Rather than skipping Christmas
next year, I spent today mulling over the possibility of keeping myself busy
instead in the run up. There will no doubt be some Christmas radio specials to
do assuming I’m still doing the three radio shows I’m currently involved with,
and I will probably do another festive album for a Steve’s LP
Box one-off (I’m not going to do another series but intend to do a
Christmas edition every year from now on) and more Dickens Christmas audio
books. Regarding the audio books, I hope to have enough time to record more
than one and release them in the run up to Christmas next year, which is
connected to part of today’s mulling over of projects.
My audio book of A Christmas Carol last year (still available) was actually a
reading of the adaptation that Dickens himself wrote in order to read the story
in public. Public readings were very much a part of the publicity machine for
Dickens in those days, starting off with a charity reading of A Christmas Carol in Birmingham but soon being paid handsomely
for these appearances. His touring schedule was an awesome task that many of
today’s biggest rock and pop stars would refuse to undertake; between December
1867 and April 1868 he earned nineteen thousand pounds, and that was in the
days when nineteen grand for four months work was a lot of money!
I fancy the idea of performing
public readings of Dickens Christmas stories during December, maybe starting
with A Christmas Dinner (this year’s audio
book, out this weekend), and carrying on with A Christmas
Tree, What Christmas Is As We Grow Older, and something a bit spooky
like The Chimes. I would of course end with A Christmas Carol. Another possibility would be to do
different books every performance so that things don’t go stale, (although I
would probably do A Christmas Carol every time
seeing as that is the one that everyone knows).
Nottingham has a handful of
very old and very atmospheric pubs that would suit the readings of festive
ghost stories in a back bar or upstairs room, although that may alienate a
family audience if doing them in the evening. Libraries are an option if they’re
up for it, there hasn’t been any Christmas storytelling going on in a public
library in Nottingham for as long as I can remember, surely this is something
they should be doing?
My other idea is something I
have wanted to do for years, in fact I first obtained permission to do this in
2002 and have been unable to do it due to a combination of time, money and the
lack of available performance space. In the late 1990s I found in a charity
shop, a double cassette of Hancock’s Half Hour
radio episodes called Hancock’s Happy Christmas.
There are four episodes on this collection, three of which could easily be
translated to the stage with the minimum of fuss and would only need five main
characters; Sid James, Tony Hancock, Bill Kerr, Hattie Jacques (Griselda Pugh),
and the ‘everyman’ characters that were all played by Kenneth Williams. The
problem here of course is that theatres will not shift away from pantomime
during the Christmas season, and who can blame them? I’m sure the finished
result would be a good show, but something like this needs to be performed in a
small theatre and even the Lace Market Theatre, who put on amateur productions,
stage a pantomime every year. Incidentally, we went to see A Christmas
Carol there last year, it was terrible.
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