Nurses from University College Hospital, London, rehearsing Christmas carols, 1930 Photo: General Photographic Agency/Getty Images  Nothing has given me more pleasure this week than the discovery that the Christmas carol While Shepherds Watched their Flocks by Night was once sung to the tune of On Ilkley Moor Baht 'At. The BBC performed a rare public service in playing a performance of the carol with the familiar words set to this jolly tune, and I doubt I was the only member of the audience who thought it sounded a remarkable improvement. Is it too much to hope that at any carol service one has to attend in future years the change might be made, and we could all have a chance to sing along with the new tune? Perhaps the movement will start in Yorkshire, and work its way outwards.  Each of us has a Christmas carol that stirs the blood and captures the very idea of what we think the festive season is meant to be: whether it be a profound religious sensibility, or an amalgam of nostalgia. The trouble is (and this is an unfashionable statement, but I shall make it none the less) that there may be only one or two carols that have that effect. The days have long gone for me, I fear, where I would find most of the rest acceptably jolly or charming. I find too many of them dirge-like, using remarkably few notes of the scale and sung at a plodding pace. Perhaps this was a ruse developed long ago to mask the fact that most people who form congregations are tone-deaf, and cannot sing, and so need all the help they can get.  An examination of the hymnbook discloses that some of the worst offenders are old, dull, German tunes, or ones that have turned up from various other parts of stodgy Mitteleuropa. Yet they have enormous popularity, one suspects for sentimental rather than for aesthetic reasons, and they stick in the carol service programme like pieces of old chewing gum. If I never hear Silent Night again, it will be too soon. Yet there are also some surprises. The tune for Hark, the Herald Angels Sing may be an uplifting dirge, but it is a dirge none the less: and it was written by Mendelssohn, though for a cantata celebrating the development of printing. It was never intended as a Christmas carol, or to have any religious purpose whatsoever. That did not stop some meddlesome Victorian pinching the tune, putting it to words by an 18th-century divine, and plaguing us all with it ever since. My heart sinks when I see it in its inevitable place on a service sheet: for it seems one can no more have a carol service without it than one can have roast beef without Yorkshire pudding.  The same is true of two other carols that seem to top and tail every service: Once in Royal David's City, with its obligatory piping treble, and O Come All Ye Faithful, another offering from the dirge school of carolling. The origins of its tune appear to be lost in the central European swamps. Once in Royal David's City is another early Victorian abomination, with words by Mrs C F Alexander set by H J Gauntlett, who clearly lacked only an X Factor to project his considerable talents more profoundly upon history. Perhaps it is only decades of hearing these same old tunes that has caused me to become jaded about them: perhaps they aren't that bad after all. However, they certainly fail to excite: and perhaps it is a cue for those who plan carol services to vary the diet a bit, and to stop regarding certain tunes as compulsory.  I must emphasise that I do not mean by this that those participating in these events should have inflicted on them carols from that ghastly sub-genre of happy-clappy, guitar-twanging, tambourine-thumping gruesomeness that has intruded into even the best carol services since the 1960s. I mean concentrating on some of the wonderful old tunes that most services regard as optional extras, but which are uniformly superb.  Many of these are good because they have borrowed tunes from English folk-songs: rather as the old version of While Shepherds Watched… did. Indeed, when Vaughan Williams edited the English Hymnal in 1906, he pillaged the canon of English folk-songs to illuminate the words of many hymns. Perhaps the best known is O Little Town of Bethlehem, which was a Sussex folk-tune before it became one of the jollier carols.  Apparently, the Church used to object to the secular nature of so many of these rather jolly tunes, associating any sense of enjoyment of music in a religious context with the influence of Satan. That was why it took so long for On Ilkley Moor to be approved by them for a carol, and presumably why any pompous tune by Mendelssohn (or any other composer, for that matter) won instant acceptance. By the time the Revd Mr Dearmer asked Vaughan Williams to do the English Hymnal at the beginning of the last century, those unenlightened times had passed, and those attending the services of the Church of England could at last participate in some decent music. Vaughan Williams himself was an agnostic, and perhaps it was his lack of encumbrance by any religious sensibilities – and particularly by some of those rather unattractive Victorian pieties – that gave him such success in the medium of church music.  The best tunes do occasionally turn up in carol services, and are sometimes even entrusted to the congregation to sing. At Advent there are Hills of the North, Rejoice! and O Come, O Come Emmanuel, the former a tune by an English contemporary of Vaughan Williams, Martin Shaw, written in 1915, the latter a medieval French number. Then, as the great day approaches, there is Holst's magnificent setting of In the Bleak Mid-Winter, Sullivan's It Came Upon the Midnight Clear (words not by Gilbert, but by an American clergyman), and the 18th-century Lo, He Comes with Clouds Descending, from the era of Arne and Boyce, before English music's century or so in the deep freeze.  For my favourite, though, we have to go back to Vaughan Williams, and his setting of This is the Truth Sent from Above, which begins his Fantasia on Christmas Carols. It is a ravishingly beautiful tune in a minor key that conveys not just the awe that Christians feel at the notion of the Creation, and the story of the Bible, but also the full hardness, darkness and bleakness of the English winter. It is magnificent – too magnificent, I fear, ever to have untutored congregants at a carol service let loose on it. But you may just hear it this Christmas, and I hope you will see exactly what I mean if you do.
Simon Heffer longs to hear the old, traditional and unusual Christmas carols    that rarely get an outing now