A Christmas Carol - 1999, television

Title:

A Christmas Carol

Format:

TV movie

Country:

USA / UK

Production company:

Hallmark Enertainment, for TNT

Year:

1999 (first broadcast on TNT in the US on December 5^th that year)

Length:

90 minutes

Setting:

Victorian

Background:

An American production for an American television network, this was however made in England with a predominantly British cast and crew, in which respect it resembles the 1984 George C. Scott version – with whom it also shares a cast member in exactly the same role, as we’ll come to below. Producer Robert Halmi Sr had spent the 1990s overseeing a large number of high-profile literary adaptations for American television, including the version of Merlin starring Sam Neill in 1998, and the 1994 Gone With the Wind sequel Scarlett, which was promoted as nothing short of a Messianic event. A Christmas Carol must have seemed a fairly safe bet by comparison, and came in the same year as he’d also overseen tellings of Noah’s Ark and Alice in Wonderland, so was veering towards fantastical fare.

Cast and crew:

The real hook for doing the whole thing is Patrick Stewart – at this point best known for his role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, a part which had turned him from a reasonably well-known character actor in his native Britain to a superstar of American television. Stewart was a great lover of A Christmas Carol and had performed a one-man show version on both the West End and Broadway – the temptation to put him into a full-blown adaptation must have therefore been irresistible. Stewart also serves as one of the executive producers – it’s very much his project, and I doubt it would have happened without him.

Richard E. Grant seems a slightly odd choice as Bob Cratchit, and I remember being surprised by his casting when I first saw this, which I think was on its debut UK broadcast on Britain’s Channel 4. Grant had been a very well-known face on British film and television since the 1980s of course, but was by his own admission rather plummy. A few years before this I heard him interviewed on BBC Radio 5 Live about having been up for a part in a film where he would have had to have attempted a cockney accent, and he admitted that he’d walked out of the audition as he realised he just couldn’t do it; it wasn’t him. And yet here he is attempting a sort of mockney accent as Bob, which never really convinces. Mind you, it’s probably less of an issue if you’re not familiar with his previous work.

I mentioned above that there is some Carol crossover casting here, with Liz Smith in the second of her three Carol roles. Very well known to UK TV audiences in the 1990s for her parts as ‘the old woman’ in The Vicar of Dibley and The Royle Family, here she plays Mrs Dilber in the Yet to Come section; exactly the same role she’d played in the 1984 version.

The following year she would turn up as a different character in the ITV version starring Ross Kemp;  a production in which Ben Tibber was also cast as Tiny Tim, who he plays here – which must surely be a unique double. The rest of the cast is absolutely peppered with familiar faces from British television, which anyone who’d watched much of it in the 1990s and 2000s would recognise even if they didn’t known the name: Annette Badland, Ian McNeice, Smith’s Vicar of Dibley co-star Trevor Peacock, Dominic West (later to be known for his role on the US drama The Wire), Saskia Reeves, Laura Fraser, the wonderful Elizabeth Spriggs who people of my generation will remember as the eponymous with in Simon and the Witch, frequent Victoria Wood collaborator Celia Imrie, and Marvin the Paranoid Android himself, Stephen Moore. From the American end of things, Joel Grey – best known for his Oscar-winning performance as the MC in the film version of Cabaret – plays the Ghost of Christmas Past.

Writer Peter Barnes was a distinguished playwright, whose The Ruling Class had seen Peter O’Toole nominated for an Oscar for its film adaptation in 1972. Latterly he’d been frequently collaborating with producer Robert Halmi on these big, British-based fantastical dramas for American television, having written the 1998 Merlin and the 1999 Alice in Wonderland.

Director David Jones had already had a long and prolific career by this point, having been handling episodes of first British and then American drama series since the 1970s. Prior to this he’d worked on the prestigious BBC arts series Monitor in the 1960s and been a theatre director for the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he had worked with Stewart – an association which probably helped to gain him the director’s job here – especially given Stewart’s role as an executive producer on the project.

Underdone Potato:

This version begins with Marley’s funeral, finding ways of getting onto the screen some of Dickens’s descriptive prose not normally seen in adaptations. So we have Scrooge signing the register of Marley’s death, and then a discussion of the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade – although sadly a door knockers is mentioned rather than a coffin nail. Perhaps they wanted to foreshadow Marley’s appearance in the knocker later on.

