Christmas television’s reheated leftovers – a Strictly special here, a Bake Off special there – failed to pull in the crowds this year, as viewing figures declined once again. (It might say something that for their festive escapism all my family seem to have watched Bird Box, a film that has a blindfolded Sandra Bullock navigating a post-apocalyptic world in which unseen forces drive people to hideous acts of violence).
In among the old familiars, however, one – or, rather, two – unlikely stars sat atop the tree. BBC Four squirrelled away Bros: After the Screaming Stops, a feature-length documentary about Matt and Luke Goss, the twins who were the hub of the 80s boy band. But it thrived on social media, as people caught on, and urged others to watch it on iPlayer. On that note: watch it on iPlayer.
Bros were the first pop group I ever liked and I liked them so much that at primary school I had a tiny pair of stonewashed jeans with Matt and Luke Goss’s faces on them, in a sort of embossed 3D foam, a technique that appears to have gone the way of the shell suit.
I had barely thought of them since the late 80s, but After the Screaming Stops brought it all back. Some of the Brosettes had never really left: there were scenes of women screaming at the airport as the brothers landed from their homes on the west coast of America, and I wondered for a moment if they had been there with banners since 1992. “Bros has never been something that the country has been proud of,” said Luke, sadly, recalling tabloid brutalities that still appear to burn, as he returned for a big reunion show at the O2 Arena in London.
It marked the twins’ first performance in 28 years and it was not plain sailing. After the Screaming Stops makes Some Kind of Monster, the 2004 film that laid bare Metallica’s internal strife, look timid. It is both deliberately hilarious and unintentionally so, as tragic as it is funny and as frank a portrait of fickle fame as you’re ever likely to see.
The brothers invent platitudes with gusto (I liked: “The letters H-O-M-E are so important, because they personify the word ‘home’” and: “Rome wasn’t built in a day and fuck me that’s true, but we don’t have the time that Rome had”). This is one of the best music documentaries I have seen in a long time. Who could have foreseen that Bros would make Christmas telly essential again?
Stephen McGann is talking total sense about teetotalism
The actor Stephen McGann, who stars in Call the Midwife, which I maintain is essential Christmas viewing, because where else can you get your fix of adorably tearful period socialism?, has spoken about the stigma around not drinking over the festive period. Early in December, he tweeted a reminder that this can be a difficult time for non-drinkers, saying that he chooses not to drink but others may not drink because of addiction. “Tip: if someone politely refuses an alcoholic drink, don’t keep asking,” he wrote.
He elaborated for the BBC last week. He stopped drinking to train for a charity trek years ago and never restarted. But people are often offended by the refusal of a drink. “Booze is so deeply ingrained in our culture,” he said.
It is a truth we rarely confront. I have been on both sides of it. I’ve met friends at the pub and had to check a blench when someone says they aren’t drinking, because instinctively, and of course wrongly, it feels as if they are not taking part in quite the same way.
But this Christmas, tired of hangovers, I have been cutting down to a drink or two. I am fond of social boozing, but can no longer take the aftermath. But I have been shocked at the amount of steeliness and insistence that it takes to say no. It can be as if one sucks the life out of the room.
It’s absurd that we find it so difficult. I know people who’ve lied about being on antibiotics just to avoid the awkwardness. McGann is right that we need to reconsider our reactions to non-drinkers, for whatever reasons they might choose to abstain.
Jean-Jacques Savin is inspiring, if you get his drift
By launching his attempt to cross the Atlantic in a plywood barrel on Boxing Day, 71-year-old Jean-Jacques Savin is trolling lazy revellers – not naming any names, but I am talking about myself – who can barely move after a recent diet of Pringles and After Eights (potatoes and mint, ie vegetables and herbs).
Savin estimates that he will spend three months bobbing along the waves in an orange capsule that looks a bit like it came from the centre of a giant Kinder Egg. At 3 metres long and 2.1 metres wide, it is, at least, bigger than most London studio flats.
On his website, Savin, who has crossed the Atlantic four times before but never like this, describes the challenge as “a crossing where the man would not be captain of his boat, but passenger of the ocean”. He is French.
If making New Year resolutions, it might be worth keeping in the back of one’s mind that, when sticking to Dry January and Veganuary simultaneously seems like the punishment of malevolent gods, somewhere, a septuagenarian is drifting across the ocean in the name of adventure and scientific research, making the rest of us look bad.
• Rebecca Nicholson is an Observer columnist
