How Santa Stole Christmas

Original version

BBC Radio 4 Extra

Your digital radio entertainment station showcasing the best in comedy and drama

Your digital radio entertainment station showcasing the best in comedy and drama. With recent favourites from BBC Radio 4.

Archive on 4

Documentaries

Factual

Brilliant stories told using archive from the BBC and beyond.

BBC Radio 4 LW

BBC Radio 4 FM

Archive on 4: How Santa Claus Stole Christmas

How Santa Claus Stole Christmas

BBC Radio 4 - Archive on 4, How Santa Claus Stole Christmas

Christopher Frayling explores how Hollywood helped to create the modern global Christmas.

Christopher Frayling explores how Hollywood movies helped to create Santa Claus and the modern global Christmas.

Cultural historian and writer Christopher Frayling explores how Hollywood movies helped to create the modern global Christmas.

If Dickens' A Christmas Carol invented the Victorian Christmas of family, good works and good cheer, Hollywood has created its modern counterpoint - Santa Claus, elaborate presents, hummable tunes, consumer satisfaction and family tensions and reconciliations. 

From Holiday Inn and Miracle On 34th Street to It's A Wonderful Life and White Christmas, Christmas movies are designed to create a warm glow in the audience. They have helped turn Christmas into a global event, spread across cultures and religions, and rebranded for the age of mass consumption. 

In the process, the meaning of Christmas has become comprehensively Americanised - complete with the ubiquitous iconography of Santa Claus, red-nosed reindeer, red costumes trimmed with white and shopping to the sound of piped seasonal muzak. A cultural critic said recently that Santa Claus is to American material faith what Jesus Christ is to the spiritual. 

Christopher Frayling dives into the BBC archive to discover how this happened and why - with the help of filmmakers, advertisers and historians, as well as comedians, commentators and religious figures.

Interviewees:
Joe Dante, film director
Judith Flanders, historian and author
Sir John Hegarty, advertising executive
Karen Krizanovich, broadcaster and writer
Kim Newman, critic and horror writer

Producer: Jane Long 

A Hidden Flack production for BBC Radio 4

BBC Radio 4

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

Accessibility links

Programme Index

Archive on 4

How Santa Claus Stole Christmas

Genres

Brand

BBC Radio 4 Extra

About BBC Radio 4 Extra