BROADCASTERS opting to talk less about a subject would be turkeys voting for Christmas; so it was a curveball to hear the gang expert Anton Noble air the benefits of keeping schtum. “Not everybody needs to hear your trauma,” Noble counsels young men in a milieu where death or prison seems inevitable, and dying violently is the path to legacy.
Against the background of the vote on the assisted-dying Bill, The Moral Maze: What is a Healthy Attitude to Death? (Radio 4, Wednesday of last week) felt straitened by its four-panellists-and-four-expert-witnesses formula.
Apart from Noble, rehearsed positions, however heartfelt, replaced depth. The philosopher Dr Teodora Manea favoured an existential outlook to make death’s inevitability add meaning to life. Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, worried about the “manner of my dying”. Recently bereaved Ash Sarkar questioned the value of death cafés to mourners. The historian Victoria Holmes highlighted Christianity as the keystone to the Victorians’ capacity to face death.
For a lyricist concerned with death and destitution, Shane MacGowan’s music is astonishingly popular at Christmas. The presenter of Archive on 4: Shane MacGowan: The Old Main Drag (Radio 4, Saturday), Sean O’Hagan, first met the Pogues singer at a record stall in Soho in 1976, “when punk was a London subculture”.
Bob Geldof seized on this blurring of nostalgia and observation, saying that the Ireland that the Pogues’ songs presented were memories of the old country, “injected” into the Tunbridge Wells-born musician by his parents. “Shane’s Ireland was of the imagination, fuelled by romantic gestures: it was not true.” Resonance came from the lyrics’ “otherworldliness”. MacGowan’s sister Siobhan recalled summers in Tipperary, hiding from Aunt Nora calling them for the rosary. Their hole-in-the-wall refuge features in the song “Broad Majestic Shannon”.
The rock star Nick Cave, an Anglican (Feature, 25 November 2022), says that the evocations of drunk-tanks and elderly poverty in “Fairytale of New York” show “the breadth of Shane’s compassion”. The line “The wind cuts right through you, it’s no place for the old,” recall Mr Cave’s winter in the Big Apple with no money.
The creator of the TV series The Wire, David Simon chose “The Body of an American” as the soundtrack for the series’ police funerals, because it allowed the American tradition of the Irish cop to embrace all ethnicities: “Music about being othered speaks to a country of immigrants.” Doubtless this fictional funerary invention has become a real-life custom.
Advent was marked with a day of Carols Around the Country, starting at Martin Mere wetlands in Lancashire. As Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Cantus Articus played, inspired by migrating swans, swans on the water outside joined in on cue.