Friday 24 December - Christmas Eve
Daily Service
9.45-10.00am
Choral Scholars from the Choir of King's College, Cambridge provide the
music for the Daily Service.
As an expectant crowd gathers around the college quad for A Festival
of Nine Lessons and Carols, the close harmony group sing to them as they
wait to enter the chapel.
BBC Manchester Publicity
The Long Winter
1/1 11.00-11.30am
On Christmas Eve, Edi Stark looks back at Britain's
Long Winter and asks how centuries of struggle against bitter cold, darkness
and hunger have shaped peoples' surroundings and way of life.
The main focus of the programme is the early history of rural Britain.
Edi talks to historians and looks at poems, journals and other manuscripts
which reveal the voices of those who lived through the Long Winter - people
such as the Anglo-Saxon Seafarer - "coldly afflicted, my feet by frost
benumbed… care-wretched on ice-cold sea" - or the 13th century swineherd
who believed that beneath Peak Cavern in Derbyshire he had discovered
a mysterious underworld, a magical land of summer and ripening fruit hidden
beneath the winter snow.
She also visits ancient settlement sites, crofts and cottages and talks
to people for whom winter is still a formidable enemy - those who live
in the more remote parts of the country and those who remember childhoods
in unheated homes.
Alongside finding out what really went on during the long winter nights
(incest and adultery as well as story-telling and singing) Edi hears stories
of ingenuity and endurance, of devastating blizzards, villages cut off
from the outside world, hard work and famine.
Presenter/Edi Stark, Producer/Julia Adamson
BBC Radio 4 Publicity
Afternoon Play - The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding
1/1 2.15-3.00pm
Hercule Poirot (John Moffatt) spends a traditional English
Christmas at the home of Colonel & Mrs Lacey (Donald Sinden
and Sian Phillips) but finds that he can't enjoy himself
too much as he has a mystery to solve.
In this adaptation of Agatha Christie's short story, an Eastern Prince
arrives in England with some family jewels which he's having reset as
a gift for his fiancee.
However, the Prince also has a mistress; she asks to wear one particularly
enchanting piece that features a huge ruby, and then promptly disappears
with it.
Poirot discovers a connection with a house party at the home of Colonel
and Mrs Lacey, and in order to pursue his investigation, an invitation
is procured for him to the Lacey's, so he can, ostensibly, enjoy an old-fashioned
Christmas.
With deft skill and the workings of his little grey cells, Poirot brings
this case to a satisfying end.
The Adventure Of The Christmas Pudding is dramatised for radio by Michael
Bakewell.
Producer/Enyd Williams
BBC Radio 4 Publicity
Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols
1/1 3.00-4.30pm
Shortly after three o'clock on Christmas Eve, a solo chorister steps
forward to sing the first verse of Once in Royal David's City to a still
and expectant King's College Chapel in Cambridge.
For many people listening throughout the world, the traditional Festival
of Nine Lessons and Carols signals the start of Christmas festivities.
The Festival has been broadcast live from the Chapel since 1928.
Each year the pattern of the scripture lessons is the same, beginning
with the story of the Fall of Adam in the book of Genesis and concluding
with the Gospel of St John, unfolding the great mystery of how God came
into the world in human form 2000 years ago.
The world-famous choir of King's College performs popular carols such
as O Come All Ye Faithful and Hark the Herald Angels Sing.
There are also specially commissioned carols including God Would Be Born
in Thee by Judith Bingham and Starry Night O'er Bethlehem by David Willcocks.
Stephen Cleobury directs the choir and the organist is Tom Winpenny.
Producer/Stephen Shipley
BBC Manchester Publicity
Midnight Mass
11.15-12.30am
The Archbishop of Birmingham, the Most Reverend Vincent Nichols, celebrates
Midnight Mass from St Chad's Cathedral, Birmingham.
Producer/Janet McLarty
Manchester Publicity
Crib City
1/1 4.30-5.00pm
Susannah Clapp explores the nativity crib making traditions
of Naples - the city that thinks of itself as the home of the Christmas
crib.
A whole district of the old town continues to be devoted to making cribs
- tiny animals, glittering wise men and pink infant Christs.
But the tradition is evolving and crib hunter's can now buy a pizza maker's
version, a crib with 'deformati' or limbless attendants, even a football
strip crib.
Crib City takes the form of a walk though Naples in December. Susannah
looks at cribs in churches, on roundabouts, in museums and in the street
of the crib makers which still survives and which, every winter, gives
vivid evidence of the survival and remaking of an ancient folk tradition
in the heart of globalised Europe.
Susannah Clapp is the theatre critic of The Observer and a regular contributor
to Nightwaves on Radio 3.
Presenter/Susannah Clapp, Producer/Tim Dee
BBC Radio 4 Publicity
The Now Show (Christmas Special)
1/1 6.15-7.00pm
The Now Show team present a satirical, 45 minute long, festive extravaganza.
Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis look at
the lessons we've all learned over the last year; Marcus Brigstocke
and Laura Shavin will be looking forward to what 2005
might have in store for the world and Mitch Benn and
Jon Holmes will be looking like Santa Claus and an elf.
Producer/Colin Anderson
BBC Radio 4 Publicity
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