Andrew Clavin skewers Paul Ryan’s tie, Chelsea Clinton’s politics, and Ben Shapiro’s Star Wars critique while praising a viral Trump accent video. He dissects Trump’s Walters interview—Muslim ban, armed citizens, and "Paris, boom, boom"—mocking Walters’ disapproval before pivoting to Lindsey Graham’s 2016 exit and NFL’s Odell Beckham Jr. suspension. Contrasting doom with progress, he highlights global poverty dropping below 10% (thanks to capitalism) while dismissing climate nihilism as media overreach. Defending Love Actually, he calls its Heathrow love scene a rebuttal to hatred, then plugs his books and M.R. James’ ghost stories before urging listeners to savor the final episodes. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, Christmas is almost here, which presents a problem for conservatives because the news cycle is slowing down, which means we have to get angrier and angrier about less and less, okay?
So today, we're going to take a searing look at the Benedict Arnold-style treachery of Paul Ryan's choice of necktie and Chelsea Clinton's cynical attempt to bolster her mother's poll ratings by having another baby.
In the spirit of Christmas love and goodwill, let me just say we will destroy them all.
Trigger one.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
It really is true.
There's less and less news.
I mean, it just dries up.
You know, there's no news because on the Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro is attacking the force from Star Wars.
Did you see this?
The force, this is the headline, the force in Star Wars is stupid and immoral.
I mean, the news.
Who does that?
Who attacks the force?
What would Yuda say?
Appalled I am.
Crazy Shapiro is.
Dysfunctional syntactically to be I am was.
The Force is so great.
Why can't the guy speak English?
Maybe Shapiro is right.
I take it all back.
But speaking of good English, we have to take another.
Yesterday, I played this insanely hilarious YouTube video of Donald Trump dubbed as an Englishman, his words dubbed as an Englishman.
But I didn't give credit to the guy.
I forgot to write down his name.
The guy who did it, his name Peter Serafinowitz, and I just have to sing his praises, you know.
When Picasso started out, he would do things like, you know, he would take a bicycle seat and he would turn it upside down so that the handlebars were coming out of the top and he'd say, it's a bull.
And everybody would go, wow, modern artists.
And people would protest and they would say, that's not even hard.
And Picasso would say, well, yes, but you didn't think of it.
So this is just thinking of this is an act of genius.
And he did it again yesterday.
He has part two of Donald Trump as an Englishman talking to Barbara Walters.
So play this part.
Do you regret at all your proposed ban on Muslims coming to America?
Not at all.
First of all, it's not a ban long term.
This country, our country, has to get its act together.
And one thing I have to say: I have tremendous friendships in the Muslim community, tremendous relationships.
They're great people.
We have to get smart.
And the people that I know in the Muslim community agree with me.
Are you a bigot?
Not at all.
Probably the least of anybody you've ever met.
There was a recent mass shooting in San Bernardino that seems with a link to ISIS.
You have said that guns should be carried to fight back against terrorism.
Wouldn't that produce more violence?
Much less.
Look, I'm a big believer in the Second Amendment.
The bad guys will always have guns, Barbara.
So, Paris, boom, boom, boom.
If you look at California, nobody had guns except the bad guys.
If you had three or four people like me, I have the right to carry.
I have a license to carry.
Yeah.
If you had people like me in that room and somebody starts shooting, I guarantee you we're going down shooting.
You are carrying a gun now?
No, not now.
Ordinarily, do you carry a gun?
A lot of the time I have the right to carry.
I just transform.
I'm voting for the guy now, you know?
I don't care what he believes.
What I love, too, is I love the disapproving look, the high seriousness of disapproval on Barbara Walters' face.
I mean, these cheap, corrupt purveyors of this left-wing Democrat narrative, you know, then they sit and look at Republicans, any Republican, really, but Trump is especially a target.
They sit with that kind of on Olympus looking down her nose at him.
By the way, you can't see that, of course, unless you subscribe to the show, and I hope you will do that.
When you subscribe, you can not only hear the show, but you can also watch what we're doing here.
And it also helps us to pay our immense staff because we have so many cameras and lights, and they have to be run.
And so, what we've done is we've hired Syrian refugees who are looking for work.
And if they can't, you know, we don't get your subscription money, they have to move back to your neighborhood.
So, you know, I'm not trying to blackmail you or anything, but our friend here, Abdul Jihad, and Muhammad Kill Ywal, will be coming to your neighborhood unless you subscribe and you get to watch the show.
