The Christmas break has been an irregular event in my professional life, something I learned very early not to rely on. Only a few months into my first job, as a BBC announcer in Belfast, I raised the subject with my immediate boss. I wondered whether he had decided the morning and evening rota for Christmas Day, writes Denis Tuohy.
"Oh, didn't I tell you?" he said. "There's only one Christmas Day shift and it's newcomer's privilege. So you'll be doing the lot."
To be fair, the lot was very little: a few snippets of radio news and a call to the Met Office for the weather forecast. The only challenge came late in the day when a drunk phoned in to order a taxi. More than once I tried to explain that I was the BBC and couldn't help. This puzzled and eventually infuriated him.
"Well, bugger you, son. Next year you can whistle for your licence fee."
Post-programme fatigue
It was also during my time in Belfast that a radio producer and I dreamed up, for reasons that now escape me, a seasonal offering called Home for Christmas. This ensured that we would be working very late on Christmas Eve and - what with a jar or two afterwards - would suffer post-programme fatigue for much of the following day. Home for Christmas involved meeting people arriving back at the last minute on trains and boats and planes, and recording interviews in which they chose pieces of music for family and friends. The edited interviews and the music were broadcast later from a studio.
There was one serious handicap to be overcome - the limited stockpile of what in those days were called records in the BBC's local library. So we made a list of what was available and showed it to each interviewee before switching on the tape recorder. "Choose what you want," was the principle, "provided it's one of these." I would also write each choice in my notebook and have it ready as a prompt.
But fail-safes are rarely infallible. Brandishing my notebook in the face of one young woman at Belfast airport I asked what record she would like us to play for her mother in Glengormley.
"I can't remember," she giggled, "and I can't read your writing."
There was a Christmas Day in the late 1980s when I had to pack my bags in preparation for a flight to Israel the next morning. The television programme I worked for wanted an end-of-year report on the continuing intifada and the unlikely prospects for peace. The trip would include Bethlehem, a key area of unrest at the time, so apart from the assignment I looked forward to making a Christmas visit to the Church of the Nativity.
Demarcation dispute
As it turned out, however, if I thought the place might be a sanctuary from the mutual hatreds that seethed beyond its doors I couldn't have been more wrong. The jointly administered house of God was in the throes of its very own demarcation dispute. Cleaners from a part of the church for which the Roman Catholic authorities were responsible had strayed into territory where Orthodox-sponsored cleaners were supposed to operate. Or perhaps it was the other way round. Anyhow, the border infringement had aroused deep passions and on the day I showed up religious leaders were meeting somewhere else to try and calm things down.
At local level there was no comment whatsoever to be had from either side and no cleaning was being carried out in the contested areas. Sinister groups whispered in dark corners, glancing suspiciously at the occasional visitor who had come to admire the architecture, make contact with religious tradition or, who knows, even pray. It was a relief to leave the sacred premises, ease past Israeli troop carriers in the otherwise empty square and meet Bethlehem's mayor for a frank discussion of the intifada.
A few years later I became a television newscaster with ITN in London. Since I was living on my own at the time my domestic routine was not bound up with anyone else's. I could therefore make an effortless contribution to seasonal goodwill by accepting the Christmas Day shift - shades of early days in Belfast - when colleagues who were mums, dads or otherwise entangled would have appealed to the European Court of Human Rights if anyone had dared to approach them.
Prestige values
No big stories broke during my four Christmas Days at ITN. There was one memorable buzz of excitement, though, but it had nothing to do with news values and everything to do with prestige and keeping the company's nose clean. That was the year when the network scheduled a five-minute news bulletin immediately before the Queen's Christmas broadcast to her subjects.
From upstairs our masters issued a life-or-death directive that the bulletin must end on time. Isn't that always supposed to happen, you ask? Well yes, but this time "on time" meant more on time than at any other time. Over and over again we had to rehearse the traditional mix of royalty going to church, the Pope on the balcony and travellers pushing trolleys through Heathrow airport. But when it mattered we did indeed rise to the challenge and deliver split-second perfection.
Mind you, that's not how everyone saw it. "What a way for your career to peak," said a friend next day. "Warm-up man for the Queen."