There’s a nice transition of the sign outside Scrooge and Marley’s ageing over the following seven years, and then some dialogue between Scrooge and Cratchit to bring to us the mention from the book’s prose about Scrooge being too mean to bother having it painted out.

Fred is his usual cheerful self, and then there’s a slight change as rather than the charitable gentlemen meeting passing him as he leaves, he meets them on the street outside after having left and they ask him the way to Scrooge & Marley. Said gentlemen are given names in this version – Williams and Foster – and there’s an odd moment of self-awareness and perhaps even self-celebration from Scrooge when he asks if they are new to the area when they explain their purpose in being there.

Once Scrooge is back home, when Marley’s ghost approaches but before it is seen by him we get, very briefly, a shot from Marley’s point of view as his ghost ascends the stairs to come and give Scrooge his warning. As with most of the rest of the script, the warning uses much of the original dialogue from the book but does tweak and simplify it here and there. So Marley’s telling of Scrooge that this opportunity of his redemption was “a chance and hope of my procuring” instead becomes “a chance I got for you,” which is a shame as that’s one of my favourite lines. This being the 1990s, there’s also a gag thrown in about the quality of British beef.

After Marley’s message has been issued, we get the scene from the book with the other chained spirits outside the window, trying and failing to render help they never bothered to give in life.

Past:

The depiction of the Ghost of Christmas Past is probably one of the most faithful in any production, with Joel Grey’s characterisation doing a good job of fitting Dickens’s description of the odd man-child nature of the spirit. It’s a shame that one of the spirit’s best lines is lost early on, though, with the reassurance that Scrooge will be upheld losing its attendant “in more than this.”

When Scrooge sees his former schoolmates going home for Christmas and calls out some of their names, he calls one of them “Tony Veck” and another “Toby Bell” – references, perhaps, to Toby Veck, the hero of Dickens’s Christmas book after the Carol, the much-less-well-remembered The Chimes. When Scrooge’s sister comes to take him away from the school, for some reason her name as been adjusted to ‘Fran’ rather than ‘Fan’.

While on the whole the production seems to have had quite a decent budget, the set for the street outside Scrooge’s offices does look very set-like, something which is brought home here when what appears to be a redressed version of the same set is used for outside Fezziwig’s. Said former employer gets a song of his own in this version and is played with some gusto by Ian McNeice, with Annette Badland giving good value as Mrs Fezziwig.

As is often the case Belle gets to come to the Fezziwigs’ party, and there’s a nice transition as we see her and Scrooge dancing alone with snow falling around them in the Fezziwigs’ business, before we move on to the Christmas when she left him. As happens in some other versions, the watching older Scrooge implores his younger self to ‘Go after her!’, to no avail. Sadly there’s no second Belle scene at the Christmas of Marley’s death here.

Again keeping close to what’s described in the book, Scrooge uses the spirit’s cap to angrily snuff it out at the end of the section.

Present:

Desmond Barrit – who I once met when he came in to be interviewed at the radio station where I work – is in fine traditional form as the Ghost of Christmas Present. We see him spreading his festive cheer and even get visits to some of the places it’s mentioned the Spirit takes Scrooge in the book, but which are not always seen – the lighthouse, the ship and see and the mine, but also a prison, which has only the very briefest of mentions in the original story.

The two main scenes, however, are the ones you’d expect – at the Cratchits’ and at Nephew Fred’s house. The Cratchit scene perhaps goes on for a touch too long, but does a nice job of conveying a homely, happy family Christmas, bustling and busy and full of cheer. We then switch from family to friends at Fred’s, with Topper just about staying on the right side of sleazy and poor Celia Imrie as another of their friend’s being saddled with a truly dreadful original line about Scrooge – ‘he leaves a bad taste in people’s eyes’. They also play blind man’s ‘bluff’ rather than ‘buff’, but apparently this is an existing linguistic corruption rather than a mistake on writer Peter Barnes’s part.

At the end we see Barrit suitably aged as the fading spirit, and he does a nice line in righteous anger when he presents Scrooge with Ignorance and Want. The two children themselves looking suitably repulsive.