So, what other news is there?
Lindsey Graham left the race.
That's the other news.
So, everybody's wondering what will happen to the Lindsey Graham vote.
Bob, is that hello?
I'm Bob, the Lindsey Graham vote.
He has decided that if he can't vote for somebody with the incredible charisma and insight of Lindsey Graham, he'll have to just cast his vote for a phone poll or something because we've lost Lindsey.
So, that was a big news story.
And I have to say, I love the commentary that's going around that in losing Lindsey Graham, another intelligent, useful Republican has fallen by the wayside in favor of these useless fools like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and Donald Trump.
These are the same people who told us that Jeb Bush would have made a better president than his brother W. You know, when now we see that Jeb Bush, there's just no way Jeb Bush is going to be any kind of a president for anybody.
Good News About Obama's Legacy00:09:07
It's ridiculous.
Anyway, so we've lost him, and there's nothing else.
The Giants Odell Beckham Jr. was suspended for a game for beating Carolina Panthers defender Josh Norman to death.
I think that was, I don't know if you saw this.
On Sunday, the Giants played the Panthers, and the Panthers are fighting to have a perfect season, and the Giants are just fighting to stay in the season.
And so, Odell Beckham Jr., one of the big receivers, is going out there and he's just pounding on the defenders.
I mean, like, after the play is over, like, running across the field and punching them.
And they threw an occasional flag, you know, we'll send you back five yards.
And even the announcers were going, they should throw this guy out of the game.
They really should have.
He was out of control.
So now they're suspending him for a game.
Only a few people died in the course of the game.
So he gets only one game.
The fact is, not only is there not very much news, but the news is actually kind of good, which is really terrible for, yeah, I know for conservative broadcasting, how will we get you really angry?
Here is Glenn Reynolds.
Glenn Reynolds is the great Instapundit and a friend, a terrific guy, but that's really one of the greatest blogs still on the internet.
And he now writes a column for USA Today.
And his column this week goes like this.
Amid stories of terrorism, government incompetence, and corruption, mass migration, and economic stagnation, there's actually some good news.
Global poverty has fallen below 10% for the first time ever.
I mean, that's really an amazing statistic.
A new study by the World Bank estimates that less than 10% of the world's population is living in what it calls poverty.
The biggest changes have come in East Asia and around the Pacific, but even sub-Saharan Africa, the worst place in the world for incomes, has improved significantly.
For most of human history, of course, extreme poverty was the norm.
People worked hard to get, if they were lucky, three meals a day and clothes on their backs.
Money was scarce.
Possessions were few.
Leisure existed only when the work was done, which was seldom, and capital for investment was scarce, as were things to invest in.
Deaths from sickness and violence were common.
As Steven Pinker has noted, human beings back in the era before nation states developed had a 15% chance of dying by violence.
Numbers today are vastly lower.
This is true, he notes, despite the number of deaths from wars and civil wars.
Charles Kenney even wrote in The Atlantic that 2015 was the best year ever in the history of humanity.
You heard it here first if you didn't read USA Today.
If you didn't read Glenn in USA Today, you heard it here first.
2015 was the best year ever in the history of humanity.
Wars have become less common and less deadly, while vaccines and medicines have reduced sickness and death.
That's the good news, but it leads to a couple of points.
And he just goes on to talk about that what causes all this good news is the spread of capitalism and the spread of open government and open debate, all of which are, of course, under threat here in America, but are spreading throughout the world.
And even here, to go on to give you even more good news, here was an article from the Wall Street Journal.
I meant to bring it in yesterday, but I didn't have time to talk about it.
The article was headlined, Cheer Up, Obama's Legacy Can Be Erased.
The White House ran through an agenda that could be quickly undone by a Republican president.
I'll just read very briefly from this.
President Obama seems to aspire to join Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan as one of the three most transformative presidents of the past hundred years, and by all outward signs, he has achieved that goal.
But while Roosevelt and Reagan sold their programs to the American people and enacted them with bipartisan support, Mr. Obama jammed his partisan agenda down the public's throat.
The Obama legacy is built on executive orders, regulations, and agency actions that can be overturned using the same authority Mr. Obama employed to put them in place.
And he goes on to say that if a new president proves as committed to overturning these regulations as Mr. Obama was to implementing them, these rules could be amended or overturned.
