Andrew Watts: confessions of a Christmas Bad Santa

Like all comedians, I loathe Christmas. It’s not because we’re all joyless and unsociable individuals who hate the idea of fun that isn’t centred on us — we are, of course, but that’s not the reason. For a comedian, Christmas means office parties. And office parties mean audiences who don’t really want to listen to comedy. Half of them wanted to go bowling or do karaoke, but were outvoted and sit in sullen silence; even for the others, the comedy is a lower priority than getting a) drunk, b) high and c) off with Sandra from accounts. The Friday before Christmas is known as Black Friday to comics — the worst gig of the whole year.

So last December I hadn’t, I’ll confess, been hustling for gigs with my usual enthusiasm. Then I saw a post on a comedians’ website: a company was looking for department-store Santas. ‘You know how good applause feels?’ it read, with admirable understanding of the comedian’s psychology. ‘Imagine what it feels like to hear a six-year-old tell you he loves you.’ So there it was: a replacement for, and antidote to, those soul-destroying office Christmas parties.

A couple of weeks later, I found myself in the seminar room of a shopping centre in South London, to learn about customer service, grotto throughput and, inevitably, elf-and-safety. Most of my fellow trainees were tiny girls in their teens: trainee elves. I gravitated to the only other middle-aged man. ‘Santa?’ he asked, nodding in the direction of my stomach. I nodded back towards his. His name was Dave and he had been Father Christmas for the past 15 years. Because I was a junior Santa — a subordinate Claus? — he took me under his wing.

There was more than one Santa, you see, and we worked in shifts. The shift-changing required more complex drills than the Changing of the Guard: one Santa hangs about unseen in a service corridor behind Paperchase, until an elf leads the other Santa out; then, like a prisoner exchange in a spy movie, one Santa walks past the other, with the curtest of nods. There was a disaster in the first week when Santa disappeared ‘to feed his reindeer’ and came back five minutes later and a foot shorter.

‘You’ll enjoy it,’ Dave told me. ‘But it’s weird. The moment the beard goes on, you become Santa…’ The beard is all-important: much of the training day was devoted to care of the beard, the correct method of combing, the importance of tying a knot in the elastic (to guard against movement) and placing a sponge under the knot (to guard against chafing). The rest was modern grotto etiquette: lifting children on to Santa’s lap isn’t done any more. And the elf on the door must ensure that Santa is never left alone with a child. (‘Or an adult with special needs,’ interjected the director of the training company, adding: ‘There was An Incident.’)

Father Christmas doesn’t make assumptions: we shouldn’t ask about Mummy or Daddy when a child might have no Mummy, no Daddy, or two Mummies. ‘There’s no place for prejudice in a grotto situation,’ we were told. And no one would get special treatment — we were to act in exactly the same way if a celebrity visits Father Christmas. Dave’s top grotto moment was meeting Suzi Quatro; she sat on his knee, wriggled, and asked him whether it was true that he only came once a year.

Stepping out on my shift, I was photographed, waved at and my bottom was pinched for the first time in my life. Mums giggled and asked if they could sit on my knee. I let them; it was the one point at which my jolliness wasn’t faked. (It’s no better for the elves. Snowdrop told me: ‘If one more man comes up and tells me he’s been naughty…’) I kept thinking about that scene in Bad Santa: is it really true that some women have a Santa fetish? It’s a question we Santas often asked each other; no one had any evidence, but there was a rumour about goings-on in another grotto after closing.

As Santa I realised that all the work I’d put into my comedy career hadn’t achieved nearly as much ‘celebrity’ as putting on a beard and a red suit; I was even filmed for The One Show, wishing viewers a Merry Christmas; people took selfies with me. I also received the ultimate celebrity accolade: a taxi driver taking me to work (I’d had a late night and slept through my alarm), when he found out that I was Santa he called his son: ‘You’ll never guess who I’ve got in the back of my cab — it’s only Father Christmas!’ The phone was handed over to me and I had to explain that, when Rudolph was tired, I occasionally used taxis.

As a comedian, I’m used to improvising, but my skills have never been tested as rigorously. It’s slightly easier, of course, to play a character when you’ve known them all your life, but still, you have to come up with explanations as to how your sledge flies or how you fit down the chimney. (For under-tens, ‘Magic dust’ answers everything; with older kids, a reference to Doctor Who and a temporal vortex does the trick.) At the end of the shift, though, when the beard was beginning to scratch and the 27th child in a row said no, he hadn’t been good, but he’d still like an iPad, my explanations got briefer.

The weird thing is, Dave was right. I did feel myself becoming Santa. At first, I enjoyed being the centre of attention — I’m a comic, that’s what I live for — but then I started seeing the wonder in the children’s eyes. I wanted to avoid those office parties purely because I wasn’t the star, yet I found joy in a place that wasn’t about me at all, where I didn’t, in fact, exist — there was only Father Christmas.