ARE you sitting comfortably? Good. Then I’ll begin…
I haven’t seen the 1983 seasonal comedy ‘A Christmas Story’, so I don’t know enough to comment on whether or not it’s a classic, as is claimed in some quarters. But the Library of Congress in Washington DC in 2012 placed the film in the National Film Registry of the United States by reason of it being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.” Has that propelled it to classic status? To use an American phrase that Ralphie might employ, “I guess so.”
Over the past few days I’ve had cause to gen up on the movie and its homely central premise, and here’s what I’ve learned about it…
Ralphie is a nine-year-old kid resident in your archetypal American suburb around the end of the 1930s in the fictional town of Hohman, Indiana. Like all boys of nine when Christmas approaches, Ralphie has his heart set on a certain present from Santa. What he wants is a pellet-firing BB gun; not just any BB gun – no, sirree. What Ralphie wants is the ‘Red Ryder Carbine Action 200 Shot’ BB gun. Like most Christmas movies this one has a happy ending. By way of a comically tortuous route, and employing a host of side plots and humorous circumstances, Ralphie finally gets the present of his dreams.
ARMS DUMP: The house from the movie is now a popular tourist attraction/museum
If, like me, you’ve not seen the movie and you don’t have a mental picture of the Red Ryder that Ralphie covets, then let me help you out here. Precisely the same model of BB gun appeared in another seasonal movie which seven years later would become an undisputed Christmas classic – Home Alone. It’s the Red Ryder BB gun that Kevin carries around strapped to his back and which he uses first to shoot toy figures into the basement, and then to shoot hapless burglars Harry and Marv through the cat flap, respectively in the balls and the napper.
A Christmas Story has become so embedded in US culture that a marathon loop screening of the film has taken place across Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in the United States for almost 30 years. In Cleveland, Ohio, a replica of Ralphie’s house is a tourist attraction where fans of A Christmas Story can relive their favourite bits of the movie. They can see the essay that Ralphie wrote about his passion for the BB gun. They can see where Ralphie broke his glasses, where he gets his mouth washed out with Lifebuoy soap for swearing and where Ralphie’s friend gets his tongue stuck to an icy pole.
But the biggest thrill for visitors, the centrepiece of the Ralphie house visit, is to hold that Red Ryder BB gun beside the Christmas tree in Ralphie’s living room and have their picture taken.
Which is what Relatives for Justice deputy director and Andersonstown News columnist Andrée Murphy did during a seasonal visit to Ralphie’s house in January. She’s written often about her love of the whole Christmas thing in her column, so it came as no surprise that a Christmas tourist attraction would draw her like a moth to a flame. And so Andrée and a US friend did the whole Ralphie kit and kaboodle and then did the thing that visitors look forward to doing more than anything else – they joined the queue to have their picture taken.
With Ralphie’s BB gun.
Beside Ralphie’s Christmas tree.
In Ralphie’s living room.
Smiling broadly.
Last week the Belfast Telegraph/Sunday Life found out about the visit. The sister papers put their top investigative team on the job and after long hours of painstaking legwork, burning the midnight oil and pumping their best and most reliable sources, they managed to find the picture of Andrée with Ralphie’s BB gun. On Andrée’s Facebook page. Alongside pictures of her family, her garden, her dog and her baking.
The sinister bastard.
And then, wielding their shiny sword of justice behind their trusty shield of truth, they went to battle with the most notorious fan of A Christmas Story in Our Wee Country.
The headline on the article read ‘Charity chief under fire for gun photo’. Or at least, that’s what the headline in the Sunday Life read. When the Belfast Telegraph online edition hoovered the story up a few hours later the headline had changed to the interminable ‘It shows a lack of respect’: Deputy chief of victims’ charity slammed for ‘distasteful’ imitation rifle photo’.
A pal of an insider who spoke to a source at the BelTel editorial meeting told me: “We thought it was a bit of unfair for our chums at the Life just to call it a gun in the headline since Ulster folk have a very definite idea of what a gun actually is. And we’re more afraid of the lawyers than they are. So we changed it to ‘imitation rifle’. We were going to call it a BB gun and get a tourist/ Ralphie/Christmas reference in, but we were keen for readers to understand the profound seriousness of this important story.”
