The Gist: Paul Duane's "My Christmas Memories"

My Christmas Memories

by Paul Duane

So here we are again! Smack-dab in the middle of “the most wonderful time of the year”, when sleighbells glisten and children listen, and my thoughts drift again to Christmases long-gone and as with most people of my age those memories often revolve around television, the Late Late Toy Show of course, as well as evergreen Christmas fare like the Muppets and of course the spectacle of Mass broadcast from Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral into our own homes where we watched kneeling beside the three-piece suite. People these days mired as they are in the swamp of social media and the rest of it don’t care about such things. Their loss. In my memories those times glow softly with a peace that the chilly yellow antiseptic-smelling present day can’t help to match.

My own most cherished memory of seasonal television is one that no matter how many times I repeat the memory when describing it to concerned loved ones, doctors or the police, nobody seems to remember except me.

This is difficult to believe because it happened on live television in broad daylight in the middle of December 1988 and I know because I saw it. But it never turns up in Reeling In The Years even though I never missed an episode and the people in the RTE Television Archive stopped replying to my polite emails long ago. Statistically someone else must have seen it! But so far I have found no-one.

This is why I am writing and with a bit of luck publishing this piece perhaps in Ireland’s Own magazine or possibly in Our Boys which is the magazine of the Christian Brothers Schools worldwide. These publications have a huge readership and surely someone out there will read my words wrinkle their brow pull out a dusty old VHS tape and send it to me so that I can have the last word on the subject and turn those doctors green from disappointment with my irrefutable proof positive on videotape. They would have to unlock those doors and I could walk out into the festive December air to find the doors long closed to me would open up again and all the ones I thought long lost would smile and take me in.

Proof. It’s what I’ve searched for all these long years.

Here's what happened as best I can tell it.

I was a student at the time in Dublin though for all the studying I was doing I might as well have called myself a dosser because to be frank the lure of easy living had caught me and I was at the time quite likely to remain in my bed until lunch hour was past and once out of bed my breakfast often came rolled up in a jumbo Rizla cigarette paper to be consumed while I watched afternoon  children’s TV programmes along with a can of beer if there was any left in the fridge.

Not just any old TV programmes though.

I was a super-fan as were all my friends of the puppet duo Zig and Zag who came to Ireland from a planet called Zog. They were a secret we kept from the outside world. They gave us a break every weekday afternoon from being young adults trying to survive the bleak Irish 1980s. We loved them. Mr Comedy and Captain Joke were our friends.

Throughout Halloween of that year one of the puppets – I no longer remember which one, so let’s just say it was Zag – had created a post-modern masterstroke which is to say he made a puppet of his own and tried to learn ventriloquism. This puppet Frankenstein’s monster was a lumpy-headed ugly bug-eyed creature to which Zag if it was Zag gave the name Podge. Zag’s clumsy attempts at ventriloquism were funny enough – a puppet operating a puppet! Had anything like this happened before in history? I doubted it! - but what happened after that was even funnier, so funny it made me howl even in my darkest dreams.

Podge sat ignored most of the time on a box at the back of the tiny studio from which Zig and Zag would broadcast. His ugly lumpy papier-mache head lolled stupidly staring with blank eyes as the puppets went through their routines. But one day something very strange happened when both Zig and Zag were for some reason momentarily off-screen leaving the studio empty. This is a phenomenon called ‘dead air’ and it is something television generally avoids and after what happened that day I understand why.

Podge, the puppet made by a puppet, moved its head and spoke.

“They don’t know I’m listening,” it said. “They don’t know I’m alive. They have a lot to learn about me.” I sat there riddled with strong weed watching in nervous fascination as this thing - this Golem – revealed its true nature to me and the rest of the television audience. We had been told a secret that Zig and Zag themselves were ignorant of. It gave me an excited scared bubbling feeling in my guts. But this isn’t the thing I’m talking about, this is only the beginning of the thing.

