner, we watched some Breaking Bad (the beloved has seen it all before, but I am new to it and loving it), in which, as you’ll know if you’ve seen it, the main character is Walter White, another chemist. The episode we watched, the last in season two, ends – I am trying to do this without spoilers, but if you really mind, look away now – with Walter looking into the sky, followed by an aerial shot of the New Mexico desert, while something spins rapidly through the air above it. We’ve been watching for a few weeks and it was sheer coincidence that we reached that episode minutes before turning the TV over to see Felix Baumgartner spin rapidly through the air above the New Mexico desert during his freefall descent to earth from 128,100 feet, which might be the most exciting thing I have ever seen happen in real time. I almost didn’t want to watch, but in the end the thrill of seeing someone do something so brave and brilliant won out over the fear of seeing someone fall to his death, which was always a possibility.
And then, when I went to bed that night, I picked up the Primo Levi again and carried on reading, and when I went to sleep my dreams were full of tortured chemists falling to their deaths in a brightly-coloured desert, and then I woke up with a start and remembered that Primo Levi did fall to his death, in circumstances which remain unclear. And I shivered, and read myself back to sleep with Stephen King, who at least is supposed to be spooky.
Last night’s dreams were even more vivid, but I don’t think I can bring myself to tell you about them. Maybe one day, after everyone implicated is dead, but not till then.
Glad All Over 