While the crackers, wrapping paper and TV specials may now feel like a distant memory (though the Christmas stomach remains a terrible legacy), I can’t help but still feel a little Christmassy. This time of year generally never fails to remind me of a creative period in my life, when I volunteered to help script (and occasionally act) for a church youth group’s “alternative nativity”. I think it’s reasonable to say that, in hindsight, this period included some of the most embarrassing moments of my teenage life. And my late present to you is my shame. Hope you enjoy (it was on offer).

The first nativity I helped with was based around the idea of the traditional Christmas story from the perspective of the animals within the story (the donkey, the camel and the sheep) arguing as to who has the largest role within the story. The point and moral being that none of them are in the original story per se except the Donkey, and their involvement is largely superfluous – similar to how many of us centre the holidays around ourselves rather than its original Christmas message, etc. etc. My sister was in the director’s chair, and my contribution to the performance itself was an awful hammy turn as the self-centred Camel, the apex of which was probably an excruciatingly embarrassing a cappela solo of “Huw the Camel has…one hump” before trailing off into silence.

I was fourteen.

My memory of the writing process is a little fuzzy, but I can largely imagine my elder sister’s reaction to my input: “Oh yes Huw, that’s a good joke there. Not too easy to get either. They’re the best. You can just write that down in your special notepad – I’ll look through it later and try and add in all your bits if I have room.” Pinter never got that shit.

After the rounding success of the first nativity, we were encouraged to create another look at the story; in this case, it focused on non-participatory characters in the original biblical story. For example, one of the innkeepers who turned away Mary and Joseph for Health and Safety reasons, trainee angels who hadn’t passed their exams in time to join in and many others including my personal favourite, the shepherd who had nipped to the toilet and had thus not been summoned by the heavenly hordes of angels to meet the son of God.

The vignette, “sketch” style of this nativity meant that the writing was more easily split between me and my sister, so I have only myself to blame for creating the flamboyant character of Herod’s celebrity profiler (as my monologue memorably ended, “some things are difficult to put a good spin on”), who was outrageously camp and dressed to kill in a sort of yellow furry coat and sparkly top hat (I’m also pretty sure I put together the outfit). Alone on stage, wearing that, saying those lines…I’m not sure what I was trying to do to myself, but I think I may have been self-consciously murdering my own social life.

As my sister departed for university, I had to step up both to her directorial duties and full control of the writing. By this point I was sixteen and pretentious, so I basically went all postmodern and made it about a church youth group trying to put on an alternative nativity (largely so that I could smarmily self-reference the two previous shows), with said performance inexplicably (even to me) adopted by a Hollywood director to make into a great spectacle, thus LOSING THE REAL SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS IN THE COMMERCIALISM OR SOMETHING. I think that it got away from me somewhat (though everyone was very complimentary), largely due to my stress from having to direct as well. Next year, I vowed, for my nativity swansong, things would be different – I would reign in the spectacle, and keep things from getting too silly or over-ambitious

So of course I made it about a time-travelling alien trying to discover the true meaning of Christmas with numerous sound and visual special effects. To be honest, calling it a “Nativity” was a bit of a stretch. There was a caveman in it. In hindsight I have no idea what possessed me to structure the play on a Doctor Who knock-off that felt dated before it had even happened.  The level of historical accuracy in the time travel required almost super-heroic suspension of disbelief from the audience, and I can’t even remember what the “moral” was in that one (to be honest, it was probably something about not being distracted by commercialism and/or personal concerns at Christmas – pretty derivative of my earlier work, as I’m sure you’ll agree).

These might seem like less beloved Christmas memories. Some of the stuff I’ve admitted is a little embarrassing in hindsight (clearly my self-awareness hit puberty a little later than the rest of me), but overall I admit to having largely positive memories of being creative at Christmas. I always had a lovely and obliging cast to work with, and not an ounce of negativity from any audiences. I can’t say that it inspired any great playwriting talent in me (if anything, evidence suggests the opposite), but it was a lot of fun at the time, and I really shouldn’t begrudge the younger me a bit of a laugh at Christmas.

Though clearly I didn’t learn much from my own work – I just spent hundreds of words making the nativity story completely decentralised from its own meaning and focused it solely on myself.