Basically, in the guy's first speech, he could snap his fingers and make all this stuff go away.
So good news, a lot of good news.
And even there was even one last story that I have to say, because this actually says something nice about Obama, so you know it's Christmas.
The SpaceX guys, this private company exploring space, actually had an impressive return to flight Monday.
Remember, they just had this terrible accident, but they flawlessly launched an upgraded variant of the Falcon 9 rocket and then maneuvering a big part back to Earth for a pinpoint precedent-setting landing.
So that was actually, that's actually a big breakthrough, because one of the things that Obama has signed into law that not many people know about is land rights to meteors.
And that sounds like something out of a Bruce Willis film, but in fact, that means that if you land on a meteor and you pull out oil or iron or whatever you need, you know, if you pull out some kind of ore that we can use, you get the money for it.
And the reason that's important is because it spurs commercial attempts to fly to space so that we can take that out of the government's hands while NASA is busy inspiring the Muslims, which was what Obama said they were supposed to do.
So that's actually really important.
So these are like the things, it's amazing.
It's amazing.
Now, so that's the stuff that's really happening.
That's really the news.
And I know that every day, the thing about good news is that it really is the common thing.
Most days, if you think about your own life, most days things go pretty well.
But they only have to go badly once.
So that doomsayers do have a certain kind of authority and power that optimists don't have.
Because if I say the end is nigh and the end comes, it really is a disaster.
And it's much easier to destroy things than it is to build them up.
But just compare this to a piece by Roy Scranton in the opinion blog of the New York Times, okay?
Just remember that Glenn Reynolds piece, this was the best year ever in human history, best year ever in human history.
And here's from the opinion blog of the New York Times.
We stand today on a precipice of annihilation that Nietzsche could not have even imagined.
There is little reason to hope that we'll be able to slow down global warming before we pass a tipping point.
We're already one degree Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures and there is another half a degree baked in.
The West Antarctic ice sheet is collapsing.
Greenland is melting.
Permafrost across the world as liquefying and methane has been detected leaking from sea floors and Siberian craters.
Accepting our situation could easily be confused with nihilism, the belief in nothing.
In a nation founded on hope, built with can-do Yankee grit, and bedazzled by its own technological wizardry, just don't get too big for your britches, folks.
We are going down.
The very idea that something might be beyond our power or that humans have intrinsic limits verges on blasphemy.
Right and left, millions of Americans believe that every problem has a solution.
It's not so much that accepting the truth of our situation means thinking the wrong thought, but rather thinking the unthinkable.
He concludes: We were born on the eve of what may be the human world's greatest catastrophe.
None of us chose this, not deliberately.
None of us can choose to avoid it either.
Some of us will even live through it.
Well, I'm sorry to break that news to you.
Some of us will even live through this.
So, what we have to do, he says, is we have to look for meaning in our annihilation.
And he says, accepting the fatality of our situation isn't nihilism, but rather the necessary first step in forging a new way of life between self-destruction and giving up, between willing nothingness and not willing.
There was another choice: willing our face, fate, conscious self-creation in the face of complete destruction.
So, these guys, yeah, these guys, guys who say stuff like that, basically always hold the floor.
They always hold the floor.
The news will always be bad.
And when you talk to newsmen about this, first of all, people don't like to listen to good news.
They've tried it.
They've tried, you know, people always complain about this.
So, we want more good news.
And so, they put it on their ratings, just fall off the table.
People don't want to hear the good news.
Even this notion, I mean, this astounding notion that people aren't hungry anymore.
I mean, that was the norm.
And what the left always does that's wrong is they always say, Why are you rich?
But of course, I mean, they always say, Why are these people poor?
But poverty is what is the norm for human life.
It's wealth that should be explored.
How did this guy get wealthy?
How can we spread it around?
And that's what's been happening in spite of the left.
It's only here where we're all so comfortable and can afford to be a little bit stupid that people don't do this.
The same thing is true in the arts.
In the arts, tragedy and moroseness is always looked upon as deep.
Critics mistake darkness for depth.
There's a famous critic, William Hazlitt, who said, Shakespeare's tragedies are better than his comedies because tragedy is better than comedy.
And I quoted that once to Douglas Adams, the guy who wrote Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and he said, Shakespeare's tragedies are better than his comedies because Shakespeare wasn't funny, which is a totally different point of view.
Greatest Christmas Mystery00:15:11
And this brings me, this brings me to the greatest of all Christmas mysteries.
