The Lost Carols - A Christmas Carol, 1950, television

Title:
A Christmas Carol
 
Format:
Live television drama
 
Country:
UK
 
Production company:
BBC Television
 
Year:
1950 – broadcast twice, both as live performances by the same cast; first at 9pm on Christmas Day, and then again in the For the Children slot at 5pm on Wednesday the 27^th.
 
Length:
Approximately 90 minutes. That was the scheduled slot, although live dramas could occasionally over- or underrun – but the evidence suggests this ran pretty much to time, as there’s no mention of anything to the contrary in the BBC’s audience research report.
 
Setting:
Victorian
 
Background:
For the second time, Bransby Williams was due to bring to the television screen his performance as Scrooge, which had become well-known on stage throughout much of the 20^th century to this point. And unlike his scheduled one-man performance from 1936, this time it did actually happen – but sadly, once again we are unable to see it now.
 
That one wasn’t really a ‘Lost Carol’ as it never actually happened in the first place, and it could also be argued that this one isn’t strictly-speaking ‘lost’ either. It never ‘existed’ to be lost at all, in a recorded sense, any more than a stage play does. It was performed live, twice, and on neither occasion was any effort made to preserve it for posterity. It simply went out into the either, seen only by those in Britain who had television sets switched-on at the time, and was then gone forever.
 
And yes, it would have been seen by anybody who had a television set switched on – because at this point the BBC was still the only British television broadcaster. Their single channel was now being beamed out from two transmitters, at Alexandra Palace serving London and the surrounding area, and at Sutton Coldfield serving the English Midlands.
 
There were, however, now hundreds of thousands of television viewers, with the number increasing all the time. Television was still a way from being a mass medium at this point, but nor was it any longer the luxury of a tiny few.
 
The live performance, pretty much universal for all British television drama of the time, meant that, yes, the entire cast and crew were there on Christmas Day. It was also common for there to be a second performance, in this case just two days later, put out this time in the 5pm children’s slot so that younger viewers who had not had the chance to watch it first time around would be able to see it.

Bransby Williams appearing on television in 1957

 

All, however, did not go entirely well for Williams in this second performance. Having been forced to cancel his planned 1936 television debut at Scrooge due to illness, the second performance of this full-cast version almost went the same way. On New Year’s Day, the Daily Herald reported how Williams had become ill early during the December 27 transmission, and that he was “in agony for one and a half hours before the cameras.”
 
“I had hardly given my first bellow of rage before I was gripped by the most awful abdominal pains,” he was quoted as having told the paper. “My training prevented the viewers – in Children’s Hour – from knowing anything was wrong. They just saw my face working more than usual. The play ran according to script.” The Herald further added that “the contortions of his face through pain made Scrooge’s rage all the more frightening,” and that Williams had “refused to abandon his part, because there was no understudy.”
 
Several of the newspaper previews and reviews of the production mention how it took up the use of two television studios, rather than simply being done in one as was more usual – although it was not unknown for big productions to be spread across a pair. The Birmingham Post, in a preview on December 14, claimed that “Bransby Williams, in the part of Scrooge, will be working on one set, while the rest of the cast will be performing elsewhere, and the two pictures will be superimposed to give a suitably ghostly effect.”
 
While this was true for certain scenes, it gives the impression that Williams was alone in one studio and the rest of the cast in the other, which was not the case. Only the scenes with the ghosts were done separately in this manner, and not necessarily always in different studios, so that the two could be cross-faded. However, it’s still impressive that Williams and his co-stars were able to play effectively without having one another nearby, whether they were in the same studio at the time or not.
 
“There are about fourteen scenes,” the Huddersfield Examiner reported on the 20^th. “And approximately half the performance will be superimposed to give a suitably ghostly effect.” Producer Eric Fawcett had commented on the difficulties this presented in a preview in the Christmas edition of the Radio Times. “We are trying to keep the ghosts as ghostly as possible,” he told the magazine, “even though this entails the actors playing scenes while standing yards apart. Two-studio production will necessitate such careful work on the part of the cameramen, sound and vision-mixers and engineers – to say nothing of those dyed-in-the-wool enthusiasts, the studio staff.”
 
As to which studios these were, I have no hard evidence but I would say almost certainly the two original BBC Television studios, Studios A and B at Alexandra Palace in North London. The BBC had in 1950 begun using their newly-acquired facility at Lime Grove, a set of ex-film studios, with Studio D having launched at the children’s studio in May. Studio G had been opened for television with a variety spectacular on the Saturday before Christmas, but at this point drama production still seems to have been based at the Palace so it seems almost certain that A Christmas Carol came from there.

Alexandra Palace in 1946, with the transmitter mast above the BBC-occupied wing

Cast and Crew:
I wrote about Bransby Williams’s background playing Scrooge in my piece on the abandoned 1936 production, so there’s little need to repeat that here. It is worth saying, however, that at the age of 80 he must surely have been one of the earliest-born people ever to have starred in a television drama.
 
He did, however, have some level of assistance – The Stage the following month mentioned “Ewart Wheeler, who doubled so ingeniously for Bransby Williams in the recent televising of A Christmas Carol.” Wheeler is credited in the Radio Times simply for ‘other parts’, so you can imagine how he perhaps played Scrooge for certain shots seen only from behind, while Williams was prepared for a following shot or scene.
 
Among the rest of the cast, one name which leaps out to anyone familiar with the BBC’s 1950s television output is that of Patricia Fryer as ‘Fanny’ – Fryer would later play Margaret Appleyard, youngest of the Appleyard siblings in the BBC’s children’s soap opera-cum-sitcom The Appleyards, taking over the part for the second series in 1953 before outgrowing it herself in 1955, and returning for the one-off Christmas with The Appleyards in 1960. There is no Fan listed in the cast, so ‘Fanny’ is presumably a slightly-renamed version of Scrooge’s sister from the Christmas Past scenes, which Fryer would have been the right age for.
 
