Chrismukkah and Other Cultural Mash-Ups (Radio 4) | iPlayer
Words and Music: Retail Therapy (Radio 3) | iPlayer
I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General (Radio 4) | iPlayer
Nabokov’s Christmas (Radio 4) | iPlayer
Chrismukkah comes but once a year – or not at all. It was coined in 2003 on a cult American TV show. It means a mixed faith celebration – a “cultural mash-up”. Presenter Sharmini Selvarajah is from a British-Asian family and grew up celebrating Diwali, Christmas and Tamil New Year. Her husband is a Jewish American, and this programme was a buoyant exploration of how she and her family combine Christmas and Hanukkah and of how other inter-faith families mix and match. It would seem that where religions are cheerfully blended, family is the force behind the compromises. And in these cases, although no one is admitting it (too uncomfortable an idea to broach?), keeping the family happy emerges as more important than – if not quite a substitute for – religion itself.
Sharmini’s mother-in-law was trying to keep her daughter-in-law happy (she was the guest, she needed to tiptoe) but could not hide her misgivings about having your Christmas cake and your sufganiyot. She wondered about identity. How would her grandchildren know to which religion they belonged? But for the grandchildren, celebrating Christmas and Hanukkah meant double the fun and double the sweets. A rabbi, Dr Jonathan Romain, professed tolerance but then let slip that he thought it a “bit dishonest” to try and blend festivals, a compromise of “different integrities”. He threw in a cautionary tale: he remembered how a Christmas tree purchased by a Christian wife was received by her Jewish husband as “a declaration of religious war”. What was most benignly persuasive was the finding that “tradition” turns out to mean whatever you experienced in childhood. It is these traditions (however customised, loose or irregular) that are later replicated: festive heirlooms.
It was mischievous to dub the latest in Radio 3’s marvellous series Words and Music Retail Therapy, in that it wound up with extracts from Matthew chapters 26 and 27 and 30 pieces of silver and at no point resembled a therapeutic shopping spree. Instead, what fascinated was how pain and commerce collide. We listened to Madame Bovary visited by the obsequiously mercenary Monsieur Lheureux and endured his French sales pitch. He dangles Algerian scarves, exhibits English needles and coconut shell egg cups (an intriguingly miscellaneous array – good stocking fillers?). Somehow, Mme Bovary resists.
Roald Dahl’s Charlie follows, emerging as a more complicated consumer than one remembered. I suddenly understood that Charlie is a compulsive (chocolate eater and shopper), unsuitably rewarded for his inability to resist (one is reminded of how subversive Roald Dahl is). This extract was followed by Gene Wilder’s suave, wistful, slightly sinister Pure Imagination, from the 1971 film of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, a song that implies imagination’s purchasing power. And then we listened to a baldly comic extract from Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic, about an out-of-control Visa bill (the idea from which Kinsella’s novels grew). The collage form of this programme creates an exhilaratingly unpredictable momentum – in this case, it was as if each spoken item were a coin thrown into and scattered by the wind.
I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General, a five-part comedy, was worth tuning into for the delight of the period voices alone: the glorious, cut-glass enunciation, not to mention the absurd exclamations (“Oh my fervent whiskers”). It was written by Simon Butteriss and Robin Brooks about George Grossmith, who starred in Gilbert and Sullivan operas for 12 years (he was the Modern Major General). George maintained he could not sing. In the first episode, Butteriss, who also plays George, gives a breathlessly convincing performance of tormented stage fright. He panics as he sings with his mouth full of words. He is well supported – and undermined – by Alex Jennings as Arthur Sullivan and Rupert Vansittart as WS Gilbert. The second episode’s masterclass on how to act was pricelessly funny: a crisis of intonation.
Nabokov’s Christmas was a perfect antidote to enforced seasonal cheer. This exquisitely desolate story is about a father mourning his son who (like Nabokov himself) was an amateur lepidopterist. The father sits, in lifeless surroundings, in a plush-covered chair he has never used before. “Can this be Christmas Eve? Could I have forgotten?” he wonders. Robert Glenister brought out beautifully the tactile quality of Nabokov’s writing. Every object’s continuing material existence is a rebuke: the boy’s biscuit tin, the blue notebook, the pins in a lacquered box, the melted candle wax between the father’s fingers. And the story builds to an ambivalent climax as an attacus moth hatches out – a not uncomplicatedly welcome sign of life.