I mean, there are a lot of Christmas conflicts.
Was the virgin birth a literal story, or was it a legend?
You know, does the Old Testament really predict the birth of Christ?
But the most important one is: is love actually a good movie or not?
I mean, I think this is, and that this is an actual controversy is amazing to me.
Love actually came out 12 years ago, 2003.
And if you've never seen it, it's this huge, sprawling Christmas season rom-com, a romantic comedy, with maybe nine or ten different narratives, all of them about romance.
Some end happily, some don't end happily, some have bittersweet endings.
Got this huge cast, Hugh Grant, and who else is in it?
I mean, everybody's in it.
Bill Naey is in it.
Who is it?
Martin Freeman, that was like his first big part, really.
That was his breakout part.
Emma Thompson is in it.
Everybody's in it.
Karen Knightley.
And Kieran Knightley.
I mean, really, every British actor is in this thing.
So this came out, and it's written by Richard Curtis and produced by Duncan Kenworthy.
These guys in the 90s, when I was living in England, they transformed the British film industry with pictures like Four Weddings and a Funeral, and what was the other one about the movie star Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant.
What is it?
Notting Hill, thank you.
You know, all these pictures, and the British hated these movies.
Four Weddings and a Funeral bombed in England when it opened.
Then it came to America and became a big hit, and the British were like, What?
And they brought it back, and then it became a big hit in England.
And the reason is the British think that serious movies are only about poor people, only about injustice, only about despair.
I mean, they, you know, while I was there, I worked with Duncan Kenworthy, and he was constantly under fire.
I wrote a script for him, and he was constantly under fire for having brought this kind of, you know, shabby middle-class sensibility, i.e., entertainment, to the British film industry.
And they destroyed it.
They basically had this renaissance that Kenworthy and Curtis brought about, and they just made depressing picture after depressing picture, bomb after bomb after bomb.
And Variety wrote about it, Hollywood Reporter wrote about it.
They were just, they just could not wrap their minds around the fact that entertainment is a good thing.
Love actually came out.
I had already moved back to the States, and I saw it in the theater.
And I think we all, do we all go?
My son is here today, Spencer.
So I think we all went to it and we saw this movie.
And I thought it was good.
I didn't think it was great.
I'm not a big rom-cam-com fan, but I thought it was really entertaining.
I don't like romantic comedies at all, but I like this one.
And I was on the phone with my British agent, and this is the first time I realized that there was a problem.
And I said, oh, I saw Love Actually.
I can't tell you what she said.
There was not a single word that wasn't a four-letter word.
She just erupted, What a piece of track!
This terrible, terrible.
Oh, I hate it.
I mean, just savagely, savage, you know, anger and rage.
Shortly thereafter, I was at a dinner at my church, and somebody said, Love actually is a test.
If you're a good person, you like it, and if you don't like it, you're not a good person.
I thought, am I miss something that I miss something?
But this, in fact, is a huge.
I mean, let me just show you a typical scene from Love Actually.
One of the things: Hugh Grant plays the Prime Minister, and he falls in love with this working girl, who not a working girl as a processor, working-class girl, which in England is a big deal.
The class system is still kind of shades over everything.
So, here's a scene where Hugh Grant goes to visit her at home because he needs to tell her that he loves her, and he goes and meets her family by accident.
He's just looking for her, going up and down the street.
So here's the scene, Hugh Grant meets Martine McCutcheon, who plays the girl.
Is Natalie here?
Where the f is my fing coat?
Oh, hello, hello, um, this is my mum and my dad, and my Uncle Tony, and my auntie Glynn.
Very nice to meet you.
And, um, this is the Prime Minister.
Yes, we can see that, darling.
And, um, unfortunately, we're very late.
It's the school Christmas concert, you see, David.
It is the first time all the local schools have joined together.
Even St. Basil's.
Too much detail, mum.
Anyway, how can we help, sir?
Well, I just needed Natalie on some state business.
Right, yes, of course.
Right.
Well, perhaps you should come on later, Plumpy.
Natalie.
Well, listen, I don't want to make you late for the concert.
No, it's nothing really.
Keith will be very disappointing.
No, really, it doesn't matter.
The octopus costumes taken me months.
It is a lot of legs, David.
Listen, why don't I give you a lift and then we can talk about this state business business in the car?
Okay.
Lovely.
Lovely.
I'll try, everybody.
