Why I’ll be lighting one last Christmas orange in honour of Caroline Aherne - David Behrens

Partly that’s because the English, unlike our brethren over the Welsh Marches, are tone deaf. But also it’s because no-one is really sure what the tune was supposed to be in the first place.

As a matter of fact, until the 19th century While Shepherds… was commonly sung to the tune of Ilkley Moor Baht ’At because no-one had written down a more formal arrangement nor invented any means of broadcasting the result.

I discovered this from English Heritage, whose newly-published history of carols reveals that hardly any of them ever had a ‘correct’ melody. Congregations just improvised tunes on the spot and the notes spread by word of mouth. It’s pretty much what happens with football chants today.

It’s on those Saturday afternoons, not Sunday mornings, that the weekly ritual of communal singing takes place now. We do it there because we can let rip in the knowledge that our voices can’t be heard above anyone else’s in the stadium. In church, on the other hand, we’re terrified of drawing attention to ourselves, especially if we’re once-a-year attendees who feel we shouldn’t really be there.

And other than church and the football terraces, we sing aloud to each other only when we’re extremely drunk.

A fortnight ago the three circumstances combined when 7,000 people in woolly football hats turned up to a carol service in east London and squeezed themselves like sardines into a little market square. The result might have been a rare coming together of communities in the common pursuit of peace and happiness but, perhaps predictably, it was the opposite.

People stood on each other’s shoulders and belted out sacred hymns with the ferocity and discordance of a chorus of Who Ate All The Pies? The unholy racket prompted organisers to call off carolling for the rest of the season, in the interests of public safety.

The crowd had been generated by social media, which is what passes for word of mouth these days. People turned up because it was free and probably because when they saw the word ‘carols’ they thought it meant Carol Kirkwood and Carol Vorderman were coming.

But I wonder why they were keen enough to go out and gather on a wet winter’s night but not in a nice, dry church on a Sunday morning. Perhaps if they put a public bar behind the pews they’d be on to something.

For most of us, Christmas will be spent not in a public square or in church but at home in front of the TV, where we will content ourselves with complaining about the number of repeats. There are plenty of those this year but may I commend to you a new offering – a documentary about a star of Christmases past, the wonderful comedian Caroline Aherne, who in various alter egos brought us The Mrs Merton Show and The Royle Family.

Caroline would have turned 60 this weekend. But she died seven years ago after a life whose incredible peaks were matched by terrible troughs.

The BBC’s tribute to her will have special resonance for me because I knew her towards the beginning of her career. It was in 1990 that the radio presenter Martin Kelner introduced me to her as a rising star of the Northern comedy circuit. She had developed the Mrs Merton character on stage and the wireless and I was able to persuade Yorkshire TV to make a pilot with her.

We shot it in a little studio at the newly-built Meadowhall centre in Sheffield and it was obvious that there was greatness about her. It was a source of lasting regret that YTV didn’t immediately see it and turned down the chance of making the series. Later, when she was a star and her life became fodder for the tabloids, I had to fend off former colleagues seeking her phone number.

Her second great creation, The Royle Family, was as much a staple of Christmas night as EastEnders and Call The Midwife but it’s 11 years since the last one went out and all that’s left are repeats. So they’re not always unwelcome.

In Caroline’s honour I’ll make one last Christmas orange tomorrow and light the candle in her memory.