Follow the Stars – A Celebration of Christmas!

While many spent their Lockdown summers perfecting sourdough starters or baking banana bread, Biddy (L6th, A) was quite literally following the stars. A family involvement with the Macmillan Cancer Support charity led to Biddy volunteering her time to help organise and curate Macmillan’s Follow the Stars Charity Christmas concert.

The concert, re-imagined for 2020 and free streamed online from the 11 December sees a stellar cast of celebrities such as Alexander Armstrong and his son Paddy (pictured above), Joanna Lumley, Stephen Fry, Sinead Cusack and Jeremy Irons joining forces to bring Christmas sparkle directly into our homes. Biddy’s responsibility was both logistical and editorial, ensuring that recorded performances from the artists’ homes were ordered and properly formatted, and that actors turning up for recording sessions in July and August were properly kitted out with Christmassy trimmings.

Biddy said: ‘However many times we reminded them to bring something seasonal they normally forgot, so I ended up wandering around Oxford (the concert comes from Christchurch Cathedral) in mid-summer, festooned like a Christmas Tree! It made me realise that even the biggest stars are actually just like the rest of us, but I was amazed at how kind they all were and how amazing it was that they were giving up their time for such an important cause’

Congratulations to Biddy for spending her summer so productively, and please do tune in, enjoy the concert, and as Joann Lumley says in her introduction, ‘let’s all raise a glass to the wonderful work of Macmillan!’

Find out more at macmillan.org.uk/followthestars