Far from being a time of ‘peace on Earth’ and ‘joy to the world’, the ‘season of goodwill’ somehow manages to disappoint, depress, highlight pain and inequality, and generally rain down misery, misfortune and death across the planet every year.
Wars don’t stop for mince pies and mulled wine. Nor do poverty, desperation or the cash registers which, let’s face it, are what actually drives this thing. With so much cynicism and bad karma in circulation, it’s no wonder so many of us have such a miserable time of it when December comes around.
From the farcical to the frightening and the comedic to the catastrophic – here are just a selection of mishaps, tragedies and other nightmares before Christmas… BY CHRIS JOHN
31st December 1999: London New Year Fireworks Fail
The capital’s Millennium fireworks on the Thames proved a damp squib for many, with The Guardian later reporting on the ‘river of fire that fizzled out’. The night saw a million revellers cramming onto the Embankment to witness an ambitious ‘piece of pyrotechnic wizardry’ creating a breathtaking ‘illusion of water turning to fire in a wall of flame advancing at the speed of the Earth’s rotation from Tower Bridge to Vauxhall’.
The reality was somewhat different – a job lot of rockets being let off from a dozen or so barges in the middle of a grim English winter.
1: 25th December 2008: Eartha Kitt Dies
Eartha Kitt devastated legions of gay fans by purring her last on Christmas Day 2008. The ‘Santa Baby’ diva was effectively blacklisted during the 1960s after making anti-Vietnam war remarks to the US First Lady at a White House luncheon, scorning: “you send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed.
No wonder the kids rebel and take pot”. In later years she campaigned for gay-rights, advocating same-sex marriage and appearing at numerous LGBT events. No wonder we were so distressed when she died.
2: 10th December 2010: Rudolph Explodes
Holiday joy turned to horror when children watching a parade in Richmond, Virginia, saw a giant inflatable Rudolph become impaled on traffic signals.
Handlers inadvertently steered him towards his demise as a gantry delivered a fatal wound to the head, causing him to rapidly deflate into a quivering pile of PVC (or die, depending on your viewpoint) thus shattering the illusions of younger onlookers, many of whom burst into tears.
3: 25th December 1986: EastEnders Christmas Day Shocker
A classic British telly moment saw a staggering 30.15 million viewers (the biggest ever UK Christmas TV audience) tune in to watch Dirty Den Watts surprise lush-wife Angie with divorce papers on Christmas day, following the revelation she’d been faking cancer to keep him from dumping her.
Across the Square, Arthur Fowler suffered a breakdown in the same episode, trashing Pauline’s parlour having been caught stealing the Christmas club money and ending up rocking back and forth on a mental ward just in time for ‘Songs of Praise’.
4: 26th December 2004: Boxing Day Tsunami
One of the worst natural disasters in history, an Indian Ocean earthquake on Boxing Day morning 2004 triggered a series of catastrophic tsunamis resulting in the death of over 230,000 people in fourteen countries. Most badly affected was Indonesia, suffering an estimated 167,000 fatalities alone, with a further 50,000 in India and Sri Lanka.
Killing tourists and locals alike, some commentators noted the disparities in media coverage and treatment of dead Western tourists and Asian victims, who made up the majority of casualties, and whose corpses were splashed across European and American tabloids whilst being described as a ‘health hazard’ by the authorities.
Meanwhile, most of Britain simply made a note to cancel their package tours to Phuket the following winter and carried on as normal.
5: 1st January 1972: The Poseidon Adventure
Also starring Gene Hackman and Roddy McDowall, such was the tragic scale of the Oscar-winning epic, complete with laughable storyline and risible acting that Hollywood producers felt compelled to issue an even trashier TV remake in 2006.
6: 31st December 2003, 2004 and 2007: Edinburgh Hogmanay Fail
Long famous for their New Year shenanigans, the Scots often deride the paucity of seasonal offerings south of the border. Whilst we admit cramming into Trafalgar Square for five minutes of screaming at midnight and losing your party heels in the night bus stampede afterwards is no way to ‘ring in the new’, we can’t recall New Year ever being actually cancelled in England.
Meanwhile, the festivities have been axed three times in Edinburgh alone over the last decade due to abysmal weather, resulting in up to 100,000 being sent packing at the last minute. Not to mention, regular washouts in Glasgow, Stirling and Aberdeen. Oh dear.
7: 16th December 2008: Suicide of Actor John Costelloe
Lending lamentable credence to the idea of the holiday season being a time of unbearable loneliness and despair, the actor John Costelloe, bestknown as gay fireman, Jim ‘Johnny Cakes’ Witowski, in The Sopranos, died at his Brooklyn home from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the run-up to Christmas.
The New York Post reported the story as ‘Death of ‘Soprano’ Hunk’, with one friend recounting how he’d seemed ‘in good spirits’ only weeks earlier.
25th December 2008: German Russian Roulette Fail
We love out-of-control drinking games and waking up in the gutter after a blackout as much as the next toxic queen. An inebriated Cologne man, however, took things too far, perhaps after becoming bored with Christmas Day charades, when he foolishly blew his brains out in front of his wife, children and other relatives.
German weekly, ‘Der Spiegel’, recounted how the 52 year-old reportedly declared: “now we’re going to play Russian roulette”, before loading a single bullet into a handgun, spinning the barrel and pointing it at his temple. A friend who had dropped by said: “we thought he was joking… but there was a loud bang and he collapsed in the chair. Blood poured from a head wound”. Oh dear.
8: 1st January 2000: Millennium Bug
The entire planet teetered on the brink as ‘experts’ predicted, well, more or less the complete end of the world leading up to the year 2000. Governments threw billions into defending computers against the ‘Millennium Bug’, aka the ‘Y2K Problem’ or ‘the inability of databases to tell the difference between the year 2000 and the year 1900’.
This apparently meant we’d either be catapulted back to a Victorian age of workhouses and crinolines, or that laptops from Wembley to Winnipeg would simultaneously shut down on the stroke of midnight, causing riots in the streets and the end of civilisation.
In the event, er, nothing actually happened. Money well spent then.