Yet to Come:

There’s an unintentionally comic start to this section as it almost looks as if the spirit is rolling up on wheels as it approaches Scrooge. The eyes burning out of the hood, rather than it simply being blank, also add to the slightly laughable appearance of the ghost, probably the least successful of all the versions of the spirits in this adaptation.

As well as the businessmen and their discussion of the death of Scrooge and his possible funeral arrangements, we also get a pretty much complete version of the Old Joe section, which is often skipped over or shortened in other versions.

We have the Cratchits mourning Tim’s death as usual, but we are also given another of the scenes which is usually left out – the young couple being glad that Scrooge’s death now gives them the time to repay their debt.

We end the section, as you’d expect, with Scrooge’s grave, and he even falls into his own coffin, tumbling through eternity clutching his own corpse before waking up in bed, alone, on Christmas morning.

What’s To-Day:

Stewart does a good turn trying to convey Dickens’s description of Scrooge’s first laugh for a very long time. The bright light of the morning does the outside street set no favours, though – especially when later in this section you get the contrast of a suitably-dressed real street when Scrooge goes to visit Fred, and it looks so much better.

The boy outside Scrooge’s in this version seems rather mercenary, mostly interested in the money he’s going to get! Speaking of the money, however, I do like Stewart’s last dying moments of the old Scrooge as he at first seems reluctant to offer a shilling, but then cheerfully decides to offer him two if he’s back in less than five minutes. Bit stingy for this version, though – the offer was half a crown in the original, a whole sixpence more!

As the cheerful Scrooge walks through the set – sorry, street – he gets some snowballs thrown at him by a group of children. As he returns fire, I couldn’t help but think it seemed slightly forced, rather like the bit in Groudhog Day when Bill Murray’s character rather maniacally tries to show how much he loves children by becoming involved in a snowball fight, trying to recreate what was a more natural moment in one of his previous loops around the day.

When Scrooge goes make it into Fred’s, he tells the maid – after rather creepily delivering the line where Scrooge calls her ‘my love’ – that he knows the way through to the dining room. This isn’t in he book, and how would Scrooge know the way if he’d never been there before? Unless of course it was his mother’s house which Fred inherited, perhaps.

The end strikes a bit of an odd note. Fred gets the closing narration, as we see Scrooge welcoming the Cratchits into his house – as he stands on the doorstep and the camera pans across them looking up at him, it feels rather uncomfortably like a scene of adoring worshippers staring up at a Christ-like saviour.

Review:

This isn’t completely and utterly faithful to the book in every single respect and line of dialogue. But it is probably the closet to the book of all the full-cast dramatisations of the story. If you’re a Dickens purist, then this is almost certainly the version which you will find the most satisfying.

It helps that it’s absolutely stuffed-full of fantastic acting talent, with familiar faces – to British viewers, at least – even in some of the very small roles. Grant may not totally convince at Cratchit, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come may risk looking rather comical, but apart from that every character is pretty much spot-on.

It may not have the budget and scale of something like the 1970 musical version, but it’s not a story where you necessarily need vast, sweeping feature film vistas and hundreds of extras. It has everything you might want – good script, good cast and everyone seemingly working together to present as authentic a version of the Carol as they can.

I don’t have one absolute favourite version of the story, as I think there are a few which are excellent, and no single one has ever quite managed to capture everything which makes the book great. Such a thing probably isn’t even possible. But here, at least, they gave it a decent try.

In a nutshell:

A truly excellent version of the book that will surely satisfy any Dickens fan. One of the very best screen versions of A Christmas Carol.

Links:

Wikipedia

IMDb

A Christmas Carol - 2018, television

Title:

A Christmas Carol

Format:

Filmed one-man performance

Country:

UK

Production company:

BBC Films / The Space

Year:

2018 (released to cinemas on December 11^th that year, and the broadcast on BBC Four on December 16^th)

Length:

72 minutes

Setting:

Victorian (sort of… the tale is being told in an anonymous space, but it is the original version)

Background:

Years after he wrote the Carol, Dickens became well-known for his personal readings of an abridged version for live audiences, something he carried on doing right up until the end of his life. In the years since others have performed one-man or -woman show of the Carol – such as Patrick Stewart, who we’ll come to tomorrow – but probably none so deliberately attempting to evoke some of the style of Dickens himself as Simon Callow.

