Saturday 25 December
Christmas Day Christmas In Bethlehem
1/1 6.05-8.00am
This is an invitation to breakfast in Bethlehem - but not, as people
might think, the little town of Christmas carol fame.
Libby Purves and guests will be in Bethlehem, South
Wales on Christmas morning and they will be finding out how Christmas
is celebrated in Bethlehems all over the world.
Presenter/Libby Purves, Producer/Phil Pegum
BBC Manchester Publicity
Christmas Service
1/1 9.00-10.00am
Bishop Stephen Oliver leads the service from St Mary's Church, Islington.
Colin Morris reflects on the different communities found in the Nativity
journey.
The broadcast is packed with Christmas music, as John Rutter conducts
the choir and the orchestra.
Producer/ Mark O'Brien
BBC Manchester Publicity
With Great Pleasure at Christmas
1/1 10.00-10.45am
Sir David Frost is the special guest on With Great Pleasure
on Christmas morning.
He is joined by celebrity actors to entertain an audience with some of
his favourite pieces of prose, poetry and seasonal music.
Presenter/David Frost, Producer/Viv Beeby
BBC Radio 4 Publicity
Santarchy
1/1 11.00-11.30am
Anyone can dress up as Father Christmas. All it takes is a red suit and
a white beard. But should you trust him? What can people get up to in
a Santa Claus outfit?
Arthur Smith dons a white beard and finds out. Each
December for the last ten years, people have been taking to the streets
of cities dressed as Father Christmas, with the intention of generating
a bit of naughty Noel mayhem.
This rather secretive organisation called Santarchy coordinates groups
of people who get together, dress up in Father Christmas costumes and
pretty much run riot.
They have Santarchy events all over the world, from Tokyo to the Antarctic.
Santarchy looks at why people dress up as Santa Claus and how it makes
them and other people feel. Do people change when they are in disguise?
There is an assumption that Santa is a warm-hearted, giving, non-threatening
creature, but is this to be relied on? Isn't there something slightly
sinister lurking under that jolly red jacket?
Presenter/Arthur Smith, Producer/Sara Jane Hall
BBC Radio 4 Publicity
Soul Music
1/1 11.30am-noon
Peggy Reynolds, Ian Bradley and Raymond
Head discuss the history of the carol In The Bleak Midwinter.
This much-loved hymn was first penned as a poem by Christina Rosetti.
Vaughan Williams asked Gustav Holst to put it to music for his English
Hymnal published in 1906. The other popular version was written by organist
Harold Darke, then aged 21.
Producer/Sara Conkey
BBC Radio 4 Publicity
Fanshawe Gets To The Bottom Of…Christmas
1/2 12.30-1.00pm
A refreshingly satirical look at the Christmas season through the best
of the BBC's comedy archives and presented by Simon Fanshawe.
Amongst the highlights will be songs and sketches by Peter Cook
and Dudley Moore, Tom Lehrer and Bill
Cosby with readings by Bill Wallis of work by
Saki, Jenny Éclair and Philip Larkin.
Presenter/Simon Fanshawe, Producer/Paul Dodgson
BBC Radio 4 Publicity
Hallelujah!
1/1 2.00-3.00pm
Handel's Messiah was written by a German for a concert in Dublin. Top
of the classical pops for nearly 250 years, Huw Edwards
tries to establish the secret of its success.
The BBC archive holds over 150 different complete performances of Handel's
Messiah, and they tell a social as well as a musical story.
In addition to the great concert halls of the country, the sound of Messiah
has rattled the windows of school gyms, village halls, churches of every
denomination and sports stadiums throughout the country.
But of course Messiah isn't just the province of the amateur. Almost
every famous singer has started their career on the Messiah circuit and
many of their stories are in the archive - Kathleen Ferrier, Heddle Nash
(who made a career out of the tenor part), Maggie Teyte, James Bowman
and Lesley Garrett have all turned up to do their solos.
