WHEN does Christmas start in your house? Have you had the tree up since the beginning of October? Frankly, I’m against early Christmas adopters. The festive season doesn’t start in the Jamieson household until the double issue of the Radio Times comes out.
But radio has been in holiday mode for the last week. Last Sunday Radio 2 cut Steve Wright’s Sunday Love Songs in half to run Steve Wright’s Peter Kay Christmas Special (not a title that trips off the tongue), a “festive one-off” in which Wright talked to the comedian about TV, because … Well, because Kay has just written a new book about his love of telly.
Kay, now 50, is very much of that postwar generation of British working-class kids who were half-raised by TV (I was one too, albeit I’ve a few years on him). I can’t say I was ever quite as obsessed by Auf Wiedersehen, Pet or Minder as he clearly was, but TV, especially Christmas TV, was meat and drink to me too.
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Like Kay, I used to religiously scan the credits of TV shows to see who was responsible. I can still probably name you most of the writers of The Two Ronnies. Kay can too, I suspect.
He told Wright that he has kept all the Christmas issues of the Radio Times and the TV Times since he was seven.
Eventually, of course, Kay became a TV star himself and started mixing with Bafta types and Grammy winners. Kay told Wright the story of hosting the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee when he had to introduce a certain Paul McCartney.
As part of his act Kay was planning to pretend to play the pan pipes on a terrible version of Let It Be. He popped in to see the ex-Beatle beforehand. “I went to see Paul McCartney and I said, ‘What songs are you going to do?’ He said, ‘I’m going to do Live and Let Die and band on the Run and Let It Be.’ “I said, ‘I’m doing Let It Be.’ He said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘I’m doing it. You can’t do Let It Be. I’m doing it on the pan pipes.’ “And he said, ‘I’m doing it.’ I said, ‘Do you have to do it?’ And I’m thinking, ‘Hang on, he wrote this.’ And I was asking him can he not do it so I can mime playing it on pan pipes.
“Guess who backed down?”
Later the same afternoon Iggy Pop co-hosted his regular 6 Music show with Tom Waits. Let me emphasise that. Iggy Pop AND Tom Waits. Maybe it is Christmas.
What a mad, strange joy this was. Two gravel-voiced men trying to impress each other with their taste in music.
It helped that they both had a penchant for crackly, ratchety records made by acts with crackly, ratchety names like CW Stoneking or AC Forehand and Blind Mamie Forehand (take that Arctic Monkeys).
I must admit I did struggle at times to tell Iggy from Tom, such are their old-man cement mixer voices. It sounded like they were both continually gargling gravel, coal and bitumen.
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If rocks could talk they still wouldn’t have the bass notes on display here.
My favourite bit probably came in the middle of the spoken-word song Ringo by Lorne Green (ask Peter Kay to tell you who he was), a story of the wild west. As Green described the inevitable shootout, Iggy and Tom both started cackling. The laughter of approval, I think.
Then again, there was also the moment when Iggy summed up one of the tunes, saying: “It’s swanging, but it’s also rrrrrrr.” You could feel that rrrrrr vibrating in your gut as he spoke.
“It’s swanging,” Tom agreed, “but it’s putting a fish hook in the back of your neck.”
You don’t get those kinds of links from Ken Bruce, let’s face it. All this and they played Maria Callas singing Puccini’s O mio babbino caro, one of the high points of western art. Can this be an annual treat?
LISTEN OUT FOR
Screenshot, Radio 4, Friday, 7.15pm
Mark Kermode and Ellen E Jones celebrate the art of the filmmaker Terence Davies, who died in October. Jack Lowden, who starred in Davies’s film Benediction, is one of the contributors.
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