So off they go with this incredible line of cars off to the school play.
And that basically captures the entire ethos of the film.
It's all these mismatched people in various different kinds of relationships.
And like I said, some of them work, some of them fall apart.
Here's Emily Scheier writing at the week.
And if you Google this, you will see what I mean.
But she puts it very succinctly.
She says, for some reason, this is written a couple years ago, 10 years after Richard Curtis's Starladen Love Actually Premiered to decidedly mixed reviews.
We're talking about it more than ever.
Christopher Orr at The Atlantic devoted nearly 3,000 words to arguing why love actually is the least romantic film of all time.
Ben Dreyfus at Mother Jones, I mean, this is the far, far left magazine.
Ben Dreyfus at Mother Jones dropped nearly just as many words to come to the rescue of love actually.
And Orr's colleague at The Atlantic, Emma Green, wrote a C.S. Lewis framework for examining the nature of love to defend the movie.
But it's still curious that the movie has garnered so much critical interest, goes on and on.
She blames overpraise.
She says fans of romantic comedies are extra thrilled by a genuinely charming and funny film like Love Actually, so because most rom-coms are so mediocre that they've overpraised it, then people go and they over-attack it.
But Christopher Orr at The Atlantic really made a solid, not a solid point, because I don't agree with it, but he made a very specific point.
He says, what does love actually tell us about love, actually?
Well, I think it tells us a number of things, most of them wrong and a few of them appalling.
Now, anyone who goes to the Cineplex with any regularity knows that the last decade has seen more than its share of bad romantic comedies, but love actually is exceptional in that it is not merely like so many other entries in the genre, unromantic, it is emphatically, almost shockingly anti-romantic.
It says, it offers up at least three disturbing lessons about love.
First, that love is overwhelmingly a product of physical attraction and requires virtually no verbal communication or intellectual-emotional affinity of any kind.
Second, that the principal barrier to consummating a relationship is mustering the nerve to say, I love you.
And third, that any actual obstacle to romantic fulfillment, however surmountable, is not worth the effort it would require to overcome.
All of this is untrue, I think.
We can fairly say.
I mean, one of the most charming storylines in it is Martin Freeman, as I say, his first big part, and Joanna Page, beautiful.
They play body doubles, and they're constantly doing the body double work for pornographic scenes.
So the two of them constantly are naked, wrapped around each other in the most obscene positions imaginable.
But it turns out that they're incredibly shy, and while they're doing these really obscene things in the nude, they're trying to start a relationship and trying to, you know, ask each other out on a date, and they're having a hard time doing it.
And it really does show you that the physical aspect of it comes later.
I mean, there's also a plot line with Bill Naey, which is just uproariously.
I mean, Nae is a great actor and hilariously.
And he plays this washed up rock star who has a hit at Christmas and becomes for a brief moment, he gets back in the limelight.
And he has this fat Rhode, his manager, who sacrifices everything for this guy, and Nai never pays any attention to him.
And on Christmas Eve, now that he's a big hit, he gets invited off to Elton John's party.
And instead, he shows up, the fat manager is left by himself, and Bill Nye comes back.
Play this clip from the piece.
What the hell are you doing here?
Which is supposed to be El Jones.
Yeah, well, I was there for a minute or two, and then I had an epiphany.
Really?
Yeah.
Come on.
Just come off.
So, um, what was that, Epiphany?
Um, it was about Christmas.
You realized it was all around.
No, I realize that Christmas is the time to be with the people you love.
Right.
And I realize that as dire chance and fateful cock-up would have it, here I am, mid-50s.
And without knowing it, I've gone and spent most of my adult life with a chubby employee.
And much as it grieves me to say it, it might be that the people I love is in fact you.
Well, this is a surprise.
Yeah.
Ten minutes at Elton John Jersey's Ameble.
No, look, I'm serious here.
I left Elton's where there were a hefty number of half-naked chicks with their mouths open in order to hang out with you at Christmas.
So the attack on the film and the basis that it doesn't show love in its various forms is untrue.
It shows it has sad scenes, it has happy scenes.
It is corny.
It's relentless.
I mean, Curtis is a corny writer.
He is an openly corny, sentimental writer.
And I think what really bothers everybody about this film, because it's the thing that stuck in my mind when I saw it, is the opening.
It opens at Heathrow Airport and it shows people greeting each other.
And this happened, remember, it came out two years after 9-11.
