‘I’m no man of God, but there’s one religious event I look forward to all year’

One of the great private pleasures I derive from the Christmas season has been watching the annual festival of carols and readings from King’s College, Cambridge. Since the mid-1980s, I guess, I regularly tuned in to the ABC during Christmas week to watch this event, a relic to some but to me epitomising all that has been missing from our lives for at least a generation.

But if you asked me to define what it is that I find in Carols from King’s that make it so worthwhile for a non-believer to stay fixated on the box for 90 minutes, I can’t quite put a finger on it. I might say that as a former amateur warbler, I like watching real ability take on tunes that are so familiar that it is possible to make a judgment about the quality of performance. But that’s unlikely.

Or, if one were a mild Anglophile, one could argue that in a world of crass commercialism, by saturating ourselves in Henry VI’s exquisite setting of stained glass and sculpted stonework, it enables us to restore some links with a set of values and experiences that are sometimes said to be irrelevant in this day and age. But I doubt that also.

For years the ABC, in its wisdom, apparently felt that an annual dose of Carols from King’s was good medicine for us. But somewhere in the 2000s, the bean-counters must have gained the upper hand in the national broadcaster because it simply vanished from our (free-to-air) screens. Without so much as a beg pardon.

Fortunately, the evolution of technology enabled me to find on the internet, a CD of the year 2000’s edition of the festival which became a dutiful substitute in our family’s Christmas experience until very, very recently. But even the comfort of familiarity must take second fiddle to that visceral need for compulsive change, even with the very conservative among us, and so I found myself in due course trawling the internet to find a more recent festival than that of 2000.

In so doing, I discovered that a special edition had been produced in 2014 to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the first televising of the festival in 1954. And part of that special edition was a documentary that aired on the BBC at the time, plotting the evolution of this iconic part of the Christmas experience, even in distant Australia.

I settled down on a comfy sofa and watched the 2014 festival and found that it was not significantly different from my 2000 version, save that the readings had been liberalised to include non-Biblical prose that sought to capture, I suppose, another dimension to the ‘spirit of Christmas’. In this it was brilliantly successful, for the producers had selected a young Scots student to read a diary entry from a Scottish soldier on his experience of the unofficial, spontaneous truce that occurred on the Western front in December 1914. Carols, beer barrels, good cheer but, alas, no mention of football matches.

Yet the documentary proved even more illuminating than such, basically, cosmetic changes to the program’s format. We were informed that the first festival of carols and readings from King’s had occurred in December 1918 when a nation, and a world, were so traumatised by the inhuman slaughter of the previous four years that an urgent taking of stock was considered essential. Its impact was immediate and immense, quickly becoming a fixture in subsequent English-language celebrations of Christmas.

From its first BBC broadcast in 1928, radio served as the medium to spread King’s Carol festivals worldwide until the first televising in 1954, a response so one of the interviewees told us, to the importance of this new medium arising from the coronation of Elizabeth ll 18 months earlier – an excusable delay one might argue. But then a further 10 years were to elapse before the festival was televised again, thus making it the household Christmas gift that it was to remain for the ensuing 40 or 50 years.

All that is by the way, however, because what really caught my ear was the explanation given by the Dean of King’s College Chapel as to why the popularity (and relevance?) of this festival (of some very old music, let us not forget, and sacred customs) had endured for so long as an integral element in our collective imagination. His explanation, however, was simple: by sitting back, shutting out the hurly-burley of the post-modern impulses swirling around us, we, too, can measure the imperfect reality of our lives against more enduring standards, like a broken world had to in 1918.

I was reminded of Bill Bryson’s autobiographical work The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, wherein he described how his parents had also fallen under the spell of the labour-saving cargo-cult mentality of the ‘50s before they asked the inevitable question: how many freezer-pantries must one acquire to find fulfilment in life itself? Barely one.

Yet, the gross domestic profit remains the god and polestar and any attempt to suggest that it is only a signifier of one form of progress and not worthy of adulation as a fetish in its own right, is always treated with merciless “ignore”. Although, like Bill Bryson’s parents, I don’t notice any uptick in public morale commensurate with every minute uptick in the financial stats.

So, what is this thing called religion, and how useful is it?

While not a believer, I have to admit to serious admiration for the role that religion has played in the evolution of humankind. I am awed by the fact that virtually every civilisation, no matter how humble, has found it essential to develop sophisticated belief-systems to explain the contradiction between the apparent randomness of life sitting alongside its appearance of being governed by inexorable rules. Such as climate versus weather to people who know they must eat and find shelter to survive.

Indeed, it wasn’t until about 1720, in the midst of scientific discoveries that foreshadowed the industrial revolution, that Englishmen, by and large, lost sight of the same vision that their affairs were governed by the intrusion of a deity far away in the heavens. So, it’s being a little harsh to compare pre-scientific beliefs with those that came after. Yet some do.
And I have heard it said that to the poor, religion is what the professional psychiatrist’s couch is to the very rich and self-indulgent.

But, in the end, I can’t go past the words of the Dean of King’s College Chapel that a festival of carols and readings forces us to stop and take stock, if only for 90 minutes, putting to one side how are we going to get to the Boxing Day sales in time to be at the head of the queue. Mr and Mrs Bryson, where are you now that we really need you?