Last week’s surprising news that, as recently as the 2011 census, more than half of the British population declared themselves to be Christian was strangely buried under the totally unsurprising news that, in the 2021 census, a little less than half did. That was the headline. Basically it was saying: “Guess how many people said they were Christian in last year’s census. You’re right – it’s roughly that. There’s absolutely no need to read on.” For news organisations thirsty for attention, this seemed like a perverse strategy.
The Daily Mail appeared to have fully embraced this approach, reporting that “young people are shunning Christmas carols for more modern festive songs”. But I’m cheating – that’s actually from a headline in November 1956. But I’m lying – it’s in fact from a headline last week. (Obviously I’ve broken your trust in my reporting now – but that’s probably for the best. Really you should be routinely checking these things with your like-minded peer group on social media.)
As with the census story, this seems to be going out of its way to declare that the underlying article contains absolutely nothing that the potential reader wouldn’t have presumed already. “No need to read the below! Get on with your day!” (That’s the headline I always pitch for the online edition of this column, in the hope of deflecting a few of those eagerly seeking causes of offence.) Why this new approach?
Could it be mercy? After years of bombarding us with urgent reports of disaster and gloom, the media have decided to cut their readership of despairing neurotics some slack. “Give yourself a break. There’s a lot of normal, bland stuff going on that you don’t need to concern yourselves with.”
Or is it simply reverse psychology? The only way to attract the contrarian brain is to evoke an initial wave of boredom to be swum through to the open sea of fascinating truth. Eschewing all the blatant attempts to shock and enthral – the Piccadilly Circus video wall of diversion that blasts out at us – increasingly people are wincing and turning away. Their attention is caught instead by the rotting pigeon carcass in the gutter around the statue of Anteros (popularly, though wrongly, believed to be a statue of his brother, Deceros). It is on the worms crawling from the dead bird’s face that the next wave of ads for Bovril or Coca-Cola must be sited.
So it proved in this case. Underneath the attention-repelling headline, there were a few surprises, starting with this sentence: “A study found that 46% of 18 to 29-year-olds have never sung a traditional carol such as O Come, O Come, Emmanuel or Little Donkey.” I absolutely could not have predicted that the author of the article would pick O Come, O Come, Emmanuel and Little Donkey as their examples of traditional carols. What weird choices.
If I was sitting down making a list of traditional carols from my head, I reckon I would have got to those two, respectively, never and 14th (after The First Noel but just before A Shropshire Carol). And even though I think, out of the two, I would have been more likely to remember Little Donkey, I’d still have been asking myself if it was a proper one. It feels a bit infra dig to focus on the donkey rather than the infant deity or the human members of His team. It’s all a bit close to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which, according to the internet, predates Little Donkey by a decade. Whereas A Shropshire Carol would probably turn out to be 1,000 years old and originally based on something written about Woden.
The article’s writer is listed merely as “Daily Mail Reporter” and the choice of carols seemed to me to be so inexplicable that I genuinely wonder if this is a pseudonym for a robot – a little algorithm that generates basic reportage. You plug in the survey findings from the press release – in this case it was a study organised by Groupon (so please everyone buy lots of lovely Groupons this Christmas to show you appreciate their effort) – then type in the subject matter, “Christmas carols”, and a few hundred words of English get generated. But the randomiser settings were a bit off, so, pre-editing, the list of carols came out as “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, Mince Pies, Ho Ho Ho, Jesus Christ Is Risen, Vorderman, Little Donkey, A Christmas Carol, Hark the Herald Hen Parties Fling and Every Little Helps”. The busy editor had time only for deletions before going back to selecting the gropiest-looking snap of Matt Hancock.
There were more surprises to come. The survey’s findings did not appear to be as dismissive of tradition as the Mail’s journalist had been programmed disapprovingly to think. Of the 2,000 people asked, “39% would never sing [carols] in groups that traditionally call at homes”. So 61%, at some point, would. Blimey! That’s loads! I’m old school and pro-Christmas – I feel like I really get involved and devote myself to putting tinsel everywhere, buying presents and consuming alcohol with conscientious rigour – but I’ve never gone round the streets carol singing and doubt I ever will.
According to the survey, the rates at which people considered various festive activities to be “a thing of the past” were as follows: midnight mass 47%, attending a service on Christmas Day 43%, reading A Christmas Carol 41%, finding a satsuma or orange in their stocking 40% and watching festive ballet The Nutcracker 38%. The change you get from 100 by subtracting each of these figures implies a church-going, Dickens-reading, fruit-eating, ballet-attending majority. If this survey is true, Britain hasn’t really changed in half a century, something you’d imagine Daily Mail Reporter’s algorithm would be entirely in favour of.
It’s not true, though. No one is happy with a satsuma in a stocking – they want a PlayStation, plus Advent calendars full of chocolate or gin miniatures or lots of different shades of lip gloss. Mariah Carey and Slade have pushed Good King Wenceslas over in the snow. So what is the secret shocking truth behind these headlines? It’s that people lie in surveys. God knows how many of us are really Christian. Assuming He exists.
