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Christmas is meant to be a jolly time, the season of good will to all men. But Charles Dickens’s Scrooge wasn’t the only one to say: “Bah! Humbug!” to that.

Why is it that so many of us delight in being negative, not just at Christmas but all year round? Could it be that we’re genetically programmed to respond more strongly to the negative than the positive? Nick Higham investigates.

In 1960, Max Bygraves had a hit with the title song from the cockney musical Fings Ain’t What They Used To Be.

Bygraves’s world was changing, and he wasn’t happy about it. There were fashionable working-class teddy boys in drainpipe trousers, upper-class girls slumming it in coffee houses, traffic jams instead of London trams, parking meters.

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