Yahoo Finance Gospel choir celebrate everyday heroes in a gritty nativity remake
When a London gospel choir decided to make a film about an alternative nativity, they had modest ambitions to share it via YouTube and festivals.
That was last summer, when no one knew what 2020 had in store. But by the time it was finished, the Soul Sanctuary Gospel Choir’s film The Night Watchmen’s Nativity turned out to have remarkable prescience in its themes, as well as being – in a year with scant TV offerings because of the pandemic – a rare original programme for Christmas 2020. All of which is why the low-budget project, filmed in a day, has been bought by Sky Arts and will be showcased as one of its key festive offerings, due to be broadcast on 6 December.
Filmed in February, The Night Watchmen’s Nativity addresses many of the issues that have emerged strongly through the turmoil of the last nine months, especially the contribution of the often-overlooked lowest-paid workers.
The film, the audience is told in its opening shots, seeks to offer an alternative to the “fairytale” around the story of Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago. In fact, says the narrator, the men who were looking after the sheep, who were among the first to hear the news, would have been night watchmen – “the minimum-wage guys, hired to look after the sheep while the real shepherds were tucked up in their beds … they were the social rejects, the disgraced, the grifters, the foreigners …”
“It’s an incredibly low-budget film, and we decided to get it in the can early because we knew it would be a real challenge to get it out there in the midst of the busy Christmas season,” says its director, Charlie Parham.
Clarence Hunte, one of the choir directors, who works in lost property for Transport for London says: “We could only afford a crew for one day’s filming, and it was really tight to get enough material for a 30-minute film in that time, but we went for it – we thought, we’ve got nothing to lose, and we really believe in the importance of getting this message out there, that Christmas isn’t just fairy lights and soft-focus stories.
“If you look at the fullest account, in St Luke’s Gospel, he often reminds his readers about the people on the margins of the story, and we realised their role hasn’t been properly explored.”
Soul Sanctuary soprano Minnie Oliver, who is a research biologist, says that without the people celebrated in the film, “a lot of what happened in the nativity story would never have happened. And that’s been the story of this year: we’ve all been made aware of the everyday heroes, the NHS workers, the bus drivers and the delivery workers, on whom we all depend but who we hadn’t really been taking into account.”
Hunte said the choir – which provides the music for Mica Paris’s new album, Gospel – decided to focus on the night watchmen because they were “at the bottom of the food chain – they’re not visible, they’re not heard, and they’re struggling”.
The work, which includes covers of songs as well as new music by Soul Sanctuary’s band leader, Peter Yarde Martin, was performed live at St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square, London at Christmas last year, which led to the idea of making it into a film.
“Getting it on to the TV seemed like a very long shot,” says Hunte. “Having it picked up by Sky is beyond anything we dreamed of,” adds Oliver.
The success of the project has also bolstered the performers’ spirits in what for all musicians has been a desperately difficult year, says Miko Giedroyc, who co-founded the 34-strong choir 15 years ago. “Our last performance was in early March, and many of our musicians – around half of them are professionals – have had a very tough time. So this has given us all hope for the future. And we believe, too, in the universal language of gospel music, in its ability to unite people of all faiths and none – so we hope we can infect others with its message.”
Phil Edgar-Jones, the director of Sky Arts, said that in a year when the arts had struggled to survive, The Night Watchmen’s Nativity was a beacon of hope, and also “a timely reminder that one of our responsibilities in the arts is to give new and diverse voices the space to tell unique stories”.
He said it was “a beautiful piece, and I was so moved when I first watched it. Beyond the storytelling, just seeing people sing together feels special at the moment.”
The Night Watchmen’s Nativity will be broadcast at 6pm on 6 December, free to watch on Sky Arts (Freeview channel 11).
