It's Christmas Eve, and since I've been neglecting you of late, and in lieu of a real gift or indeed anything of much actual substance to say, here's an anecdote about my day's listless internet surfing. Hey, notice how no one calls it 'surfing' anymore? It's probably because the sense of fun has worn off. Using the internet at the close of 2012 feels more like slowly drowning. By this point I can almost hear the rattle of water in my lungs.
But anyway, I'm here to talk about The Snowman, the classic Christmas family cartoon and staple of the late December TV schedule for the past thirty years. You might have heard that tonight a sequel is being shown on Channel 4, The Snowman and the Snowdog, which judging from the title promises to be an 'out-there' conceptual re-imagining of truly pedestrian proportions. I was reading one of those typically hand-wringing articles about it on the Guardian website when I discovered that The Snowman was once introduced in a short video opening by a peroxided David Bowie dressed in beige chinos and a pastel sweater. AND that the whole thing was available on YouTube. Christmas, for me at least, had clearly come early this year.
We see David pottering around a darkened attic, wistfully resting on an old rocking-horse and reminiscing about his childhood. He speaks about this using the pronoun 'we', suggesting either that a) he still lives with his parents, or b) he's suffering from some form of split personality disorder, both of which would go some way to explaining the beige chinos and paisley sweater. Then he pulls a Snowman-decorated scarf from a drawer and tells us he was given it by 'a real snowman', and we cut to the beginning of the cartoon. The implication is that the child in it grows up to be David Bowie, which is a brilliant idea. It lends what has previously seemed a simple tale about childish wonder and the loss of innocence a new and nutty layer of meaning; as he clutches the sodden scarf and hat of his deceased friend at the cartoon's close, is he already dreaming up the piano riff for Ashes to Ashes? Is Starman, his hymn to an elusive, mind-blowing celestial figure who refuses to visit him, simply a veiled reference to another magical 'man' he once knew? It's a psychoanalytical goldmine.
What was even more satisfying than then video. however, was reading the YouTube comments (always a fertile breeding ground for genius insight) and stumbling across this one, by user TheRealVeterans.
At first this struck me as an odd observation. Seeing as the Snowman never speaks, it seems difficult to determine what his attitudes might be - for all we know he could be mentally reciting his favourite passages of Mein Kampf or chuckling at the memory of old road safety videos in which toddlers are catapulted through windshields as he gallivants around in the snow. Thus the only clue we have to his attitudes come from his actions - which, as I don't need to remind you, mainly involve abducting a small child and flying him to Lapland in clothing patently unsuited to the freezing conditions. Indeed, at one point the Snowman flies showily low over a Mosque, as if to say 'Look at the broken state of the nation we're escaping', before whisking him off to a gathering attended exclusively by giant white men for a spot of ritualistic chanting and dancing. None of which is suggestive of a particularly tolerant, enlightened mind.
And as a final marker of his sheer callousness, the child having developed an evident emotional attachment to him, the Snowman chooses to melt in his back garden, leaving the poor kid to wake up on Christmas morning to the sight of his watery corpse. Yes, I know that the coming daylight meant that he was doomed to die, but if we acknowledge that this same Snowman only moments before waving goodbye to the boy had the power to fucking fly, you'd think he'd have done the decent thing and nipped off to behind a bush before dissolving into a messy pile of coal and knitwear. It's the equivalent of an elderly relative who, upon sensing the end is near, chooses not to go quietly but curl up underneath the Christmas Tree so that the kids come down not to presents but to the sight of Grandma's dead, bloated face. It rather puts a crimp in the festive spirit.
The video opening only reveals the extent of the psychological damaged cause; the boy has grown up to be weird, lilting manchild, pottering around an attic, fondling childhood heirlooms and talking to no one. It only takes one night with the Snowman, the cartoon suggests, to turn you forever into a living Ken doll. I can't help thinking that more people possessing the Snowman's attitudes can only make for a more disturbing, pastel-shaded world.
But then I realised - this isn't any old freak in an attic and jumper, it's David Bowie; possibly the greatest and most innovative British solo artist in the history of popular music. Seen in this light, it all begins to make sense; it isn't hard to see how the attentions of a child-abducting, racist and sadomasochistic Snowman might lead to you wanting to wear make-up and write The Laughing Gnome, and my golly isn't the world better off for it. What with today's charts being as bland and mass-produced as they are, we could probably do with a couple more snowmen to liven things up. Just imagine how much more exciting Ed Sheeran might sound if he'd had to face a bit more dismembered slush as he was growing up. So hear hear, I say to the TheRealVeterans's diagnosis. Bring on the frozen kid-snatchers. The rebirth of pop starts here.
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