The Podge saga as we now called it continued through the month of October and we watched avidly as Zig began to slowly suspect something was up. Giggling with joy we talked about it in the dingy college canteen over polystyrene cups of Nescafé. We adopted weird ugly Podge as our mascot. He was in on the joke. Or so I thought anyway. He was the one who knew the world’s secret inner workings. I began to draw him in the margins of my college essays and I will admit perhaps I thought about him more than my friends and maybe I did it a little bit too much but it was only a joke really or so I thought at the time.

Eventually the Podge ‘story arc’ concluded and the evil puppet was found out and banished but I continued to turn the events of October over and over in my mind and examine them with fascination and some slight puzzling internal excitement.

On the day this happened Christmas was fast looming with its forced return to the family home where the parental norms I hid away from in Dublin would return and once again I would be with people who would not understand the secret language I had adopted in Dublin. I tamped down the fear by increasing my intake of substances which I managed to do by selling additional substances to my immediate friends and by ignoring my college work even more than usual.

The day this happened I breakfasted at lunchtime on stale bread toasted so as to intensify its palatability and topped with honey I found at the back of the fridge. The honey had fibrous growths in it that I finally recognised as the remains of the October mushroom crop which had been left there to macerate for weeks into a sweet sticky mulch. No stranger to fungi, I shrugged and ate it though it tasted strange. Though some have tried to argue it might have had some bearing on my later actions that day I maintain that things would have transpired in the same way even if I had been as sober as a member of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Society like my father.

A Christmas-themed week was in progress on the Zig and Zag show. It was built around a big ‘reveal’ which had been hyped for weeks. Surprisingly I was the only one at home on the day of this reveal as the rest of my housemates were busy doing their exam prep in the college library. All the better for me! I had the cluttered living-room entirely to myself. I made myself a cup of tea to go with my bread and honey. I waited in great excitement to see what Zig and Zag had in store for us. What was to come was something I could never have imagined.

A curtain hung across the middle of the studio set. It was hiding something mysterious and I smiled to myself as I imagined what it might be. Possibly the show’s host - the perennially confused-looking Ian – might have been made to dress as a hapless Santa trying to deliver gifts only to be mocked and made the butt of jokes by his puppet masters. Nobody knew because as I said before it was a carefully guarded secret.

Then the curtains parted to reveal Podge sitting upright on a tinsel-decorated throne. It was the last thing I expected. He had not been part of the show for weeks now. He had almost been forgotten except sometimes in my dreams. Here he was, back.

Now all the sounds the music the banter of the puppet hosts faded into an echoing distant roar as Podge’s bug-eyes bored deep into mine as I sat on the floor inches in front of the television in the livingroom filled with discarded pizza boxes and paperback books which gradually fell away from my view until all that was left in the universe was those terrible, unblinking eyes with their crudely painted black pupils that reflected back no light, nothing at all.

Then he said my name.

And he turned to look at me.

And he moved towards the tv camera that separated him from me and towards the curved smooth screen of the television and through it and into the room with me.

The things that happened after that they wrote up in the newspapers so you might have seen it and you probably have strong opinions about me like most people do but I don’t like to think about too much especially during the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.

The way they all say it was me who did all those things to all those people and say nothing at all about Podge the puppet even though I told them exactly what happened but now if I think about it too long it just makes me angry so I try not to.

Just because I forgot to press ‘record’ on the VCR sitting under the TV. If I had just recorded the time when the puppet came out of the TV at me they couldn’t be upset with me anymore and maybe they might allow me out for Christmas sometime instead of lying here in this yellow room with the smell of Dettol with my face turned to the wall on my small bunk looking into the cracks in the paint and turning them into pictures in my head as I sing the old songs to myself like have yourself a merry little Christmas or It was Christmas Eve baby in the drunk tank.

So please check your old video recordings for me!

In between the ads for Bachelors beans and Xtra-Vision video rentals somewhere in the static on some tape somewhere is proof of my innocence which if you think about it would be the very best thing you could ever give anyone for Christmas. You boy what day is it. There’s one for everyone in the audience.

I turned my face away and dreamed about two blank black eyes and the fuzzy reception on the tv set like snow falling generally all over Ireland.

Nollaig shona daoibh go léir.