SPARE a thought for a group of people who are at their most vulnerable around this time of year but whose plight rarely attracts public sympathy.
I refer to those unfortunate shop assistants now being forced to listen, day after day, to the same small collection of banal Christmas songs, played on endlessly repeating loops. How on earth do they retain their sanity through the months of November and December? It's bad enough for customers, especially those of us who have already lived long enough to hear Slade's (So here it is) Merry Christmasor Cliff Richard's Mistletoe and Wineat least 500 times too often. We only have to spend half an hour so in the supermarket. And if we want to, we can always wear headphones and listen to something else, like Mahler's Fifth Symphony. For shop assistants, though, there is no escape.
I understand that some of the big stores at least stagger the introduction of seasonal soundtracks, first, making one in every five songs a Christmas one; then one in four; and so on until saturation point.
This is a relatively humane approach, allowing staff to build up resistance. It’s possible that some of the more enlightened businesses may now also be offering counselling to those affected. Even so, it will be no surprise when, one of these years, a shop assistant somewhere in the world successfully sues an employer for the harm caused by passive inhalation of Paul McCartney’s Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time over a prolonged period.
Then there'll be a wave of copycat actions; after which will come legislation to impose limits on the number of times an employee may reasonably be asked to listen to that song, or Wham's Last Christmas. Maybe eventually, the human rights of shop assistants in December will be the subject of an appendix to the UN Convention on Torture.
In the meantime, they must suffer on, slaves to the belief of evil retail scientists who for some reason think that exposure to these songs makes consumers spend more.
IF, THIS MINUTE, I had to choose one Christmas record for permanent banning, it would probably be that aforementioned Paul McCartney thing, one of many atrocities committed in his name since, sometime in the 1970s, the original, highly-talented songwriter was kidnapped by space aliens and replicated with something that only looks like him.
Not the least bad thing about Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Timeis that it's hard to listen to it without also reflecting again on John Lennon's death. What was a tragedy in its own right, you find yourself thinking, was made worse by the fact that they shot the wrong Beatle.
But the truth is that even Lennon's Happy Christmas War is Over– once (and possibly still for anybody who has not heard it a thousand times) one of the better seasonal efforts – now has all the musical appeal of being hit on the head, repeatedly, by a mallet. After too many repetitions, the quality of a song just doesn't matter any more.
And there is a corollary to that too. Trawling the internet's many lists of worst yuletide songs ever, I found several mentions of one I couldn't remember: John Denver's country-and-western number Please Daddy, Don't Get Drunk This Christmas. So I looked it up on YouTube to remind myself. And although the song is not – by any musical yardstick – good, it had one outstanding virtue: I had never heard it before.
As such, it was a refreshing break from Wham, Band Aid and the rest. In fact, when those start up now, I try to drown them out by mentally singing along with Denver’s impression of a child pleading with his feckless father: “Just last year when I was only seven/And now I’m almost eight as you can see/You came home at a quarter past eleven/Fell down underneath our Christmas tree.” No doubt even that song’s novelty will wear off soon.
I’m conscious that the problem of hackneyed Christmas music is, essentially, one of age. As with cholesterol, it’s the years of exposure to these songs that hardens your arteries. No doubt there are people out there who are experiencing the joy of Wham or Band Aid for the first time, or even for the hundred-and-first. And to them, I apologise for being so Grinch-like.
Maybe it’s just as well that most shop assistants are of a tender enough age that they can endure six weeks of Paul McCartney’s high spirits without long-term damage. On the other hand, increasingly, shop work has become a retiree’s job as well. It is a testament to human endurance that even people of that age can suffer the mind-numbing repetition of saccharine ditties about peace and joy for six weeks on end, and that at least some of them can still be cheerful.