Q1.  The Father Christmas is fairly crudely constituted (being iconic with low motivation) by colour, styling, positioning to offer instant recognition, reassurance, benevolence, a warm welcome and a clear focus. The setting further suggests an urban, business-oriented, consumerist Christmas where there is warmth here but nothing particularly spiritual unless the audience identifies a star in the east among the white spots in the sky (which may be stars or snow and add either way to the manufactured ‘magic’). The words provide anchorage through a tagline (“when it comes to Christmas, there’s no place like…Manchester”). This stating of Christmas then sharpens up the snow-covered iconic buildings which add relevance and a familiar Christmas aesthetic. It also draws focus to the pretty lights which draw attention to what most will recognise as a German or continental or merely generic Christmas market.  

Q2.  This city scape is The Public Sphere, iconic buildings, the central shopping area, an economic centre: the commercial heart: it is dark and mysterious also ‘promising’. The representation here may be seen as dangerously bland, as if we are observing a ‘natural’ scene, a kind of Capitalist Realism. Equally it may be seen as ‘gorgeous’: glamour and spectacle this is a classic Barthesian myth, a deliberate confusion of History and Nature: we are to imagine this is what cities are like rather than this is how cities have developed. Additionally, this is a representation of the city as a ‘resort’: a location for consumerist adventure: Christmas as a spending spree with Manchester as a temporary materialist theme park, the political here is disguised as if its meaning came from just how things are. 

Ghost Town is more overtly political, a conscious reproach to Thatcher’s Britain. A booming City and Southeast juxtaposed with the post-industrial collapse of the economy everywhere else drew up lines of opposition across the 1980s. The video provides a guided tour of deprivation anchored by a literate protest lyric and there is also a political message in the multi-racial composition of the band in a Britain beset by the mobilisation of the hard right. Punk had provided access to expression to the disenfranchised and prompted a new kind of political pop that was articulate and working class.