HOGWASH TRADITIONAL CELEBRATION IN DECLINE
Streets sealed off, parties cancelled, £12 for a dook and rubbish on the TV.. what’s gone wrong with New Year?
A capital under blockade with city centre residents needing tickets to get into their own homes.
A London-based events firm allowed to charge people £12 to take a dip in the actual sea.
Meanwhile in our biggest city, another year of, er, nothing.
No wonder so many people are starting to ask – what’s gone wrong with Scotland’s Hogmanay?
The disquiet started in Edinburgh, where a decision to hand control of the streets for Hogmanay to events firm Underbelly was furiously criticised by council tax payers.
Footage posted online showed an angry gum-chewing police officer telling revellers they couldn’t access their own streets because they were under the control of Underbelly.
The next day it emerged that the same firm was charging people £12 a head to take part in the Loony Dook.
The Dook is a New Year swim in the Forth, which has grown organically since its inception by three South Queensferry locals in 1986. Now it had been apparently privatised.
Conversely, Glasgow saw in 2020 with no organised fireworks display, no concert, no DJs.
There has been no organised event since 2010 when the George Square celebration was held for the last time.
In Dundee, the city’s first Hogmanay street party for years was stripped back from two days to one after a planned concert by Squeeze had to be cancelled.
Even for those who stayed in to watch TV, things fell flat.
Live coverage had been reduced and Jackie Bird – the mainstay of BBC Scotland’s coverage for so long – had clearly timed her exit accordingly. It meant 200,000 fewer viewers for the new offering fronted by Susan Calman.
Over on STV, weather presenter Sean Batty’s Hogmanay special was described by online critics as “the worst TV I have ever seen”.
Academic and cultural commentator Sir Tom Devine, of The University of Edinburgh, said: “I do recall in my younger days in the 1950s and early 1960s that Hogmanay and New Year’s Day were the Scottish winter celebrations, withh parties galore, often starting just before the bells with steak pies and plenty of drink, then continuing throughout the night. New Year celebrations are not on the scale of yesteryear, though we should not exaggerate the decline. Families still gather on January 1 to celebrate the new year together. “But the place of Hogmanay as a distinctively Scottish festival is undeniably on the wane. “Christmas has superseded it over the last 50 years or so to become the midwinter celebration of the nation. Local traditions everywhere are being challenged by the impact of mass global media, which threatens a bland transnational cultural uniformity. “It may well be also that many do not feel the coming of 2020 fills them with expectant optimism “After all, they face a post Brexit future, the danger of climate change and a Westminster Government which Scots overwhelmingly rejected in the December general election.” Author and broadcaster Stuart Cosgrove said: “I think Hogmanay is surv in better in small communitie than in big towns and cities. The car and changed attitudes to drink driving was a wedge, with people less willing to walk and first foot especially in bad weather.
“The clubs, hotels and pubs, which previously closed at 11pm to let people home, began to run late licences with New Year bells and that caused a schism between old and young.”
But for some the changes are just a relection of a changed society.
Comedian Janey Godley said: “I don’t think that the traditional Hogmanay where everyone came round the house with black bun and bits of coal exists any more.
“I think people like to think that Hogmanay is a community coming together but lots of those old traditions have not carried on.
“It’s nice that young people have their own traditions now. I don’t think Hogmanay needs to be revived, I think society should be left alone to develop in its own way.”
Comic Andy Cameron added: “The thing now with first footing is you can’t take your car anywhere and nowadays not everybody knows all of their neighbours.
“I think the young people of today will find their own way to celebrate Hogmanay and create their own traditions just like we did.”