THE17 IN BETHLEHEM
24 December 2006

Christmas Eve. Stuck in Gatwick. Our flights have been delayed for eight hours all because of the big fog that descended on the bottom half of the country over the past few days. At least things are better than they have been over the past few days when 50% of the flights were cancelled.

I’m with members of my family and we are supposed to be on our way to Norway for Christmas.

While waiting my thoughts are drifting onto the idea of The17 in China. When doing The17 in Huddersfield, one of the events was attended by a woman from the British Council. The British Council exists to promote British culture abroad. It is considered good PR for UK PLC if Johnny Foreigner is exposed to our culture. The sun may have long set on the empire but cultural imperialism is still the best game in town when you want the world to buy what you’ve got to sell. Popular music and Hollywood have done it for the USA ever since the end of World War 1. The Beatles and Shakespeare continue to do it for us to a lesser extent. The British Council is there to promote British culture that may not be able to hold its own in the market place but is still thought to show the UK in a good light.

So this woman form The British Council in Huddersfield introduces herself to me after the performance. Her name is Leah Zakss, an interesting name I thought, leah tells me it is Latvian, I tell her I had a number of Latvian friends in Corby, she tells me her auntie used to live in Corby. She then steers the conversation onto what she is supposed to be talking about. She tells me she is in charge of music for North Africa, The Middle East and all the rest of Asia. She asked me if I had ever done anything before with The British Council. I tell her about the Soupline in Estonia and how that went well but they didn’t want to know in Sweden, when I was going over there with The17, ‘cause they thought hard earned taxpayers money should not be spent on money burners like myself. She then told me she was interested in exploring ways of The17 working in some of her territories.

And that was that. I didn’t hear back from her. That was, until the day before yesterday. Then we spoke at length on the phone. She wanted to know what was happening when and where and would I be interested in going to China with The17. Who wouldn’t be interested in going to China if somebody else were paying. But what she told me next I found to be the most revealing.

‘We are being encouraged to find work to take out to China, work that will appeal specifically to intelligent and thinking 18 – 35 year olds’. I should not be surprised at the cynicism. We all know that China is to be the mega economy of the 21st Century. We, UK PLC, need to get in there with the young and intelligent Chinese now, make our mark on them before they are running the place in the next few years. It would be a waste of our tax payers hard earned money sending The17 out to win friends and influence people in countries that are going to mean jack shit in fifty years time.

I have always found this sort of thing hard to square with my puritanical nature. I don’t want to be part of the PR arm of our ‘Evil Empire’. If I go to China it will be for my own reasons. Not in the hope that they will be buying Aston Martins and drinking Glenn Fiddich in 50 years time.

But The17 in China. It almost sounds like the title of a TV documentary, bit of a nod to the opera Nixon In China by John Adams.

I occasionally get asked by TV production companies if I would be interested in making a TV film about my work or my past or something. I never follow any of this through. I have a pathological fear of TV as a medium. Nearly every time I have been involved in television in the past I feel it has reduced or ended up trivialising what I’m doing.

But here I am trying to kill time in Gatwick Airport having fantasies about The17 in China and what the documentary would look like. Maybe make up a score especially for the trip. One that involves hundreds of people at the same time singing in Tiananmen Square or on the Great Wall or on a boat sailing up the Yangtze or standing in paddy fields. And how the programme would be screened the week this book came out in Spring 2008. And how the big challenge in making it would be that it could not contain any of the music of The17 as that is never to be broadcast. Never to exist for posterity – remember.

These thoughts were exciting me and I was forgetting all about the drag of sitting around an airport hour after hour. Then all the excitement imploded ’cause I remembered reading something last week about a reality TV show about a bunch of kids from a London comp’ that had never sung in a choir before in their lives before being turned into a real choir by some charismatic choir master and then being whipped off to China to take part in the choir Olympics.

So as far as TV is concerned, choirs and China have been done.

Then an idea makes it’s presence felt: its Christmas Eve, - where do ones thoughts turn to on Christmas Eve if you have had any sort of Christian upbringing? Bethlehem. The teenage Mary and her belly fit for bursting and no room at the inn. I have had a thing about the Holy Land most of my life. Never been there. But I have always seen the valley of Jordan not only as the beginning of the Rift Valley that goes all the way down into central Africa but a fault line on the human soul. Where three tectonic plates of the three great monotheistic religions of the world grind up on each other. Jerusalem may have the Temple Mount – the site of the Israelis first temple and Mohamed ascent to heaven and all the conflict that has inspired. But Bethlehem holds a stronger pull in my imagination. Somehow, the nativity story as it is played out in thousands of schools and churches every year around the globe, dovetails neatly into the idea of modern Bethlehem, the home of Palestinian refugees and all their poverty and stateless misery.

So that’s it. If I can swing it, I would love to do The17 in Bethlehem with a bunch of Palestinians, both Christian and Muslim. Write a score specifically for the place and occasion. And if The British Council and a TV production company are up for being involved, so much the better.

I would like to round this text up by reporting that our flight has just been called. But I know there are still at least 2 hours to wait.