Callow is a great lover of Dickens’s work, and has long been associated with A Christmas Carol. As well as performing his one-man version of the book based on Dickens’s own reading, including in excerpts for the BBC in 1996, he has also played the man himself on film and television on several occasions. The year before this film was released he played the book’s original illustrator John Leech in The Man Who Invented Christmas, a film about how the Carol came to be written.

Publicity for the film tied it in with the Carol’s 175^th anniversary, and it was a good idea to capture for posterity Callow’s performance of the story. Although it did have a short cinema release across 444 cinemas in the UK and Ireland, most people are likelier to have seen it five days later when it was broadcast on the BBC’s arts and culture-focused channel, BBC Four. For this broadcast, there was an option to listen to it in ‘binaural stereo’ via headphones – the process which apparently makes it seem as if the sound is all around you.

Cast and crew:

Being a one-man performance, the cast of course numbers just one – the aforementioned Simon Callow, finally getting to star in a version of the Carol worthy of his talent and love of the story, some seventeen years after lending his voice to Scrooge in the 2001 animated version. He was also seen as Dickens in some versions of that film, bookending it with live action sequences of the author performing one of his readings, and had played him in other productions including two episodes of Doctor Who in 2005 and 2011, both of which referenced the Carol.

Although he does have some other film and television credits to his name, director Tom Cairns is mostly a man of the theatre, where he has helmed both ‘straight’ productions and operas, including for the Royal Opera House. He’d also both directed and designed for Callow’s stage version of his one-man performance of the Carol, which made him the perfect choice to helm this – he’s also credited alongside Callow for the adaptation, so was undoubtedly one of the driving forces behind the project.

Musicians and sound designers Ben and Max Ringham are responsible for the atmospheric and evocative soundtrack, having also done extensive work for the stage, including for the National Theatre.

Scrooge, PI.

Underdone Potato:

This is all very intriguingly set up. You might expect it to take place in some Victorian study by a roaring fireside, with Callow all done up as Dickens, reading from some enormous leather-bound volume.

Instead, Callow is in a modern suit in what looks like it might be some abandoned warehouse or office building at any point in the late twentieth or early twenty-first centuries. There is the occasional relevant bit of scenery or a prop, and clocks on the wall or the floor showing the relevant times, but for the most part he seems to be wandering through some melancholy otherworld.

I formed the view across the production, as Callow walked between various different but similar set-ups, that perhaps these were the places mentioned in the Carol but many years later. Scrooge’s counting house and home, Fezziwig’s business, the old school, all abandoned and empty, long after Scrooge and everyone else in the story is dead and gone. It’s probably not right, but I liked the idea of it.

Callow does a good job of always making sure you know which character is speaking in dialogue scenes without ever straying into silly voices or overly-extravagant gestures. It’s an absolute tour de force from him, as you’d expect – this is the sort of thing he was born to do.

It isn’t all entirely Callow talking to the camera. To add a bit of variety, there are one or two voiceover scenes, including of Callow walking up the stairs as Scrooge arrives home which makes the thing seem a little like some hard-bitted detective drama. When he is home and Marley arrives, this was the one part I felt they’d compressed a little too much – Marley’s visit seemed to be over and done with very briefly, and without as much of the original Dickens dialogue as I would have expected.

Past:

There was a nice jump scare at the beginning of this – I knew there was going to be a final ‘bong’ from the clock, but they make it sound really quite creepy. Callow’s reaction probably helps to sell it as well.

We get some snow indoors which adds a sort of magical realism feel to proceedings, and this was when I first began to wonder if the locations might be the settings of the story long abandoned, with the large, bright, barn-like room through which Callow walks here perhaps being the abandoned school.

There’s a lovely little bit in the Fezziwig scene where Callow does line about “her brother’s particular friend, the milkman,” with a sort of implied raised eyebrow which could be indicating any one of a number of different things about what’s going on there!

Argh!

Present:

There’s a very nice use of shadow at the start of this section to have Callow as Scrooge turn and look at his enlarged shadow on the wall, representing the spirit. We get the usual trip to the Cratchits’ and to Fred’s part, both rendered very well and faithfully, although nothing of the other bits and pieces from this section in the original story.