Oh well. ‘Tis the season.

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★★★☆☆
Three Stars

Since Neighborhoods, Blink-182 have broken with their record label to produce the Dogs Eating Dogs EP. Recorded together as a group rather than in separate studios, it promised a new, more inventive and collaborative sound. The opening of ‘When I Was Young’ has all the vibrant elasticity that might be expected from an EP produced in such fertile circumstances. The same is true of ‘Disaster’: both these songs take the experimental approach to the band’s pop punk roots that we first heard in the eponymous 2003 album, but with half the conviction. Although the way these songs start seem eclectic and interesting, the ideas are not carried throughout. The simplistic structures which take over seem to let down the bold introductions, making the music sound confused and unsure of itself.

It might be refreshing, even interesting to begin with, but the gentle acoustic introduction to ‘Boxing Day’ turns out to suit its needy tone perfectly. Downbeat, even edging on dull, this song has been done before – and they know it. DeLonge’s caustic SoCal drawl is the only thing which really makes the song sound any different from the consummately disposable versions produced in their thousands by armies of adolescent boybands.

Although perhaps not the most exciting on the disc, the final track, ‘Pretty Little Girl’, promises the most for the next full album. Here the reconciliation of the band’s older school pop punk and newer experimentalism is by far the most successful and the point of the track does seem, in some respects at least, clear and effective. Until Yelawolf’s surprise rap, the actual content of the song doesn’t seem that original, but at least it succeeds where most of its colleagues failed – really engaging with the listener by reworking older, well-known sounds into something fresher. It’s the rap that really makes this though. Just like with Robert Smith in ‘All of This’, the band move differently around each other and around the music. This more sensitive sound generates the kind tensions which make music interesting, and which suggest better things to come in 2013.

★★☆☆☆
Two Stars

Life of Pi is a new, ‘magic-realist fable’ with academy-award winning Ang Lee as director and a huge digital-effects budget. What could go wrong? Well, a lot, is the answer. Don’t let the stirring electric drums of Sigur Ros and Coldplay (the cheek…) in its international trailer delude you – or the fact that it contains the only ‘pretty’ bits of the entire film.  If you want to see Life of Pi, you might be better off watching the trailer on YouTube instead. 

It gets off to a tortuously numbing start, which pointlessly illustrates Pi’s childhood in India. I know it’s called Life of Pi, but I don’t know if Lee’s literal attempt at a birth-to-mid-life-crisis timeline was the way to go. Sadly, this numbing doesn’t seem to subside once Pi’s actual journey begins. Even the disaster scene of the shipwreck seems futile – and frankly very mundane if you’ve ever seen Titanic. Which we all have. At 20 minute intervals I found myself glancing around at my fellow sufferers, updating my Twitter feed and re-re-checking the release date of Django Unchained.  If this was the rate Pi was going to live his life, it could have been 2013 by the time I left. I hoped it was 2013 by the time I left.

As a further criticism to this, we cannot expect the most radical and genius of wit to arise from a PG film, but at the same time, this does not justify the excruciating surrogates which surfaced. Yes, the schoolboy ‘pissing’ pun on Pi’s (hilariously witty) full name ‘piscine’ did make a few 8 year-olds crow with laughter, but I, along with the premiére-seat pensioners at the back, wasn’t even going to try to change my deadpan expression. When I found myself smiling, it was at the shots of overfed hippos grazing to a badly, badly judged majestic overture.

So, what is good about Life of Pi?  If nothing else, its digital effects are incredible. The CGI tiger Richard Parker is remarkably lifelike and so should be, starring as the supporting act – or even protagonist. It wasn’t hard to be on a more similar wavelength as those tiger-shaped pixels than the infuriatingly irrational Pi.  Lee does also succeed in breaking the stagnancy of Pi’s journey by whisking us now and then into a glittering and kaleidoscopic unreality (not always making sense), which somewhat illuminates Pi’s daily, and frankly quite pedestrian, lifeboat ritual. Why that whale illustrated in the trailer turns fluorescent, God knows. And even still, the whale’s visual perfection does not, in any way, justify IMDB’s ludicrously high rating of 8.4, which surpasses even James Cameron’s Avatar. It is, without doubt, an optical masterpiece though. What I expect happened was that Lee got a bit too happy over the CGI, and forgot he was supposed to be directing a film. Not an incongruous, 2 hour long advert.