As is not exactly common but also not unique, the three performers playing the ghosts here double-up in other parts. Arthur Hambling as the Spirit of Christmas Past also appears as one of the stock exchange gentlemen discussing Scrooge’s death in the Yet-to-Come scenes; Julian d’Albie as the Ghost of Christmas Present – yes, they were billed as a mix of ‘Spirit’ and ‘Ghost’ – is also credited as a ‘portly gentleman’, and WE Holloway as the Spirit of Christmas to Come (no ‘yet’ in the billing) also portrays Marley.

 
Whether this was for effect or for economy is debateable, however it appears to have almost certainly been the former. ‘Young Scrooge’ actor John Bentley also has a credit as a night watchman appearing early on in the play, and similarly Old Joe actor Leonard Sharp appears as a crossing sweeper. Fryer too had a second role, credited as ‘Girl waif’ alongside Michael Edmonds as ‘Boy waif’ – from their placing in the order-of-appearance cast list, almost certainly these are Ignorance and Want from the end of the ‘Present’ section. This perhaps adds weight to the idea that the doubling-up was a deliberate effect, with some of the figures Scrooge encounters through the story having the faces of those who are familiar to him.
 
On the subject of familiar faces, several of the cast were old co-stars of Williams’ – he remarked to the Daily Herald after his illness during the second performance that “there was always one of my old pals – Jimmy d’Albie, Bill Holloway or Arthur Hambling – waiting to give me an arm. Once or twice they half carried me.” Kathleen Saintsbury, who played Mrs Cratchit, was also a friend and regular co-star from the stage, who would appear on Williams’s This is Your Life in 1958.
 

Kathleen Saintsbury appears on Bransby Williams' episode of This is Your Life in 1958

Perhaps one of the most notable names in the cast is Barbara Murray, as Belle – evidently not named here, as she’s only given as ‘fiancée’ in the cast list in the Radio Times. Murray was already a recognisable face from British films at this point, having co-starred in Passport to Pimlico the previous year, and would continue to be a notable screen presence in British cinema for some years to come. So it’s quite impressive that they were able to drag her away from her Christmas dinner to come and do this – although it is possible that her scene could perhaps have been a film insert, especially as Murray is not one of those who doubles up in another role. Such inserts were being used in television drama by this point, although only very sparingly and more often than not for outdoor and action sequences rather than dialogue scenes.

 
It was also the usual practice of BBC television drama at the time for there to be a single person credited as ‘producer’ who performed what might today be understood to be the functions of both producer and director – overseeing the production both administratively and creatively. This was the case here, with producer Eric Fawcett also having written the adaptation – although from an existing stage play version by Dominic Roche, rather than directly from the book. Fawcett had a long career with BBC Television, beginning as a producer on the pre-war service from Alexandra Palace in the 1930s and continuing right through until the 1970s as a drama director.
 
As a Doctor Who fan and someone with a great interest in the creation of that programme, I cannot resist noting the presence of James Bould as the designer. Thirteen years later, Bould would be the BBC’s Design Department Manager and one of those who was not keen about Doctor Who going ahead as he didn’t think his department had the time, manpower and resources to provide for its needs. He was presumably having a happier time here with a different story which went through the barriers of time.
 
Underdone Potato:
Without having had access to the script, it’s obviously very difficult to say anything much for certain about the specific elements of this version. However, with the cast listed in order of appearance in the Radio Times, we do know that Julian d’Albie, Leonard Sharp and John Bentley, later to appear as the Ghost of Christmas Present, Old Joe and Young Scrooge respectively, all appear early on, after only Williams as Scrooge, John Ruddock as Bob Cratchit and Robert Cawdron as Fred, so there seems to have been a deliberate level of foreshadowing there.
 
I have been able to read the BBC’s audience research report on the production, which notes how “There was praise… for the way the atmosphere of mid-Victorian London was suggested, especially in the opening scenes ‘which set the mood for the whole play’.”
 
Past:
The credits for Sean Lynch as ‘Boy Scrooge’ and John Bentley as ‘Young Scrooge’, as well as Patricia Fryer as ‘Fanny’ and Barbara Murray as ‘Fiancée’, indicate that we get the usual scenes of Scrooge as an unhappy schoolboy, and later breaking his engagement – or rather, having it broken.
 
There is, however, no credit for anyone playing Fezziwig, which suggests that the party scene was either omitted or scaled-down. There is a production credit for “Dances arranged by John Armstrong”, which would surely have been mostly likely to have been for a Fezziwig scene. Perhaps it was only briefly shown using extras.
 
Present:
Again, we can mostly only try and guess at what was shown from the cast list – but we certainly have the scene with the Cratchits, as there are credits for Mrs Cratchit, Martha, Peter, Tim and unnamed ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ Cratchits. Fred was already credited for his earlier appearance at Scrooge’s office, so it’s uncertain whether there was a scene at his Christmas lunch. I am inclined to think not, as there is a credit for ‘Ann Wriggs’ – seemingly an error, and meant to be Ann Wrigg without the ‘s’ – as ‘Mrs Fred’ but not until the very end – suggesting she is not seen until Scrooge visits after his redemption to go and make amends.

 
Yet to Come:
There are credits for the gentlemen who discuss Scrooge’s death, and for Joe and Mrs Dilber discussing the sale of his things, but with the Cratchits having been credited earlier it’s impossible to know whether their future scene was included here – but I suspect it probably was.
 
