Thing With Cliff Richard In

A Christmas Lantern (ITV/Central, 1982).

Christmas 1982. David Essex, Shakin’ Stevens, David Bowie and Bing Crosby and Keith Harris And Orville dominated the festive top twenty while Santa Claus And The Christmas Trees and Dizzi Heights didn’t. Ad breaks alternated between Tesco’s neon-hued post-New Romantic futuristic till-launching ‘Checkout ’82’ campaign only with the session singers hauled back in to crowbar in the word ‘Christmas’, the twenty seven million hour plug for ivory-tinkling Tellydisc box set The Magic Of Richard Clayderman, and the proto-Blipvert promotion for post-Boxing Day half-price dry cleaning at Johnson’s courtesy of a static image and a desultory synth fanfare played twice in succession. A million adults regaled office parties with their hilarious Renee And Renato impressions that didn’t involve any actual jokes, while a million youngsters got in trouble for throwing a younger sibling’s most treasured doll to each other in a re-enactment of the rose-hurling scene from the video. BBC1 did its level best to ensure that children who had tuned in during the school holiday mornings to at least derive a modest amount of entertainment and fun from The All-New Pink Panther Show and Battle Of The Planets did not go unpunished with a spectacularly unasked for triple bill of Why Don’t You…?, Edgar Kennedy and Play Chess. The newly-launched Channel 4 treated viewers to the first ever Bowie-contextualised showing of The Snowman, bafflingly introduced by a continuity announcer advising “he’s coming…” in a disconcertingly apprehensive tone, and at peak viewing time on Christmas Eve, ITV broadcast a weird variety show that made little to no sense and seemingly only one viewer even noticed it.

With a perplexing air of something you just wouldn’t see on ITV now at the same time as being something you wouldn’t see on ITV until many years later, whatever this peculiar show actually was, it seemed to involve something about some boys finding an old projector and rifling their family’s collection of cine films for a look at how they had celebrated Christmas ‘through the years’. This noticeably incorporated considerably more singing, dancing and joke-telling with a conspicuously professional sheen than you were liable to find in the average family household festivities, and at one point alighted on Christmas Morning in the Edwardian era, whereupon a merrymaking youngster was shown looking through a newly-unwrapped kaleidoscope, initially seeing a sort of jumble of orange letters on a pale yellow background which then dissolved into a distinctly television studio-styled ‘Winter Wonderland’ with Cliff Richard sitting in the middle of the fir trees performing his right-words-wrong-tune ‘Of Bethlehem’-depleted synthesised trumpet-festooned rendition of Little Town – then hovering just outside the top twenty – before it dissolved back into the unexplained lettering shenanigans and then back in turn to the original projector-agitating youngsters. At a time and on a day and on a channel where you would not unreasonably more normally expect to see an otherwise regular edition of a game show interrupted by our special guest John Inman dressed up ‘as’ Mother Goose, it felt very much out of place, seemingly founded on the nostalgic notion of the ‘magic’ rather than the fun of Christmas and oddly more aligned with the sort of intentionally out-of-time shows like Young Sherlock that you would have tended to find on ITV on Sunday afternoons around that time. Razzmatazz Solid Gold Christmas it was not.

A combination of being pressed into helping with present wrapping and/or various other Christmas Day-anticipating preparatory furniture rearrangements while it was actually on, and the inevitable continual parental ire-courting mysterious disappearances and reappearances of the Christmas TV Times over the coming days saw to it that I initially didn’t have an opportunity to find out what it was called, and then just plain forgot to. I didn’t forget about that weird programme itself, though. Admittedly Little Town would do its own historical vanishing act – you don’t even really hear it very much even now in fact – but every time I was reminded of it I would be reminded in turn of this strange, flat, stilted and haunted light entertainment anthology seemingly made with nobody whatsoever in mind. Which was very evidently the case, as nobody upon nobody that I described it to ever seemed to have either seen it or to have the faintest idea of what I was actually going on about. Usually having to also explain Little Town into the bargain did not exactly help, but even people who remembered The Beachcombers, Falcon Island, Buzzfax, Can’t Take My Eyes Off You by Boystown Gang and the ‘Bibbledy Bobbledy ladies and gents, pennies are pence to me’ song from Tomfoolery didn’t remember it. Even people who remembered a specific showing of the Pufnstuf movie by ITV one Saturday morning in the early eighties didn’t have the faintest idea of what it was or why it might have happened. Trying to find out what it was called was a little like looking in a kaleidoscope and just finding an assortment of refractive colours instead of a severely misplaced Cliff Richard.

