It’s Independence Day, and I miss winter, so how about some sentimental Christmas music? Here’s a selection from a British TV special that Channel 4 shows every holiday season. The song is “Walking in the Air”, from The Snowman:

This half-hour special, first aired in 1982, has apparently become, in Britain, iconic of holiday TV in the same way that that cloying, lame, religious Charlie Brown special has over here. The Snowman, though, is worlds ahead of any American holiday kids’ TV. It’s more refined, more genuine, more innocent, and ultimately, more visually beautiful. In summary: lonely boy makes snowman, snowman comes to life, snowman is curious about human life, snowman in kind flies boy to North Pole to show him Christmas creature life and participate in pseudo-pagan snowman dance. Pathos creeps in at the end (magic snowmen are notoriously impermanent friends), and I’ll admit I sobbed pitifully the first time I saw it. What’s so remarkable is that the show is entirely without dialogue: the lyrics to “Walking in the Air” are the only words you hear for the duration of the show. Everything else is instrumental. The orchestra and the animation tell you everything you need to know about the characters and the wonder with which they experience each others’ worlds.

The score was composed by English composer Howard Blake, and the boy soprano here is Peter Auty, who went on to be an operatic tenor. Channel 4 astonishingly left him uncredited for twenty years, until they finally inserted him in the credits in 2002. A measure of how well-recognized this show is in Britain is the well-intentioned spoof of the “Walking in the Air” sequence that appears in a 2006 Irn Bru TV ad.

Tags: Music Post-off