The unnamed reviewer, credited only as ‘Cathode’, in the Wokingham & Bracknell Times gives us an impression of how the Spirit was realised for this section, and they were not particularly impressed. Having praised the production generally, ‘Cathode’ felt that “the Ghost of Xmas Yet to Come looked too much like a member of the Ku-Klux-Klan.”
 
What’s To-Day:
Again, because most characters who would normally re-appear here have already been credited, it’s very difficult by this stage to be able to determine too many specifics without the script. However, we can say that there was Tony Lyons as ‘Boy with the goose’, and as mentioned above there does appear to have been a scene of Scrooge going to dine with his nephew as Mrs Fred is the final new character credited as appearing. We do know that Scrooge lifted up Tiny Tim at the end of the Christmas Day performance – because the Daily Herald noted Williams was unable to do so on the second performance due to his illness.

 

Review:
Obviously I cannot review the production myself as I have not seen it, and nor sadly will I ever be able to, and I have not currently been able to read a copy of the script. However, fortunately unlike for some lost versions of the Carol we can get at least some impression of what it was like, from contemporary reviews – both professional, and from ordinary viewers.
 
The BBC at the time did not yet compile viewing figure as such. They did, however, have a panel of several hundred families selected as being a representative cross-section of the audience, who recorded their reactions to the various programmes. From their responses, the BBC calculated that some 59% of television sets had been switched on for A Christmas Carol on Christmas Day, with 23% for the repeat in For the Children two days later.
 
The first performance had an average of 4.35 people watching per set in use, and the second performance 3.19. Both received very good ‘Reaction Index’ figures – the indication of how much those in the sample group who watched a programme had enjoyed it. The first performance had a score of 74, and the second 73. This was, as the audience research report noted, “well above the current average (63) for studio performances of plays.”
 
The report does also note, however, that “The audience for this programme, though large by normal standards, was by no means outstanding compared with others during the Xmas holiday period, large numbers of ‘guest viewers’ leading to high ‘viewers per sets-in-use’ figures for nearly all programmes.”

 
In terms of qualitative rather than quantitative feedback, it’s fascinating that the audience research report records an almost reverent attitude towards the Carol. Noting that 94% of the 272 who completed questionnaires related to the programme indicated that the story had already been familiar to them, the report suggests that “because this story now ranks as a Christmas tradition most viewers felt it to be beyond criticism.”
 
Not all, however. “A few admitted a slight feeling of aversion for its ‘outdated’ sentimentality and insistence on a moral ‘which now seems to have lost much of its original point’.” While there was “little comment on individual points,” some viewers felt that “the length of the novel made it a difficult subject for television and that some cutting, especially in the scenes depicting Scrooge’s earlier life, would have done no harm.” Which seems a strange thing to say given it’s quite a short book, and a 90-minute slot ought to enable it to be done fairly well.
 
Williams’s performance as Scrooge was “widely regarded as little short of perfect,” with some who had seen him play the part on stage in the past “delighted to find he could still play it ‘with all the old zest’.” John Ruddock as Cratchit, Thomas Moore as Tim and Robert Cawdron as Fred we also “singled out as especially memorable.”
 
The production techniques seem to have gone down well, also, with report stating that viewers “thought very well of the production and settings, particularly of the camera-work and sets in the spirit scenes. As several said, here the resources of television came into their own, enabling the viewer to see things which were quite impossible to manage on the stage.”
 
Among the professional reviewers, George Campey in the Evening Standard admitted that “the attention of some of my guests wandered during the first hour.” However, he himself “sat enthralled by the encounters between Scrooge (played with veteran knowledge by Bransby Williams) and the assorted spectres in a production which fully evoked the Dickensian spirit. This play must have been a producer’s nightmare. Eric Fawcett, at the helm, handled the tricks and the action with consummate skill.”
 
AE Jebbett in the Evening Despatch liked Williams’s “smooth melodrama” as Scrooge, but felt overall that the production was too long. Cyril Butcher in The Sketch’s round-up of Christmas viewing had no such qualms, praising Eric Fawcett for having “turned in one of the best jobs of work in his career. The story, with its ghosts and spirits, obviously lends itself to a full use of camera superimposition – a dangerous trick used by inexpert hands. But Mr Fawcett’s are just about as experienced as one will find. Nor did he, in this welter of technicalities, forget that he was dealing with a lovely and moving tale which needs most delicate handling. Thank you, Mr Fawcett.”
 
‘Cathode’ in the Wokingham & Bracknell Times “had that queer feeling that one gets when one visits an entirely strange place and feels ‘I have been here before.’ For everything in the play was just as I had imagined it. The brilliant Scrooge by that Grand Old Man of the stage, Bransby Williams, really made old Ebenezer live, and Dorothy Summers gave an excellent portrayal of Mrs Dilber.”
 
Apart from the aforementioned reservation about the costume of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, the only criticism ‘Cathode’ made was that “the Ghost of Xmas Past was not nearly as awesome as it might have been.”
 
In a Nutshell:
An important milestone in the Carol’s television history, it’s a shame we can’t see this today – but that’s nobody’s fault, it’s simply the way things were. You may as well blame a stage play for ‘not existing’.
 
Links:
IMDb
Radio Times

A Christmas Carol - 2020, film

Title:
A Christmas Carol
 
Format:
Live action feature film
 
Country:
UK
 
Production company:
Frith Street Films
 
Year:
2020
 
Length:
96 minutes
 
Setting:
Fantasy Victorian
 
Background:
This is, I feel reasonably certain of saying, a unique version of the Carol. There is a framing set-up at the start and end which is conventionally acted and performed, of some children putting on a kind of puppet show version of the Carol with cut-out paper figures from newspapers and illustrations, for an audience of presumably their mother and father and a younger sibling. An older woman, perhaps their grandmother, narrates.
 