Yet to Come:

The text about the body seems quite different here – I haven’t read Dickens’s performance version, so I don’t know if these were changes he made, or ones made for this production. The Cratchit scene is different here, too, with Bob coming down from upstairs with Tim’s body rather than in from having been to visit the site of the boy’s grave, although he does discuss it as usual.

What’s To-Day:

We get a precise time for how long the boy took to come back from the poulterer’s – four minutes and twenty-seven seconds! We also get an exact street address for Bob over in Camden Town.

Review:

This version is based on Dickens’s own performance version of the Carol, which was obviously abridged but was also tweaked and subtly changed in various places, evidently right up until the end of the author’s life – he could evidently never quite resist tinkering with it. All of the main familiar scenes and characters are there, but if you’re very familiar with the original 1843 book you’ll notice certain chunks of text shortened or missing, or some moments different to how they were before.

The only part of the story where any of this really pulled me up short, however, was in the Marley section, which as I mentioned above did seem to have been cut rather to the bone. Or should that be to the chain…? But aside from that, this is a full-blooded version of the story, with Callow giving it gusto without ever going over-the-top. There is a danger with these sorts of one-man shows that they can veer into being unintentionally comic, but the only place I found I had a laugh that wasn’t meant was with Callow’s cry of ‘Belle!’ at the end of the Christmas past section. This put me in mind of no less a character than The Fast Show’s Rowley Birkin and his meandering, only semi-intelligible monologues – but for there to be only one such moment in a production of this nature is probably quite a good thing!

One element which did, however, feel slightly less successful than everything else was the sound design. I like the idea of having sounds and elements from various parts of the story coming in under and around Callow’s voice at various points, but at times I felt this was rather overdone and could have been used more sparingly and subtly. I wonder if they got over-excited about the idea of it being broadcast in binaural stereo for those with the relevant equipment, and decided – or were told – to add as much in for such viewers / listeners as possible.

In a nutshell:

A one-man performance won’t be to everyone’s taste, of course. But if it’s the sort of thing you think you might enjoy, I highly recommend this – a wonderful, comfort-viewing telling of the Carol to luxuriate in at Christmas time.

Links:

BBC

IMDb

The Stingiest Man in Town - 1956, television

Title:

The Stingiest Man in Town

Format:

Live television musical

Country:

USA

Production company:

Theatrical Enterprises, for NBC

Year:

1956 (broadcast live on NBC in the US on December 23^rd that year)

Length:

80 minutes

Setting:

Victorian England

Background:

Live anthology series were some of the staples of early British and American television drama, although live productions died off in the early 1960s, as did using multi-camera studios for drama at all in the US. There, bigger budgets and different market demands saw almost all scripted productions bar some sitcoms move onto film much earlier than happened in the UK and much of the rest of the world.

This isn’t a straight drama, however – like the 1954 American TV version this is a musical, but unlike that one this is indeed live. It was an episode in The Alcoa Hour (despite being longer than an hour!), a fortnightly anthology series named for the aluminium company which sponsored it, which alternated with Goodyear Television Playhouse on NBC from 1955 until 1957. This particular episode was broadcast live from New York, although I don’t know whether it was then performed live again a few hours later for the West Coast audience.

The Stingiest Man in Town seems to have been one of the highest-profile and best-remembered episodes of Alcoa Hour, with an original soundtrack album having been recorded by the cast, as advertised at the end of the broadcast. It lived long enough in the American popular consciousness to be considered worthy of an animated remake in 1978, although the 1956 version which survives today is a rather grimy film recording of the live broadcast.

And now, a word from our sponsor...

Cast and crew:

Basil Rathbone as Scrooge really does seem to have been Mr Christmas Carol in the 1950s. Two years before this he’d played Marley in the earlier American television musical, and three years later he was Scrooge again in another TV adaptation, this time a non-musical version made in Britain. There can’t be many people who’ve had three such prominent roles in three different versions of the Carol, and all within the space of five years, too.

Young Scrooge is played by Vic Damone, perhaps better known as a singer but one of the biggest names in the cast. Martyn Green as Bob was well-known as a leading man with the D’Oyly Carte company in their Gilbert & Sullivan productions, while Patrice Munsel who plays Belle was a distinguished opera singer, so they certainly didn’t hold back on getting a powerful singing cast in.