Presenter/Huw Edwards, Producer/Martin Edwards
The Little White Bird
1/1 3.30-5.00pm
The narrator (Michael Siberry) is a gentle, whimsical,
lonely old bachelor and author whose ambition is to have a son.
From his window table at his club, he watches the romantic progress of
a young governess (Sara Markland) and her boyfriend (Chris
Pavlo) who meet every lunchtime in the park opposite.
He secretly intervenes when they split up and engineers a re-union which
leads to their marriage.
He follows them, unseen, to their home and from then on he becomes their
unknown friend helping the penniless couple, anonymously, when needed.
He follows the birth of their son David (Thomas Glenister)
from a distance and as the boy grows up, he becomes a substitute for the
son the narrator never had.
He engineers a meeting with the boy through the child's nanny as she
walks the boy in Kensington Gardens.
Through their various meetings, the narrator invents the character of
Peter Pan (Joe Absolom) and explains to David how all
children were once birds and that the reason there are bars on nursery
windows is because very little people sometimes forget that they no longer
have wings, and try to fly away.
He tells the story of one such child, Peter Pan, who escaped from being
a human when he was seven days old... and flew to Kensington Gardens where
he still lives, half-child and half-fairy, never growing any older.
The narrator and David invent stories together about Peter, the fairies
and Solomon Crow (Philip Voss), who lives on an island
in the middle of the Serpentine, until David grows up and is no longer
interested in hearing about Peter Pan.
The narrator writes a book about his relationship with David and sends
it to David's mother.
Finally, she meets her secret friend face-to-face, accepts the book and
thanks him for all he has done for David.
The play is dramatised for radio by John Peacock.
Producer/Celia de Wolff
BBC Radio 4 Publicity
Remember Alistair Cooke (repeat)
1/1 7.00-8.00pm
Alistair Cooke, the man considered to be one of the
greatest broadcasters in the world, died this year on 29 March.
He was 95 years-old and had been broadcasting up to a few weeks before
his death.
His weekly Letter From America ran on BBC radio for over half a century,
but Alistair Cooke was also a man of many talents and passions.
A jazzman, golf fanatic, television presenter and a friend to the stars
of journalism, politics and Hollywood.
In this special hour-long programme James Naughtie pays
tribute to this renaissance man.
Presenter/James Naughtie, Producer/Rosie Goldsmith
BBC News Publicity
The Archive Hour - Sing Christmas
1/1 8.00-9.00pm
On Christmas Day in 1957 the BBC broadcast songs of Christmas from the
British Isles, anchored by the noted Texan folklorist and broadcaster
Alan Lomax.
It was a fascinating musical mixture: carols several hundred years old,
contemporary folk songs, American spirituals, calypso, Ghanaian high-life
(possibly the first African music broadcast on the BBC), dixieland and
skiffle, children's carols and glees.
Coming at the start of the British folk revival there were contributions
from Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger and Shirley Collins.
It was a technical triumph, using live link-ups to Scotland, Plymouth,
London, Manchester, Belfast, Derbyshire and Bangor, with Lomax at the
centre of the web in Birmingham.
There were fluffs - the well-oiled contributors in the Plymouth studio
sang the wrong song; those in Belfast only just got to the studio in time;
and the script had to be rewritten live as items over-ran.
Peggy Seeger was detained in Dover at the last minute by the immigration
service (because of her left-wing sympathies, which Lomax shared) and
a vinyl recording of her had to be substituted - but in the end everything
went ahead.
There are sharp disagreements about the value of the material broadcast,
with some folk purists feeling that Lomax should not have included ephemeral
material like skiffle.
Others feel that skiffle, which had just taken off in Britain, really
was the new folk music, a democratic form accessible to anyone with a
guitar.
The BBC itself had qualms about Lomax's left wing politics - an internal
memo from an editor insists that he should not be given a platform to
promote potted marxism; and that he should not be allowed to identify
sexual permissiveness with happiness, or the Christian attitude to sex
with sorrow and suffering.
Presenter/Ken Hunt, Producer/Jolyon Jenkins
BBC Radio 4 Publicity
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