But the main action of the story and the majority of the film takes place ‘within’ their model theatre stage. Live-action performances among dioramas of cut-out newspaper clippings and Leech-like illustrations and cardboard walls. And these live-action performers do not speak any words – they glide and move but all the vocal performances are given by others, mixed with the narration. The whole effect is rather like watching a narrated ballet with voiceovers for the different characters, or visuals put to a radio play.

 

This did, apparently, get a cinema release in the UK for Christmas 2020, and I think I do remember toying with the idea of going to see it. But cinemas were of course struggling in the pandemic at the time, with big releases having been pushed back to 2021, social distancing in place and not many people yet keen to get fully back into the swing of going out and gathering together. So I doubt this did much business or was seen by a huge number of people on its original release.
 
Cast and crew:
Each of the characters, outside of the framing set-up, has two performers – a dancer and a voice artist. So, for example, Scrooge is seen being performed on-screen as a dancer by Michael Nunn, but all of his dialogue is delivered by Simon Russell Beale, as Nunn’s lips never move to it, nor do any of the other characters to their voice actors – this is not a mime show.
 
The voice cast is, I think, much better known than the dancing one. Beale is one of those actors distinguished in the profession – knighted, even – with a wide and respected body of work but not really a household name as such; more of a kind of ‘oh, him!’ type when you see him in things. I recall him mostly as Widmerpool in the Channel 4 version of A Dance to the Music of Time, for which he won a BAFTA.
 
Elsewhere, Bob Cratchit is voiced by Martin Freeman, known of course for his TV roles as Tim in the original BBC version of The Office and Watson in Sherlock, and on the big screen for his starring role in the Peter Jackson Hobbit films. Oscar-winner Daniel Kaluuya voices the Ghost of Christmas Present, while two-time Oscar nominee Carey Mulligan gets quite a high billing for quite a small part as Belle. Andy Serkis, a year on from his appearance in the 2019 television version, gets a credit on a more traditional telling here, this time in the role of the voice of Marley. The biggest name actually appearing on screen is Siân Phillips, as the narrating grandmother figure in the wraparound sequences, and in voiceover form throughout.

The film is directed by Northampton-born brother-and-sister team Jacqui and David Morris, with David providing the screenplay. They began their filmmaking career on documentaries, being BAFTA nominated for their production about war photographer Don McCullin. Together they run Frith Street Films, which was the production company for this version of the Carol.

 
Underdone Potato:
Having Phillips as the narrator means that, much like Gonzo in the Muppet version, we get to keep much of Dickens’ prose from the book which would otherwise have been lost in a more conventional screen adaptation, so that’s a good move. However, there is one change near the very start which gives me pause. The underlining that it must be understood that Marley is dead at the start “…or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate,” is here changed to “nothing good,” which I’d suggest is a rather different thing.
 
It's an interesting change because it seems to me to switch the meaning of the line from being that you have to understand Marley is dead or else the story itself will not have its wondrous magic, to meaning you cannot take the good and decent message of the story unless you understand that. It is, as I say, an interesting thing to do and I wish I could ask David Morris why he’d decided to make that particular change.

 

Marley is quite a sinister figure here, so much so that there’s even a bit of a coded warning about this at the start, with the mother warning her youngest child that Marley will be the frightening one, but will be soon gone. One of his lines which is often left out, the explicitly Christian reference to the Wise Men following a star, is included here – and overall this version does retain more of Dickens’ specific references to Christianity than is usually the case in other adaptations of what’s become the great secular Christmas tale.
 
There are some minor changes, such as Scrooge meeting the two charitable gentlemen out on the street rather than in his office, but on the whole, as with the rest of the film, this section proceeds fairly faithfully to the book.
 
Past:
The spirit is female on this occasion, and seems to lack any of the candle imagery specified by Dickens – although I suppose you could say that her dance performance is perhaps intended to evoke the flickering of a flame. It’s fairly subtle though, if so, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, of course.
 
The school scene contains one of the few of this versions own inventions, a man called “Honest Tom” who is seen to comfort the young Scrooge during one of his lonely childhood Christmases. We get Fan bringing him home, and then later an extra Fan scene between the Fezziwig party and the Belle scenes – Fan dying in childbirth with Fred, which I suppose could perhaps be taken as implied in the book but isn’t explicit.

As in many other versions Belle is present at the Fezziwigs’ party, which she isn’t in the book, and we see Scrooge propose to her there. After the late scene of her breaking their engagement, here we do get the second Belle scene from the Christmas of Marley’s death, which any adaptation always gets an extra mark from me for including as I have always liked it. However, they don’t do the entire scene – we see her husband return home, but there’s none of their discussion of Scrooge and Marley which takes place in the book.
 
With the spirit lacking that candle imagery, here Scrooge does not snuff her out at the end of the section.
  
Present:
Most of the usual main elements are all present and correct here, but as in other places they also include some things which other adaptations often omit. So we have Scrooge’s confrontation with the spirit over the pressure to close bakeries on Sundays, and a little of their trip out to sea – although no miners.
 

Just before the end of the section, there is another of the inventions unique to this version, as we see examples of violence, aggression and prostitution on the streets of Victorian London. These are seemingly there to underline the issues of Ignorance and Want, as unveiled from beneath the spirit’s cloak as in the original.
 
Yet-to-Come:
The spirit has something of its usual hooded shape, but taking a cue from Dickens’s description of it “coming like a mist along the ground,” it’s depicted here not so much as a person as a kind of black cloud with a single hand emerging from it to point and gesture as-and-when required.