Janice Torre wrote the script and lyrics, with Fred Spielman handling the music. The pair were an established songwriting team whose best-remembered work these days is probably the song “Paper Roses”, written in 1960 but perhaps most famously a hit for Marie Osmond in 1973. Director Daniel Petrie had a hugely long and distinguished career in television, first directing for the medium in 1949, and his last work being a TV movie over half a century later, in 2001. A Canadian, he also worked in film and his 1980 film Resurrection saw two of its performers nominated for Academy Awards.

Underdone Potato:

Fans of David Croft sitcoms may like the opening line-up here – instead of a ‘You Have Been Watching’ sequence of shots of cast members at the end, we get a sort of ‘You Will Be Watching’ version, complete with voiceover of who each one of them is.

Unusually we don’t begin from Scrooge’s perspective, nor even from Bob’s as has occasionally been done in the past. Instead, in common only with the 1938 film version so far as I can recall, we begin with Fred, singing and dancing in the streets about “an old-fashioned Christmas,” which has a certain irony to it as many of the festive traditions we now regard as old-fashioned were either brand new or not yet established when the Carol was first written.

Also unusually for Fred, he has a present for his uncle when he finally finishes his song and goes in to visit him, although as you might imagine it’s not one which is particularly well-received, and we don’t really get a clear look at what it is. Scrooge sees him off, as well as the two charitable gentlemen, before Bob heads home with Scrooge being very specific on this occasion about how much earlier he wants him in on Boxing Day – two hours.

There’s an early appearance for Mrs Dilber in this version, wanting paying for doing the cleaning, and then she, a “rag-picker” character named Harry Hawkins who’s an invention of this version and a group of four beggars get the title number, “The Stingiest Man in Town”. The beggars are played by a singing group called The Four Lads, who also act as sort of Greek chorus, giving quick recaps of the story coming out of the advert breaks.

It seems odd that none of the main characters are present for the title song, which does seem to be there purely to allow time for Rathbone to get set-up in bet for the next scene, the visit of Marley’s ghost. Like Nephew Fred’s Johnny Desmond, Marley actor Robert Weede doesn’t even attempt to hide his American accent despite it being clearly a British-set version, but that’s more forgivable in a heightened-reality version such as a musical, I think.

We get a taste of Scrooge seeing some of the other helpless chained spirits, and a moment from the book which hardly any other version – perhaps no other version – does when Scrooge recognises one of them. I was interested and amused to see that as he does in the 1959 version, Rathbone sees Marley off with a little wave goodbye as he goes!

Bye bye Marley!

Past:

The Ghost of Christmas Past is an older, bearded man, going against what’s in the book and making for less of a contrast with the following visitor. He talks to Scrooge about his schooldays and his sister Fran, but we don’t see them – instead, we head straight to the Fezziwigs’ Christmas party, where as usual for most adaptations Belle has been introduced into the action early. As with Bob Cratchit being told exactly how early he has to be into work for the day after Christmas, they’re very specific about timing in this version – the spirit tells Scrooge that this party was “forty years ago.”

Neither Vic Damone as young Scrooge nor Patrice Munsel as Belle budge from their American accents either, but there is some nice live production work (saving the dip into view of a boom mic, impressively the only one I spotted in the whole thing) to transition from the party to a sort of dream sequence of their possible future together and them then drifting apart. There are some nice lines in their song together here with Scrooge saying he’s built a wall of gold to protect them, and Belle saying the wall of gold is now between them.

Said song does drag on, for a bit, however – I wondered whether perhaps this was deliberate, to give Rathbone a bit of a rest given that he’s in almost every scene.

The Ghost of Christmas Past.

Present:

The Ghost of Christmas Present is perhaps a little younger than usually depicted, but is his usual jolly self and even brings some backing dancers with him for his initial visit to Scrooge’s rooms. They play toys such as fairies and clockwork soldiers, and even manage to cajole Scrooge into a little bit of a dance with them.

Rathbone does a nice performance of being nervous and worried about being taken into the Cratchits’ house uninvited, concerned that Mrs Cratchit might hear him and the ghost talking. He also has a fun little bit of business with her when he takes a seat by the fire, and has to hurry out of it when she decides to sit down.