And so that was very, very much on our mind.
Everybody was rolling to war.
There's an anti-American scene in the movie where Billy Bob Thornton plays the evil, you know, country, countrified George W. Bush-style president, and the prime minister has to stand up to him and all this stuff, which is always a thorn in the side of the British that we're so powerful now and we're kind of them as they used to be.
But this airport scene is, I think, the scene that bugs everybody.
So just play the opening.
This is the narration, Hugh Grant narrating the opening at Heathrow.
Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport.
General opinion is starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed.
But I don't see that.
Seems to me that love is everywhere.
Often it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there.
Fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends.
When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge.
They were all messages of love.
If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love actually is all around.
Now that's about as corny as you can possibly get for an opening.
But the thing that struck me when I saw it is that it's also true.
I mean, it is true that the people in the World Trade Center, they had their phone calls and they were on answering machines and the people in the planes, they never called in and said, you know, get these guys back.
They called and said, I love you.
Goodbye.
And that really is true.
And I think relentlessly, as we're relentlessly being sold this bad news of the end of the world while the world gets better, we are relentlessly being sold this picture of love that is simply untrue and which this picture, and it's not my favorite movie in the world, but it definitely captures this about love.
Now we are constantly told, I actually brought one of these.
Let's play one of these.
I know we're running out of time, but let's play it anyway.
Play the science of love, say.
Speaking of attraction, how does it all work?
Well, all of your senses play a big part in being attracted to someone.
We all know that pheromones can attract you to another person, which uses our sense of smell.
Our sense of sight is also a big one.
See that cutie over there with the hella good hair and the clear skin?
Our instinct is to be visually attracted to that person who shows characteristics of being fit for reproduction, or in some cases, just the first part of it.
I mean, could we be any more shallow?
It's like this fake, it's fake science, not in that the science doesn't work, but that they're putting the physical ramifications of a feeling before the feeling and telling you that you are caused by the chemicals being mixed in your brain.
But remember, people fall in love through the mails.
They fall in love without ever having met.
They fall in love on the instant.
There's absolutely nothing to say that love is a physical experience.
It's not.
It's more than that.
It is a spiritual experience.
Yoda was right.
I'm afraid to tell Ben Shapiro this, but Yoda was right.
Luminous creatures we are.
Even if he couldn't say it.
And love is really a human reflection of the greater love that is all around.
And that's why love actually is set at Christmas and actually tells us something about Christmas, something that we would do well to remember.
It's not actually a controversial film.
It's actually a very good romantic comedy that says something important in a simple way.
All right, that's all I'm going to say today.
Let me just put in a little bit of an advertising plug for myself.
Some of my books I've noticed, the young adult books, are on sale.
The Hostage Run is the second in the Mind War series, and it's only $1.99.
The last thing I remember was $199.
I think it may have gone back up, but it's still only like $3.99 or something.
And you can pre-order The Great Good Thing, my memoir, The Great Good Thing, a Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ.
I hope you will pre-order it.
It doesn't come out until September, but put in your bid now.
Christmas stuff I like.
You know, I put this off.
I know Lindsay is going to love this, but I put this off to the last minute because we did Halloween stuff I like all through October, and I began to feel kind of oppressed by all the dark, scary stories I was selling.
But a ghost story at Christmas is also something that is traditional and that I'm very fond of.
When I lived in England, you know, I stay up late, I don't sleep a lot, so the whole family would go to bed.
And I remember on Christmas Eve, my first Christmas Eve in England, it was just turning midnight.
Ghost Stories for Christmas00:00:58
Everybody was asleep but me.
I poured myself a drink, sat down in front of the television, turned on the TV, and on came a ghost story for Christmas.
And I thought, I have died and gone to heaven.
I thought this is the best thing that ever happened to me.
And I have since acquired some.
This was a series they did once a year.
Most of them were written by the great M.R. James, my great ghost story hero, but they were dramatized.
And some of them were, one of them is from Dickens.
There are other ones.
And now they are available in a complete set, and you can get them from Amazon.
I got them when they were still English tapes.
I had to buy a special CD player to play.
They could play British tapes.
But now I think you can get them directly from Amazon.
They're called Ghost Stories for Christmas.
They're from the BBC, and you can get them all.
That's it.
We have a couple more days and then the big day, and we'll be gone for the year.
So enjoy.
So suck the marrow out of every show because we'll only be here for a couple more days and then we're gone to the new year.