What’s To-Day:

Again, very faithful to the book – although there is one oddity which I don’t quite understand. When Scrooge asks the boy below his window to go and buy the prize bird from the poulterers’ for him, Dickens has the boy reply with a disbelieving “Walk-er!” This no longer being a common expression it’s not usually included in adaptations, although it is sometimes by those who like the period flavour it gives or just want to try and be as authentic to the text as they can.
 
Here the boy replies… “Walk-RE”. Which I don’t understand. It almost makes me wonder… Was it a typing error? A transposing of the last two letters of the response which somehow made it all the way through scripting, redrafting, recording, editing and dubbing…? It couldn’t be… Could it…?

Review:

It’s hard not to imagine a lot of the people who might actually have ventured to the cinema to see this turning to someone who’d come to it with them a little way in and asking, in trepidation, “Is it… like this all the way through?”
 
Sadly, yes it is. I didn’t hate this version by any stretch of the imagination, and I think that the design and concept of the staging of it, the whole idea of the characters being cut-outs within the dollhouse theatre setting, is lovely. And having Phillips as narrator to give us some of that wonderful Dickens prose is always something which I’d welcome.
 
But I suspect you’d probably get a lot more out of this version of you’re interested in interpretive dance – which I am not. I think you need words to tell a story, and while of course narration and dialogue are both present here, I find the way they’re detached from the characters on screen gives a distancing effect to the whole thing.

In a nutshell:
There are far worse versions, and it is an interesting experiment. It looks lovely – but I find it hard to believe it could ever be anybody’s favourite version of the Carol.

Links:

Frith Street Films

Wikipedia

IMDb

Scrooge, or A Christmas Carol (Sarah) - 1990, television

 

Title:

Scrooge, or A Christmas Carol Sarah 

Format:
Multi-camera studio VT children’s comedy
 
Country:
UK
 
Production company:
BBC Television
 
Year:
1990 – transmitted on BBC One on December 29 that year
 
Length:
41 minutes
 
Setting:
Contemporary
 
Background:
Going Live! was the BBC’s live Saturday morning children’s television programme from 1987 to 1993, one of the best-known shows from a tradition of such live sequence programmes which were a fixture of weekend children’s viewing in the UK from the mid-1970s until into the 2000s. Both the BBC and ITV developed strong contributions to the genre down the decades, although they rarely if ever both had strong, popular shows of this type at the same time – perhaps inevitably, it would swing back-and-forth between the two as to who had the most successful format at any given point.
 
That said, the formats were broadly similar – the shows would be studio-based, led by a duo or perhaps a team of presenters, with live guests including various young pop stars and actors of the day. There’d often be an audience full of children in the studio, regular items, games, interviews, and episodes of cartoon series interspersed throughout. The best-known examples of these shows would become well-known pop culture touchstones, and part of the childhood television memories of a generation.
 
Going Live! is certainly one of those best-known examples, and by 1990 was probably at the height of its powers. Being from the Saturday between Christmas and New Year this particular example was not, in fact, a live show, but a pre-recorded version retitled Gone Live! and consisting of the regular teaming linking between the usual cartoons and other items without the audience or guests. The final 40 minutes was then all built around this adaptation of A Christmas Carol, using the Going Live! team as the stars of the story. 

Cast and crew:
The presenters of Going Live!, Sarah Greene and Philip Schofield, had already become well-known on children’s television through the 1980s through presenting Blue Peter and the Children’s BBC ‘broom cupboard’ weekday afternoon strand respectively. They take on the main Scrooge and ‘Scratchit’ roles here, with Greene probably getting the Scrooge part – Sarah Scrooge – because of her greater actual acting experience, having previously appeared in the likes of Doctor Who. Schofield clearly did also have at least some acting ambitions himself, as not long after this he took over the lead in Jason and His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat in the West End, but Greene was clearly the stronger and more confident actor. As a six-year-old at this time, I labour under the misunderstanding that Schofield’s name was “Philips Gofield.”
 
Also a well-known element of Going Live! were the comedy duo Trevor and Simon, Trevor Neal and Simon Hickson, who had been brought onto the programme to give a child-friendly version of the kind of alternative comedy of the Young Ones and Blackadder generation which had become popular through the 1980s. Trevor and Simon’s material, however, still had plenty to engage and amuse across the generations, and they appear in multiple roles here – framing the story as their regular ‘World of the Strange’ paranormal storyteller characters, and also popping up in their ‘Swing Your Pants’ folk singer guises.
 
Most importantly, however, Hickson and Neal actually wrote the whole thing, too. Peter Leslie was the director and David Mercer the producer, with the special being recorded across two days earlier in the month, on the 4^th and 5^th of December.

Underdone Potato:
The ‘World of the Strange’ wraparounds take place in a timeless, cod-Victorian misty street setting, but the actual main action of the story is very firmly of its time. Sarah Scrooge runs a typically yuppy-looking, late-Thatcherite hard-nosed big business empire, with big shoulders, big cordless phones, big green-and-black computer displays and Stock-Aitken-Waterman second-ranker Sonia, exactly the type of person you would expect to turn up as a guest on Going Live!, as one of the charity collectors. The other charity collector is Peter Simon, who presented Going Live!’s game show segment, Double Dare.
 
Schofield is poor Philip Scratchit, office underling, who we see in a scene from home is ‘married’ here to the Going Live! cookery slot presenter, and future co-presenter of the show’s Saturday successor Live & Kicking, Emma Forbes. Their offspring is of course Schofield’s sidekick from throughout his children’s television presenting days, the puppet Gordon the Gopher, here rechristened ‘Tiny Gordon’ for the occasion. Oddly, despite the workplace setting being contemporary, the Scratchits’ home is a very 1950s-type set-up.