There’s a full bevvy of Cratchit children, with Martha unusually being the focus. She gets a song of her own, which takes the British Christmas tradition and crosses it over with the American as she sings to reassure her brother in a song which might as well be called “Yes, Timothy, There is a Santa Claus” – indeed, she has the very line, ‘Yes, there is a Santa Claus’ within it.

We then get a trip to Fred’s party, where he also gets a song, focusing on the nativity scene model set up at the side of his living room and giving a reminder of the Christian side of Christmas. There’s quite a good point made in this about gold being a rather pointless gift for Jesus when he was supposedly the supreme ruler of the universe.

Scrooge concerned about whether Mrs Cratchit will notice him.

Yet to Come:

The Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come has the traditional robes but human hands, and shows Scrooge a version of the Old Joe scene with Mrs Dilber and her friend Harry the rag-picker coming out of his office / house (the same building in this version, sensibly in a live production to save on sets and compact studio space) with their ill-gotten gains, including the clothes taken from his dead body.

We don’t see anything of the Cratchits mourning for Tim, but instead we go straight to Scrooge’s gravestone, where a group of dancers who might be spirits or perhaps demons of the underworld do a bit of interpretative dance which verges on ballet. Indeed, the bit with them carrying Scrooge around may remind you of a scene from over a quarter of a century later of the ballet dancers and Freddie Mercury in the video for Queen’s “I Want to Break Free”.

There’s something interesting here which isn’t often done – although is in more comic form in the more famous musical version from 1970 – when Scrooge has a chain of his own added by the spirits. As he begs on his knees for another chance, he see hands clasping at the spirit’s robes – but cleverly, they’re not Rathbone’s, as he’s nipped off back to bed on the set next door to be ready for the start of the final section.

What’s To-Day:

The 1951 film version was only a few years old at this point, and I wonder if the fact that Scrooge sees Mrs Dilber and joyfully greets her after he wakes was an influence on the same happening here? (Although as I’ve said before, the antecedence of that scene, like other elements of the 1951 film, seems to be in the 1935 version). She also takes the place of the boy out of the window, telling Scrooge what day it is.

Scrooge heads off to the Cratchits’ with presents for them all, and I like the way in which he interrupts part-way through the scene we have already seen in the Christmas present section. This means Tim doesn’t get his song about Santa Claus from Martha, but he confirms he does indeed believe in him after Scrooge’s visit. Luckily, the turkey Scrooge provides is already cooked, saving them the trouble of having to do it.

Scrooge declines the invitation to stay for lunch, instead heading off to Fred’s although we don’t see it. We do seem him lined up with the entire company to wave us farewell, although before we get the end credits we have a filmed advert for our sponsors, extolling the virtues of Alcoa Foil this Christmas time.

Review:

If, like me, you’re interested in the history of television and how it was made, then this is a fascinating production. American television abandoned live productions and indeed multi-camera shooting for most scripted shows aside from sitcoms far earlier than the UK and much of the rest of the world did, so this is a glimpse into a world and a type of television that before long would disappear altogether.

I suppose part of the problem is the fact that the audience would have been familiar with epic Hollywood musicals, so even the most ambitious live multi-camera studio production could ever compete with that. Nevertheless they certainly do their best, and while some of the songs do outstay their welcome a touch, they’re certainly much better than the ones in most of the other musical adaptations of the tale, barring the 1970 musical and perhaps the Muppet version.

For a live production with so much singing and dancing, there are impressively few missteps, too. There’s one boom shot I spotted, which I mentioned above, and perhaps one or two very minor line fluffs, but apart from that the cast all do extremely well. Rathbone in particular is excellent – a very good Scrooge, and it’s a shame that perhaps his performance has been forgotten over time.

In a nutshell:

If you’re not used to or don’t enjoy watching grotty, smeary film recordings of archive TV broadcasts then this may not be for you. But if you can stand that, then I think it’s an enjoyable and interesting watch.

Links:

IMDb

Ebbie

Title:

Ebbie

Format:

TV movie

Country:

USA

Production company:

Crescent Entertainment, for the Lifetime cable network

Year:

1995 (first broadcast on Lifetime on December 4^th that year)

Length:

96 minutes

Setting:

Contemporary United States

Background:

The cable network which became Lifetime had been set up in the US as BETA and then Daytime in 1982, gaining the name Lifetime the following year. Since the start it has been aimed at women, with programmes based around women’s issues, but was initially mostly a non-fiction channel with various discussion and health-related programmes. In the late 1980s they began to show more drama, repeats of older series but also new original commissions, which became more central into the 1990s. These would usually have female-led casts or be based around issues which may be more of interest to women, and Ebbie was a festive offering for 1995.

