At this time of year, once the sexy zombie outfits are packed up and four months of heavy drinking and moderate depression loom, you really understand the primal importance of winter festivals. The light to seasonal affective disorder’s dark, the raucous cousin in a stupid hat holding spiritual death at bay with over-hearty mirth and Ferrero Rocher - Christmas! - now hoves into view. Some say it begins with the arrival of seasonal marketing campaigns, others hold tight for “advent” – pfft, whatever – but for me it’s Kirstie All Sop No Substance and her pony handmade decorations who really marks the season. Sadly, no previews of Kirstie’s Handmade Christmas (Tuesday, Channel 4, 8pm) were available, but I have no doubt that the tree decorated with sprouts, the crap twig and twine menorahs will be as watchable as ever, provided you crack into the BOGOF liquor early.
With Christmas (holly, tartan, acid reflux) and the Victorian age (cholera, workhouses, orphans) somehow inextricably linked, I was still able to get a cosy feeling by watching What A Performance! (Thursday, BBC4, 9pm), a three-part series documenting the golden age of entertainment. Or to give it another title, What People Did Before TV. What people did do before TV, according to this first episode focusing on the music hall, was smear on some greasepaint, get up onstage and perform routines about sprats and murder. Hosts Frank Skinner and Suzy Klein listen through scratchy recordings, stage-side chats with historians, and finally, dress up as music hall stars Dan Leno and Marie Lloyd to run through hits of the time. What this bit adds I couldn’t tell you, but it’s a fixture throughout the series so it must have some sort of purpose. Perhaps it’s to show that immense talent is required to make sprat-based song and dance routines entertaining. Or to illustrate that comedy is so fast-moving, that the hilarity of hoiking up your crinoline saying “Gor blimey, shuck me oysters why don’t ya, guv’nor” is now lost on modern audiences. Maybe it’s just an excuse for Frank Skinner to put on a wig. Who knows.
What I do know is that I loved every moment of this show, from the tours of music halls past and present (like the City Varieties in Leeds or the Britannia in Hoxton that’s now a big square LCC block), to the manic underlining of the fact that music hall was a right mucky medium. Its most lauded stars were decidedly rough; none more so than Bessie Bellwood who rose to fame from the slums and was frequently up on assault charges. In the modern equivalent of the song and supper club, ie the gastro pub, Frank meets historian Michael Kilgariff who reads from a contemporary article that suggests music halls “appealed to the most depraved propensities”. He then reels off a list of songs heavy on the innuendo with titles such as There’s No Shove Like The First Shove; He Did It Before My Eyes, or the slow-burning Friars Candle. Mike, you had me at depraved propensities.
There’s something pretty edifying about all this smut being venerated as treasure. At the time, music hall was the medium of the masses, playing to rowdy audiences, pissed off their merry tits on cheap ale and porter, considered by the arbiters of culture as lower than low. (Until the 1840s, putting on any kind of serious play needed a licence, leading to “doggerel Shakespeare”, a subverted unlicensed form where tragedies were played for comic effect.) This clearly points to music hall’s scion being, in spirit if not in strict adherence, the ITVBe powerhouse that is structured reality, which as regular readers of this column will know, is the only valid art form. You can huff and puff all you like at “vajazzle” entering the public consciousness, but it’s called progress, yeah? It’s a choice between the bawdy stories of Geordie Shore, told with a big wink and the faint air of venereal disease, or the prim propriety and stuffy values of Kirstie’s Handmade Pomposity. I know what I prefer, and I think Bessie would agree.