 
Scratchit is invited round Sarah’s trendy early 90s flat for Christmas Eve, but this turns out to be a trick so she can frame him for being arrested for stealing her hi-fi system – another very of-its-period prop. Sarah is then visited by the ghost of her former business partner Jacob Marley, who is played by Rowland Rivron. Rivron is one of those performers who most of the audience might recognise as being someone they have seen in something, but would be unable to place or name without a bit of help, who has nonetheless spent many years since the 1980s cropping up in a range of British musical and comedy – and sometimes both – TV shows.
 
The Marley played by Rivron is something of a departure – no chains, instead the hell of constantly having to keep a white suit clean, which isn’t a bad substitute gag. The thing is, though, it’s made clear he’s not actually being punished – he was a nice person who enjoyed Christmas, and it’s Scrooge who’s the only bad one. He also gets a gag about being off to Elvis Presley’s Wild Sherry Party, which reminded me that for years and years, through all my growing up certainly, Elvis was pretty much the most famously dead person whose being dead could be safely joked about without fear of offending or upsetting anybody. Is there a modern day equivalent of this, I wonder…?

 
Past:
Smashing through a wall in Sarah Scrooge’s apartment much like Robbie Coltrane as the ‘Spirit of Christmas’ in another BBC spoof version of a couple of years beforehand, it’s Red Dwarf computer face Norman Lovett as a Hell’s Angel-type spirit wearing a winged motorcycle helmet left over from an old Doctor Who story. I quite liked this, as it placed it very much within the BBC of my youth, where all the shows the BBC made and had ever made all seemed to exist together within Television Centre.
 
Anyway, the Spirit shows Sarah some of the action from the office at Christmas time a few years beforehand, and there’s an implication that she might have killed Marley by kicking him out of a window. She insists she didn’t, but it’s not clear how much we’re meant to believe her – and as the Spirit points out, who would anyway, with her reputation? We also see her declining the offer of a mince pie from Marley on the basis that she’s a vegetarian – a nice little reference to the pies’ real origins. Or juts one of the man fun, throwaway gags in the piece, one or the other!

 
Present:
Much like Rivron, the actor cast as the Ghost of Christmas Present here is someone many in the audience will know by sight but then get frustrated they can’t remember who it is. It’s Susie Blake, who certainly at this point would have been familiar to many for her work with Victoria Wood, most notably as her blunt in-vision continuity announcer.
 
There’s a nice gag which it’s surprising hasn’t been done more about the Ghost of Christmas Present literally being the ghost of a Christmas present – complete with box-on-legs type costume. The whole thing is filled with corny gags of this type, but it knows they’re corny and isn’t earnestly trying to sell them to you. The whole thing is a send-up of itself, a knowing nod-and-a-wink to the audience as their Saturday morning favourites mess around, which is exactly the kind of thing that A Christmas Carol being so familiar a trope allows you to do. This being the time period that it is, there’s also a gag an the expense of Channel 4’s famous 1982 animation The Snowman and its “Walking in the Air” song, both very much as strong a part of the secular British Christmas as the Carol at this point.
 
The Spirit takes Sarah Scrooge to see the Scratchits being very poor indeed, and there’s an interesting bit at the end of this section where Scrooge has left the scene upset, and the Spirit then turns to the family and congratulates them on their performance – so in this version, they’re in on it with the Spirits.

Yet to Come:
The Spirit initially appears in its traditional guise, but is eventually unmasked, or unhooded, as… rapper and television presenter Normski, for no apparent reason other than yes, he is also exactly the sort of person who might have turned up on Going Live! at this point.
 
We tick forward a decade to the year 2000, where we see Sarah’s desk at work being cleared away, although it isn’t entirely clear what’s supposed to have happened to her. Of course the set hasn’t been changed at all from the 1990 version, so it’s still filled with those green-and-black displays which would have been long gone by the real 2000 – it would have been Windows machines by then. Not that anybody making this would have known or cared about that, but it was an interesting reminder of just how quickly some things really did change over those ten years, as the internet era arrived.

What’s To-Day:
Sarah and Normski agree to skip a couple of pages of unnecessary dialogue, so they can get to the big party scene at the end. Sarah does get to have a chat with a boy at her window, and arranges for a nut roast to be sent to the vegetarian Scratchits. We then have the big party at her place, which is an excuse for the show’s second interminable musical number, and a whole bunch of cameos from various musical, acting and presenting names of the time – Kim Wilde, Rosemarie Ford, Annabel Giles and Andi Peters are among those present. At the finale Sarah, having signed over all her money to Scratchit, asks to borrow the taxi fare she needs – and we see his eyes go devil red, as it’s suggested he is perhaps now the miner… or miser, sorry, to repeat one of the show’s own gags!

 
Review:
I don’t remember watching this at the time, although I can’t help but feel that I must have done, as I was every inch the Going Live! viewer, and I know for certain that I did see one of the preceding shows that morning, the final episode of Breakfast Serials. I wish I did remember more about it from the time, as I would probably have got more of the gags and references to people and things from Going Live! which time has wiped away from my memory – well it has been 32 years now, after all!
 
It does what it does very well, though – takes those presenters and characters and references and running jokes with which the intended audience will already be well-versed, and uses the familiar tale of the Carol as a framework upon which to hang them. And remember, they didn’t have to do this. For a pre-recorded programme on the weekend between Christmas and New Year, they could simply have shot a few links joining together a load of cartoons and ‘best of’ bits. The fact that they took the time, effort and trouble to mount a full-on 40-minute production of the Carol, as cheap and cheerful as it doubtless was comparatively-speaking, is to be applauded.
 