It remained such a holly-decked distant mystery – as you can hear me talking about on Looks Unfamiliar here – that it was initially included on TV Cream under the title ‘Thing With Cliff Richard In’, and it was only thanks to the efforts of TV Cream‘s indefatigable listings-scourer Steve Williams that we were able to eventually identify it as A Christmas Lantern, broadcast by ITV at 7pm on 24th December 1982. Made by Central and described by TV Times as “This magical Christmas tale by Ronnie Cass shows how one family celebrates Christmas over eighty years… and without a hint of ageing” – you cannot help but suspect that whoever drew the short straw there was every bit as perplexed by it as I was – the near column-filling list of stars highlighted Una Stubbs, Mike Reid, Robert Hardy, Christopher Timothy, The Ambrosian Singers, Nigel Lythgoe, Wayne Sleep, Laurie Holloway and his Orchestra, Claud Paul Henry – a dancer who isn’t that famous but whose name always amusingly called to mind Benny from Crossroads wearing a beret instead of a woolly hat – and of course Cliff Richard, who it turned out had also performed The Water Is Wide as part of the show; Ronnie Cass, incidentally, co-wrote the screenplays for Cliff’s big-screen musicals The Young Ones and Summer Holiday so that weirdly very very slightly anachronistic feel suddenly seems to make a good deal more sense. Anyone who hadn’t wanted to join in the oddly structured fun could have opted instead for 20,000 Leagues Beneath The Sea on BBC1, Don’t Do As Donny Don’t Does-titled news retrospective The Year They Raised The Mary Rose – hopefully including Prince Charles’ miserably unfunny attempts at mid-raise witticisms for the news cameras – on BBC2, and the notably festive double bill of The Friday Alternative and Channel 4 News over on that pesky ‘new’ channel. Meanwhile, if you had somehow tuned in too early out of an inexplicable charge of excitement after reading that TV Times listing, you might also have seen a repeat of The Goodies’ unfairly maligned ITV debut Snow White 2, and some kind of showbiz spectacular called Strawberry Ice, which judging from the listing seems to have taken an ambitious and dazzling fantasy-themed panto show by top international ice dancers and given it the sort of name Lyons Maid might have rejected for lacking vibrancy and glamour.

You can find both of Cliff’s performances online, but in some ways A Christmas Lantern remains as distant and elusive as ever. Even though the entire show still exists in full, and is also the sort of one-off oddity that usually inspired viewers – not to mention obsessive Cliff Richard fans – to make and retain their own off-air recordings, only six non-Cliff seconds of A Christmas Lantern have actually found their way online anywhere. This almost literal blink and you’ll miss it fragment forms part of a preview of Christmas On ITV highlights for viewers in the Central region, and to be honest you could have forgiven anyone with the misfortune to live in the vicinity of the Lichfield transmitter for not expecting much in the way of raucous seasonal jollity and paper hat-askew goodwill. Following an at least halfway effort-making animation of the Star Of Bethlehem turning into the Christmas On ITV logo rendered in ye olde frozen waterre, it opens with a trailer for the Christmas Special of riotous hit game show Punchlines! – a show that hinged around comedians running about the set and swapping places with such speed and regularity that the contestants needed genuine skill and attentiveness to remember which ones had which halves of which joke – featuring presenter Lennie Bennett against a plain black backdrop mutedly promising “an even more festive than usual Punchlines!” with the same degree of exuberance as someone discussing their approach directing to Czechoslovakian theatre on a BBC2 arts show. While it was no doubt business as usual on the Christmas Punchlines! itself, even a hurtling Barry Cryer would have had trouble lifting the audience after that lead-in.