And who, we proceed to ask ourselves, is Andrée ‘under fire’ from? Who has branded her decision to visit a Christmas attraction and hold nine-year-old Ralphie’s BB gun beside a Christmas tree ‘distasteful’? Well, the quotes are from the family of a West Belfast plastic bullet victim, over whose names I shall draw a veil of silence lest I too should have my sense of taste and appropriateness called into question. It was “highly inappropriate” for Andrée to hold Ralphie’s BB gun beside his Christmas tree, they said, especially since she represents a group which includes victims “many of whom have lost loved ones to gun violence”.
Now, to repeat, I haven’t seen the movie, but I’ve checked the synopsis on the IMDb movie database and at no time in the movie does Ralphie use his BB gun to shoot any Irish people dead. I think it’s important that we get that straight, because had Ralphie’s BB gun been smuggled into Ireland by Ulster Resistance, had it been used in the subsequent upsurge in drive-by and pub shootings, many of whose victims are represented by RFJ, I’d be the first to say, “Andrée, put Ralphie’s BB gun down and step away from his Christmas tree.”
The West Belfast critics of Andrée then opined that Andrée “shows a lack of respect for the people the organisation claims to speak for”. Well, RFJ has spoken for me and my family for a long, long time, and they have done so with endless and inordinate empathy and professionalism, so I would have to respectfully disagree when I’m told that its deputy director visiting a Christmas visitor attraction shows a lack of respect for me, or indeed the countless others who are and have been blessed to have Andrée and her colleagues by our side over the long and painful years.
This is the third Sunday/Monday in a row that Sunday Life/BelTel have published stories critical of Relatives for Justice and Andrée Murphy. Apart from a singular focus on a victims group and its deputy head, the three stories share a common shortcoming: They’re all hopelessly outdated. The first concerned DUP anger – or was it fury? – at something that Andrée Murphy wrote about the DUP and the Orange Order last November. Four months ago. But that was breaking news compared to last week’s doozie which concerned the status of a complaint about RFJ made to the Charities Commission. Three years ago. So this week’s piece about a Christmas visit to a Christmas house that took place seven weeks ago is the newspaper equivalent of live-streaming.
I don’t know why Sunday Life/BelTel have suddenly taken such a lively interest in a Belfast- and Dungannon-based victims’ group. Perhaps Andrée and her colleagues have done something to upset the Dutch-Belgian media conglomerate which owns the two unionist papers. And I certainly don’t know why in their efforts to hold RFJ’s feet to the fire they’re resorting to news stories with the ‘new’ bits removed – stories which might better be included in a Memory Lane column in the feature section.
But I’ve warned Andrée that if she has anything embarrassing to reveal about her First Communion Day in Dublin or the evening of her Leaving Cert that she would do well to approach the Sunday Life/BelTel and throw herself at their mercy. For I know that the Sunday Life/BelTel has a big heart. I know because at the same time that they did their searing exposé of a woman visiting a Christmas tourist attraction, they blew open the case of an unfortunate policeman who’s about to lose his job of 22 years. He’s about to get the heave-ho because he went online and tried to pay for sex via someone who turned out to be a convicted nonce.
But while this was incredibly fertile tabloid ground, the papers decided instead to treat this as the human tragedy that it is. This was no ‘perv cop’. This wasn’t a ‘sleazy betrayal of trust’ or a ‘sordid sex sting’. And of course the copper’s enthusiasm for paying for sex wasn’t even “inappropriate” or “distasteful” in the way that holding Ralphie’s BB gun clearly is.
I don’t mind telling you that I splashed tears on to the page as I read about what happened to a police “veteran” who only wanted to break the law by handing £140 over to a sex worker.
The story read: “A PSNI officer’s 22-year career is in tatters after a notorious paedophile duped him into paying for sex.” The poor peeler, we’re further informed, thought he was only “organising a meeting with an escort”, when in fact he was setting up the illegal sex session through a notorious paedophile.
Happens to us all, doesn’t it? One day you’re at a Christmas Market in Europe firing pellets at ducks, next day you’ve joined the police and you’re online with a convicted sex offender trying to get your leg over with a sex worker. And when it does happen, we all deserve a little understanding, don’t we?
