Come to the Christmas Day, Old Chum!
2020 Christmas will be a Cabaret-esque nightmare, complete with a sense of impending doom and dusted with tap-dancing blitz spirit
Wilkommen, bienvenue, welcome! It’s almost Christmas time, and despite the sense of overall dread and the stench of mass death hanging in the air, Britain is determined to put on its sparkly shoes and pretend it’s all fine. When is this dance being performed, might you ask? Well, between the 21st and 28th of December, of course! On those seven days, the jazz band will be playing, the cast fully warmed up, the laces of the tap shoes tied firmly and the tickets being checked at the door.
Come to the Christmas Day, old chum! Just like a real-time immersive performance of the blackly comic Cabaret, a musical about singing, dancing, screwing, drinking and, of course, Nazis, we will all be invited to a seedy set of titillating numbers set to dazzle us past our consciences. Watch the ham-fisted governmental chorus do their level best to rush us past our sense of social responsibility and rouse us into a UK-wide flash mob performance you’ll never forget.
When the coronavirus first hit our nation, the first response of boomers and our government officials was to adopt a wartime spirit. Don’t be afraid, we lived our lives through the blitz, so why can’t we adopt our stiff upper lip now? This bizarre refusal to admit that a deadly virus was not the same as a bomb threat was soon dissipated by scientists, who insisted that no, ignoring the virus and defiantly flying in the face of regulations was not the right way to go. The blitz didn’t seep into your immune system and kill you from the inside, now, did it? Very good. Now we all understand that ignoring the virus and shaking your fists at its audacious attempts to ruin our society is not a good idea. Right? We all get it, right?
Well, dust off your gas mask and get out your ration book, because apparently we aren’t finished with the Churchillian logic just yet. Get your tickets at the door and gather round, Brits, we aren’t letting that bold-faced virus ruin our fun this year. No, in fact, we have intelligence that informs us the coronavirus will be committing to a ceasefire Christmas week. To celebrate, in a viciously bad reprisal of Liza Minnelli’s iconic role (all he needs is the hat and some hair dye), Boris Johnson is coaxing us out of solitude in time for the Christmas Cabaret. “What good is sitting alone in your room? Come, hear the music the play! Life is a Christmas Day, old chum; come to the Christmas Day!”
I get it. The lights are flashing and I want a front row seat to this show. I have three sisters, two brothers and, for all intents and purposes, four parents. Combine busy work schedules and geographical distance, and you’ve got yourself very few windows in which we can all be together across the year. Christmas is that, for me. Togetherness. I could leave the paraphernalia out of it and I wouldn’t mind at all. But it does mean something to me. What I’m trying to say is, I get it. Despite my sarcastic tone, I get the desire to see your beloved people on the one day a year nobody has anything better to do. It’s really important. It really matters.
Yet no matter how much Christmas does or doesn’t matter to you, the pandemic is worse now than it was in March when we hid behind closed doors, baked banana bread furiously and clapped for the NHS on a Thursday night. Lockdown was difficult the first time around, but at least we were taking it seriously. We were spritely in our fear, diligent in our drills, dancing to the tune of Stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives; we choreographed our own at-home dystopian Cabaret, complete with problematic class divisions, an ensuing global tragedy, and a creepy yet endearing MC in the form of Chief Medical Inspector Chris Witty telling us to remain indoors. “Leave your troubles outside! So, life is disappointing - forget it! In here, life is beautiful!”
Unlike in the spring, though, coronavirus is no longer a new concept. The people are bored, and the tired old tune of Stay At Home ain’t so catchy nowadays. Boris had to come up with a solution to his waning showbusiness career, and so it came to him, perhaps during one of his seedy private rehearsals of the threesome song Two Ladies (“Diddly dee dee dee! Two ladies! But I’m ze only man, jah! I like it!”); he has decided to invite us all to the Cabaret once more.
After all, Boris has been a little down in the mouth since his veritable soulmate and raison d’être Dominic Cummings packed his bags and stormed out with a final gilet-clad iteration of Mein Herr: “Bye bye, mein liebe herr! Farewell, mein liebe herr! It was a fine affair, but now it’s over!” Boris is dying to be out on the town for some rebound fun and he’s asking the nation to join him in the name of wartime resistance. It’s not like he can take his wins elsewhere - we can all picture him singing a lonely, drunken rendition of Maybe This Time after a particularly nasty beating from Keir Starmer in PMQs - so all that’s left is to throw the nation under the bus as his own career drowns. “Everybody loves a winner, so nobody love me…”
I won’t give you the song and dance about how irresponsible this is - besides, I’ll be interrupting Jacob Reese-Mogg’s belting parliamentary performance of Tomorrow Belongs To Me - but I will say this: this is an economical choice. An egotistical choice. A purely political choice. Boris, afraid of sealing his fate as villain of this particular production, has given us all what we want: the chance to see our families and feel like none of this ever happened. We’re all fucked, anyway, so let’s just booze it up and have fun, right? Isn’t that what they did in the war?
Christmas is an important time for the economy, as our billionaire Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak has reminded us many times. Rishi’s particularly snarky version of Money Money alongside the nation’s leading lady is a frighteningly miserly interpretation of what used to be a wealth-hating classic, I have to say. “Money makes the world go around, the world go around, the world go around, of that we both are sure!” You can almost hear them laughing at us when they whisper, “Who’s there?” “Hunger!” “Oooh, hunger!”
So, the show must go on. If you’re stuck between a rock and hard place when it comes to choosing where to go and what to do at Christmas, you aren’t alone. Like it or not, you’re inexorably trapped in the Tories’ acid-trip Cabaret, complete with all the necessary trimmings of fascism, sticky back rooms and slippery moral choices. You might as well make the most of it and go along for the ride. As Chris Witty will remind you when you are back in lockdown on January 2nd, sitting glumly on your sofa as if it were March 2020 all over again: “Ladies and gentlemen, where are your troubles now? Forgotten? I thought so! We have no troubles here. Here, life is beautiful. The girls are beautiful. Even the orchestra is beautiful…”
Written by Maddie Goode
Madeleine Goode is a writer, tutor and barista from Manchester. She can be found cute-wrestling any dog she sees, watering her houseplant collection or making cheap jokes on Twitter. She likes to write about current affairs, neoliberalism and feminism, as well as poetry and journal entries. You can find her personal site at www.seizeyourlife.blog; on Instagram and Twitter she is @goodegracious.