The cherry on top of this cinematic let-down though was, without doubt, its infuriating / anticlimactic / ‘…really?’ / void ending. As the screen fades to black, the spectator silently wills that Lee will pull something startling out of the bag at the last second: Reversal of expectation? Catharsis? The return of Richard Parker? Unsurprisingly, the audience is left (in my experience, at least,) exasperated. Pi’s wife in Canada isn’t even his childhood sweetheart: a satiating ending which even the simplest of films could master. Yes, that girl whose name we can’t remember, but who for some reason was allowed to consume at least 15 minutes of valuable screen time.

If anything, the film is a bombsite (or shipwreck) of unanswered questions and ambiguity. With a middle-aged Pi banging on about ‘believing in God’, and a junior-school Pi trying to follow three religions, you’d think the teenage Pi would encounter one or two instances of divine intervention. Apparently not. So, does the story make you believe in God? Not really. Does the story make you believe in anything? Thanks to the film’s superfluous digital effects, I’d be inclined to say no. If you’d like to pay £7.45 for post-trailer betrayal and a trippy daydream (nightmare?) go and see Life of Pi.  If you want to watch a film, go and see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

It was an ambitious move on the part of Emmy the Great and Tim Wheeler to schedule their special London Christmas gig on the same night as The Pogues’ only UK show of 2012. After all, ‘Fairytale of New York’ has been cemented in the country’s musical consciousness as everyone’s favourite Christmas song since before Emmy picked up a guitar. But on the 20^th December, 2012 the night before the apocalypse (as Tim repeatedly reminded the audience), one of indie music’s cutest couples managed to capture the Christmas spirit perfectly for everyone who crammed into Scala.

The audience was given a clue as to what the night might bring when Emmy, possibly fearing that her fans might be suffering from boredom, came on stage in between the two support acts to talk about the book series ‘Sweet Valley High’, which is for "teenagers and people with, you know, hearts", in her words. After a brief reading from the book, which is about a girl with an evil twin who is identical apart from "a mole on her left shoulder, ew", Emmy proceeded to list the many and outlandish deaths which occur throughout the series including "Luke, silver bullet". And that wasn’t the end of the out-of-the-ordinary warm-up acts: after the two support bands, Pete the Magician took the stage, performed a few unorthodox card tricks involving a loaf of bread before stripping down to nothing but colourful underpants, a vest, a sweatband and socks, then leaving to rapturous applause.

From then on, it was all Christmas as Emmy & Tim, arriving on stage to an instrumental cover of ‘We’re Walking In the Air’ complete with electric guitars, launched into their re-released Christmas album, ‘This Is Christmas’ with tinsel on their microphones and a light-show of snowflakes playing across the walls. Christmas is a time for otherwise unbearable cheesiness, and they certainly managed that, gazing into each other’s eyes throughout ‘Snowflakes’. But the humour of the night was key, and continued with ‘(Don’t Call Me) Mrs. Christmas’, a lament on behalf of Santa’s wife, a very neglected woman this time of the year ("probably shagging an elf" according to Emmy, which "might not be so bad" according to Tim). Another highlight of the pair’s incredible showmanship came when the lights went down and the surround sound went crazy to introduce ‘Zombie Christmas’; terror reigned as the support acts came on stage in horrifying make-up and staggered into the crowd hunting for brains.

Their Christmas album wasn’t the only source of material though, with Emmy & Tim drawing on classics such as ‘Sleigh Ride’, as well as The Ramones’ ‘Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want To Fight Tonight)’ and even E17’s ‘Stay Another Day’, a thoroughly surreal experience complete with arm-swaying and lighters in the audience. Inevitably, the show closed with joyful dancing and singing along to ‘Fairytale of New York’ before the whole cast of Emmy & Tim’s Christmas extravaganza came on stage for a final bow. Apparently they intend to make this a tradition so, to quote one of the pair’s songs, "see you next year".