A Christmas Lantern is then introduced by the suitably bare minimum enthusiasm-deploying announcer as “capturing the spirit of the occasion in music, dance and comedy”, with at least one of those three represented by a clip showing what appears to be a formation dancing line of Boycies from Only Fools And Horses redeployed as waiters and setting down great steaming platters of traditional festive fare on a very long trestle table at which some kind of Stig Of The Dump-skewed approximation of Charlie Chaplin also appears to be seated. That’s basically all we get of A Christmas Lantern, and it’s straight on to Christmas Day with Ted Rogers jumping down the 3-2-1 staircase, the Game For A Laugh team deliberately falling over in panto costumes for reasons that we probably wouldn’t understand even if they were very patiently explained to us, Bruce Forsyth affecting comedy boredom while being carried on to the Play Your Cards Right set by a small army of ‘Dolly Dealers’, a disconcertingly prominent premiere for Disney’s decidedly family unfriendly 1979 live action sci-fi chiller The Black Hole, and some desperately needed post-Borgnine and V.I.N.CENT light relief with Chas’n’Dave demanding that Mick give it some stick in their Christmas Knees-Up, which incidentally you can find Grace Dent reminiscing about in Looks Unfamiliar here.

If all of that wasn’t enough, there’s also a look ahead to the unofficially shunted ‘Christmas Sunday’, where the highlights include Secombe At Christmas – represented by Sir Harry in a natty red smoking jacket leaning on a grand piano and chortling while Gemma Craven thunders through I Went To A Marvellous Party – and the network premiere of Donald Sutherland-led heavyweight 1979 Cold War thriller Bear Island, with a similarly impressively speedy premiere for Moonraker on the actual designated Boxing Day followed by, inevitably, The Morecambe And Wise Christmas Show when they went to Thames at the end. Why there apparently wasn’t enough room for Ian and Wee Jimmy presiding over festive mayhem and live performances by Modern Romance and Bananarama in The Krankies’ Christmas Club, however, will sadly have to remain a mystery.

You’ll probably find superficial equivalents to every other show and indeed movie in that Christmas On ITV trailer in any given present day Christmas television schedule, but A Christmas Lantern – possibly intentionally – felt like it belonged to a bygone era even in 1982 and certainly not something that ordinarily would have been in such a prominent slot on Christmas Eve. Its only even tenuous link to any present day counterparts is in featuring Cliff Richard singing an audience-pleasing new number that they would apparently have forgotten all about a couple of weeks later; tellingly, its place this year is taken by Britain Get Singing with Roman Kemp. It has more or less become one of those film strips the projector-provoking youngsters were watching in itself, so small wonder that it stood out as unusual even over a Christmas when Channel 4 – which you had to watch everything on because it was new, and that was that – led their festive entertainment with a mockumentary about Santa Claus being psychoanalysed and a ‘panto’ presentation of Prokofiev’s The Love Of Three Oranges. Even if it did only stand out to one viewer.

Buy A Book!

You can find an expanded version of Thing With Cliff Richard In with much more about the sights and sounds – including that inescapable Richard Clayderman box set advert – of Christmas in 1982 in Keep Left, Swipe Right, available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Alternately, if you’re just feeling generous, you can buy me a coffee here. At least we can be sure that Cliff Richard would write the correct name on the cup. Although he might write it on something else instead.

Further Listening

I had plenty more to say about A Christmas Lantern in Looks Unfamiliar here, and you can find Grace Dent’s thoughts on Chas’n’Dave’s Christmas Knees-Up – and the Tesco ‘Christmas ’82’ advert – here.