I love the whole world in which this is set – not just that Saturday morning, Sarah and Phil and Trevor and Simon world of my young childhood, but also the world of BBC Television Centre and the types of stars who could have been wandering the corridors there to be roped into this, and of the time and place. When Sarah smashes her square clock-radio-alarm thing and then gives herself a new one for Christmas, I’m watching it thinking ‘I had one like that!’ It’s of its era, no question, but for someone who was a child at the time that only makes it all the more appealing.
 
The one thing I could have done without were the two musical numbers, from acts way down the 1990 cast list – Twenty 4 Seven and Hothouse Flowers. They just seem to bring the whole thing grinding to a halt, and you’d much rather have Trevor and Simon back on the screen doing something amusing. Or just some more of the running joke about Sarah being unable to remember it’s “Bah humbug!”, so we get hobnobs, hotpants and more!

 

In a nutshell:
If you grew up watching Saturday morning BBC Television in the late 1980s or early 90s, you’ll very probably enjoy this – but anybody else may just be left a tad confused!
 
Links:
IMDb

A Christmas Carol - 1970, television

Title:
A Christmas Carol
 
Format:
Illustrated reading
 
Country:
UK
 
Production company:
Anglia Television, for the ITV network
 
Year:
1970 – shown at various points by several different ITV regional companies that Christmas season
 
Length:
48 minutes
 
Setting:
Victorian
 
Background:

Anglia Television, based in the city of Norwich, were the East of England regional contractors for the ITV network in the UK, going on-air in October 1959. Although they relied heavily on the network output produced by the larger ITV companies for much of their prime-time output, they were also a fully-fledged TV station and production company in their own right, producing a large number of programmes across a range of genres. They became something of a cultural institution in their region, particularly across much of Norfolk, the county where they were based.
 
They still exist, too, although these days pretty much just as the ‘ITV Anglia’ regional news service for the east. They are still based in their original Anglia House home, however, having disposed of many of its extensions and other buildings they occupied in Norwich down the years. Anglia House must surely be the last 1950s television studio still operating in the UK – the story goes that as a condition of the lease, they have to return it (the old Agricultural Hall) to the condition in which they found it should they leave, which is allegedly why ITV have surprisingly not yet downsized the operation.

 
Although many of Anglia’s programmes made during their glory years were purely designed to be shown in the eastern region on Anglia only, they also produced a number of wider-interest programmes screened on the network – they were particularly successful with their wildlife series Survival, their quiz show Sale of the Century and with a number of dramas down the years.
 
A Christmas Carol is another example of an Anglia programme which was clearly designed to have potential network appeal, with no particular regional ties. It’s an interesting affair; when I was kindly given a copy by James, a reader of this blog, he told me that it was animated, but that isn’t actually – bar one winking face and one moving clock hand – the case. It’s more of an illustrated reading, akin to a long episode of Jackanory in which you never see the narrator. It’s made up of an abridged version of the story, read over a series 150 or so still illustrations, with the cameras panning across and zooming into them at various points.
 
What I found especially interesting about this is that, although I’m no technical expert, it’s pretty clear that there wasn’t a rostrum camera or any film involved. The smooth pans and zooms, the occasional camera wobbles and the clean cross-fades all show that this was an entirely video production, with the artworks shot on studio video cameras and the production assembled on videotape.
 
The Transdiffusion TV history website has an article giving some of the background to this production, although it’s not clear where their information comes from. It seems that A Christmas Carol was one of a series of such productions made by the same team at Anglia in the late 1960s and early 70s, following on from a serialised adaptation of The Wind in the Willows and an original serial called The Winter of Enchantment, and followed by four further serials, including an adaptation of Treasure Island.

 
This doesn’t appear to have gained Anglia a network showing at Christmas 1970, but it seems as if it was broadcast by several of the different regional companies of the ITV network at some point or other over that festive season. Southern and Border both showed it on Christmas Eve, at 11.15am in Southern’s case and midday on Border; Anglia themselves put it out at 3.25 on Christmas Day in the afternoon; London Weekend Television at 9.20 on Boxing Day morning; Westward in two parts, at 10.40 on Boxing Day morning and 1pm on Sunday the 27^th. There may have been others too, but those are the ones I could find in The Times’s Christmas TV listings.
 
Cast and crew:
There are just two people mainly responsible for the vast majority of the work on this version. One of them is Paul Honeyman, who produced it, wrote the abridged adaptation, and also performed it for good measure as well. And the other is John Worsley, the artist who produced all of the illustrations which make-up the visual part of the production.
 
Worsley had had a fascinating life; an official war artist during the Second World War, he was evidently the only one to be captured as a prisoner-of-war. He’d also work for famous comics such as the Eagle, and evidently his Carol illustrations for this production also saw release as a large-format children’s book version of the story.

"Come on mate, time to go..."

 
Honeyman was a staff producer for Anglia in Norwich, who had served in the army before joining Tyne Tees Television as an announcer. Moving to Anglia in 1968, he was initially a reporter for their About Anglia news programme, before moving up the ranks to become a producer and eventually Head of Features and later Assistant Programme Controller. Even through these promotions he continued to work on producing and narrating these children’s productions. He died in July 1978, at the age of just 41, shortly after finishing work on another of his children’s serial collaborations with Worsley, The Whisper of Glocken.
 
Aside from Honeyman, there are one or two sound effects used here and there, and also some other voices to give occasional background chatter or laughter. However, the other main presence is the music – by Peter Fenn, who was evidently Anglia’s Head of Music at the time. He employs the services of the Choir of Norwich Cathedral, to give the soundtrack an appropriately festive air.
 
