Quite a journey
Life on Mars writer TONY JORDAN tells Philip Halcrow about his TV nativity
LIFE on Earth is about to change. A couple are on a long journey. The woman is pregnant, but there is tension between them. They barely make eye contact. Their future seems uncertain. However, some of the people who know about the forthcoming birth believe that the baby will have a huge effect on the future of the world.
It’s an old story, but EastEnders, Hustle and Life on Mars writer Tony Jordan wanted to tell it again. His four-part drama The Nativity begins on BBC One on Monday (20 December). ‘I was fascinated about how to retell a story that has been told a million times before,’ he says.
The story may have been told a million times, but Tony was gripped by what he did not know about it.
‘I had so many questions. I didn’t know how Mary and Joseph met. I didn’t know how old she was. I was equally intrigued by the wise men, the Magi – who they were and why they travelled 1,000 miles to see a baby.
‘And I was fascinated by the shepherds. Of all the people in Judaea at the time, why did the angel go to that particular field on that particular hillside and talk to those particular shepherds?
‘I took my questions and interwove them to create the story.’
In his research for the drama, Tony first went back to the two Gospels that tell the Christmas story, Matthew and Luke. ‘I think I counted about 480 words. I realised it was going to be tough to make that into two hours of television.
‘I also watched every film and read every story based on the Nativity that I could. What struck me was that the writers all seemed to walk on eggshells as though the Gospel text couldn’t be touched – as though you couldn’t embellish it. But treating it in that way leads to problems for storytelling.
‘So, for instance, when Mary tells Joseph, “I am pregnant – but don’t worry, it is God’s,” Joseph is a bit miffed, but then simply goes to bed, has a dream about an angel, wakes up and says: “Blessed am I!”
‘I knew that if I was to make an audience in 2010 buy into the story, I had to address those kinds of issues.’
Tony carried out further research by ‘talking with people of faith as well as historians’.
He was sometimes surprised by what he learnt about the cast of characters in the Bible story. ‘There is a fair chance that Mary could have been 12 or 13 years old, and Joseph could have been 55 or 60. That was a bit of a shock. In my nativity I have tried to show an age gap, but to make it palatable for modern audiences I have portrayed them as being 16 and 30-something.’
However, Tony’s conversations with historians also led to a different kind of twist in the development of his drama.
‘They were saying to me that the story couldn’t possibly have happened – for instance, because the census of Quirinius didn’t take place until years later when Herod wasn’t alive. They held up all these facts, thinking that they had discovered something and disproved the whole of Christianity.
‘But what they failed to understand was that in those times there was an oral tradition. So those stories were just passed from campfire to campfire, from person to person. They were only written down 100 years later. Even now we all tell stories about our own lives to our friends and our family, and they get passed on to someone else and then someone else. By the end of that process some of the details might not be the same, but you get the heart and soul of the story.
‘If I were to tell you an anecdote and you passed it around and someone wrote it down in 100 years’ time, they might say: “In Christmas 2010 when Tony Blair was Prime Minister…”
‘Once I understood that, I realised that I was allowed to take the story as though it was that oral tradition and pass it on in my words, which meant I could fill in the gaps.’
Left to his own dramatic devices, Tony explores the world view that drives the Magi to follow ‘Balaam’s star’. He portrays the fears of a poverty-stricken shepherd who is running out of hope that life can be better. And he follows the relationship between Mary and Joseph, whose plans for a dream wedding look to be shattered when Mary – seemingly inexplicably – becomes pregnant.
‘I remember coming to the scene where Joseph discovers that Mary is pregnant,’ says Tony. ‘Up to that point, we’ve seen them meet, we’ve seen them fall in love. We’ve invested in them as a couple. Then this bombshell is dropped. I knew that in the drama Joseph would have to ask the questions that I genuinely thought he would ask. So when Mary is trying to explain that she hasn’t betrayed him, he takes that to mean that she has been raped and asks her if she has. I think that would be a natural question for that character to ask.
‘I was trying to put myself into characters’ minds and understand what they would think and say. I wanted to be truthful to the characters.’
Tony believes that the two-thousand-year-old story is still worth telling.
‘The beating heart of the story is a message of hope – in my version, it is when the angel Gabriel kneels in front of the shepherd, holds his hand and tells him that the Messiah is here. It is a message that your prayers have been answered – you now have hope where there was none before. Christ represents that hope.
‘The story is just as relevant in 2010, because to live without hope is the worst thing of all.’
So prime-time television viewers are to get the chance to follow Mary and Joseph, shepherds and wise men to Bethlehem.
Tony confesses that in writing The Nativity even he did not end up where he started.
‘I remember one of the first meetings I had with a professor of history. I sat down with my pad and pen and within the first five minutes the professor said to me: “Of course, the Nativity almost certainly never happened.” I was then given a detailed thesis of why the Nativity was a made-up story. I wrote it all down, and I didn’t argue, because I didn’t know any different.
It confused me a little, but I soldiered on with my drama. Then about nine months later I went to see another professor, who was an expert on the historical Jesus. Within five minutes he said the same thing: “Of course, it almost certainly never happened in the way that people think.”
‘What was really strange was that I found myself arguing with him. Every time he brought up the historical inaccuracies, I brought up the nature of oral tradition and how details change, so you can’t take that as proof that the events didn’t happen.
‘The fact that I was arguing suddenly made me realise that I had come an awful long way in those nine months. I had gone from thinking it was just a cute story to believing that it happened in this way or something like it. Mary did give birth to Jesus and it was a virgin birth, the Magi did travel a thousand miles because they had been waiting for Balaam’s star for centuries, and the shepherds represented the people who were waiting for the Messiah to come.
‘It all clicked into place, and I believed it to be a true story. Now that is quite a journey.’
• This article is reprinted from the Christmas 2010 edition of The War Cry with permission. For further information visit www.salvationarmy.org.uk/warcry
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