Director John Salway had worked at Anglia for some years, including on the the previous Honeyman / Worsley children’s efforts. Like Honeyman, he also died young, in 1972 while in production on their version of Treasure Island.
 
Underdone Potato:

In spite of the fact that this is an abridged version of the text to fit the running time, we get something here which you get hardly anywhere else – Dickens’s little preface about hoping the story will haunt the readers’ houses pleasantly, which is a nice touch.
 
Aside from that, though, while most of the best-known sequences are all present and correct, most of them have been quite heavily cut down in some way or other. Fred’s best dialogue, the “other creatures on other journeys” bit, is gone, and the two charitable gentlemen also pay little more than a flying visit.
 
The gravy pun is retained during Marley’s visit, however.

 
Early on, as we sweep across Worsley’s vision of Victorian London with the dome of St Paul’s dominating proceedings, there’s a pub sign for The Bell in the foreground – coincidence, or perhaps a deliberate reference to one of Norwich’s best-known watering holes…?

Past:

Worsley does a decent job of trying to render Dickens’s description of the Ghost of Christmas Past as both old and young at the same time, although there’s an odd effect given by the shadowing of its face early on which makes it look rather like it has some bushy black beard. It also looks as if it’s carrying a document folder, given how the cap its holding looks when we first see it, giving it a rather officious, middle-management-ghost sort of appearance.

The transition of Scrooge and the spirit being outside the school to inside the schoolroom is a nice effect that works well, although there’s no Fan at the end of the school sequence. Fezziwig, however, gains a first name in this version – Algernon – and in the break-up with Belle scene the young Scrooge gains some fairly extraordinary-looking yellow trousers.

"How can you possibly not want me, with my magnificent yellow trousers, Belle?"

Present:

While the Ghost of Christmas Past appeared oddly bearded on its first appearance, here Worsley goes against tradition and while depicting Christmas Present as the large, robed figure of Dickens, he has no beard in this version.

Another surprising inclusion, given all the tightening up elsewhere, is lingering on the Christmas fare for sale and retaining the mention of “Norfolk biffins” – which, for those like me who had to look it up, are a type of apple. Bless Anglia Television for flying the flag for their region and being possibly the only people in the history of Carol adaptations to keep that mention in. Indeed, so surprising was it that I actually had to check the original book to make sure it was there and not something Paul Honeyman had added in!

 

We get the educational point about the bakers cooking people’s Christmas lunches for them because they didn’t have their own ovens, but the only ‘main’ scene included is the visit to the Cratchits’ house. There’s no dropping-in on Fred and his house guests and party games in this one.
 
Yet to Come:

This is the most unfortunate section, and probably the reason – or at least one of the reasons – why this version isn’t better-known, and is unlikely to get another run-out on television today.
 
The reason being is that there’s a concentration on the Old Joe scene here, which is fair enough. But sadly, Old Joe himself is depicted as a very Fagin-like figure, in the worst possible sense; as every inch the offensive stereotype which Fagin has so often been played as being in the past.
 
While there are arguments to be had about Tiny Tim and the representation of the disabled, for a piece of literature written in 1843 by an author who had known prejudices, A Christmas Carol is pretty much free of such baldly offensive material, which makes it all the more disappointing that nearly 130 years later Paul Honeyman and Anglia Television saw fit to introduce it here.
 
The visit to the Cratchits is changed here, so that Bob isn’t coming back from visiting the site of Tim’s grave when he arrives home, but actually coming downstairs from his deathbed. To tell the family that Tim’s just died, which makes it seem a bit weird that they weren’t all up there with him.

Es are good, apparently...

 
There’s a common spelling error on Scrooge’s gravestone here, with Worsley adding an extra ‘e’ to label it ‘Ebeneezer Scrooge’.
 
What’s To-Day:
This is the only section which actually contains any of what you might call animation; firstly as Marley’s face on the knocker gets a reprise, giving a wink as it appears again, and secondly at the end when Scrooge watches the clock for Bob’s late arrival at work on Boxing Day, and we see the hand move through the minutes.

This is probably the section which departs most from the original; not massively, but there is a bizarrely, Disney-ish diversion when Scrooge laughs to himself at the change which has overcome him, as he does in the original. In this version, however, we see illustrated and are told about the birds on the windowsill outside being surprised to hear this noise from him, and they gather there to hear it.
 

We get the main sections, as per usual – meeting one of the charitable gentlemen, going to see Fred, and then playing his trick on Bob at the end.
 
Review:
When I first began watching this, I did wonder how well it would hold the attention. I’ve nothing against a reading of a book, but usually - unless it’s some sort of performance of the type Dickens himself used to give – you’re not also watching it at the same time. Honeyman’s reading would work equally well as an audio book without the illustrations, although it would fall down on not being a complete version.
 
The illustrations are nice, though, and director John Salway does a decent enough job of not just keeping them statically in frame the whole time, but keeping the cameras moving across and into them.

Worsley doesn’t try to ape John Leech’s original illustrations and has a style of his own, albeit one which feels very in-keeping with the Victorian setting. He’s also good at creating mood and atmosphere, with Marley and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come both being particularly effective in this regard.
 
Honeyman does well as narrator, too – I found a review in The Times from the time of the original transmission crediting him for not attempting to go over-the-top in acting it, but rather giving a good reading instead, and I think there is indeed a difference. It’s just a shame about the Old Joe sequence, which leaves a bitter taste in the mouth and means this can’t, in all good conscience, be recommended as a highlight in the Carol canon.
 
In a nutshell:
This isn’t a bad version by any means. It’s well-read, and the illustrations are nice – it’s just that there are better-read unabridged versions if that’s what you want, and more exciting versions visually, making it hard to think of a particular reason to recommend it.