Cast and crew:

Susan Lucci stars as Elizabeth Scrooge, known as ‘Ebbie’, which as with some other female versions of the character seems to be needlessly pushing it a bit. Lucci is evidently a bit of a television legend in the United States, having starred in the daytime soap opera All My Children from 1970 until 2011, at one point apparently earning over $1 million a year for her role, which is pretty good going by any era’s money.

Canadian actress Wendy Crewson as the Cratchit character is worth mentioning as she has some pedigree with Christmas films. The previous year she had co-starred in The Santa Clause, and would go on to appear in its two sequels. Made in Canada, Ebbie also has a Canadian director in the form of Hungarian political refugee George Kaczender, who’d made Don’t Let the Angels Fall in 1969, the first Canadian film to be entered into the main competition at the Cannes Film Festival.

Writers PaulRedford and Ed Redlich were both fairly early in their careers at this point, but would go on to write scores of American TV drama episodes between them. Redford in particular would carve out a niche working on Washington-set shows, working on The West Wing, Madam Secretary and Designated Survivor.

Jeffrey DeMunn as Jake Marley.

Underdone Potato:

This version takes place in a department store, Dobson’s, owned and run by Scrooge. We begin with her walking around the store handing out rather meagre Christmas bonus envelops to employees, with her assistant Roberta Cratchit in tow. Ebbie’s nice niece Frannie comes to try and persuade her to come round the next day and is rebuffed, as are two rival store owners who want her to contribute to fund for the needy.

Ebbie also fires the store detective, Luther – a man who looks about as inconspicuous as Blackadder’s giraffe in dark glasses trying to get into a polar bears-only golf club – and tells Cratchit that she has to come in on Christmas afternoon to help prepare for the launch of the big Boxing Day sales. Not that I suppose they call them Boxing Day sales in the US.

A bit of info-dumping during the charity section tells us that Marley died just one year ago rather than the traditional seven. After Ebbie goes home for the night, Marley shows up in her TV set and then takes her on a ghostly elevator ride, while being badgered on a mobile phone by his mysterious boss. He warns her that she has to ‘take three meetings’, at the oddly specific times of 12.01, 1.11 and 2.15. She asks if she can take them all at once, as a ‘conference call.’

The Ghost(s) of Christmas Past.

Past:

It’s always nice to be surprised by a version of the Carol, and I was here. Several versions show the ghosts as other characters before they visit Scrooge, but it’s done with a touch more subtlety than usual here (and certainly more so than, say, the 2004 musical managed), so I hadn’t predicted that the two employees from the perfume counter were going to turn up as the Ghost(s) of Christmas Past. Once they had done it was easy to then guess just from the look of him that Luther the store detective was going to be the third spirit, but I couldn’t work out the second.

Having two of them is a nice change, and there’s an interesting habit they have of changing costumes for each different vision that they show Ebbie. We see a glimpse of her childhood and her abusive father, her life seemingly kept happy by her older sister; also called Frannie, and played by the same actress who portrayed her daughter, Ebbie’s niece, earlier on.

We visit Frannie’s ‘tiny’ flat – actually enormous and quite plush-looking – later on when Ebbie is now a young woman, and as begun working at Dobson’s. Frannie is heavily pregnant and not feeling well, but insists that Ebbie go to the party, the equivalent of the Fezziwig Christmas ball.

The Dobsons themselves are a nice couple, with Marley one of their main employees who is teaching Ebbie some of the tricks of the trade. At the party – which Ebbie had joked to her sister about being the ‘belle of the ball’ at – we meet the Belle equivalent, Paul, who actually comes over as something of a sleaze. It probably isn’t helped by the fact that they do such a good job of making Lucci look much younger for these scenes that Ron Lea as Paul actually looks far too old for her.

When Paul drives her back to check on her sister after the party, it turns out that she’s been rushed to hospital, where her baby has been born early but Frannie herself dies in Ebbie’s arms. Ebbie becomes a much harsher and harder person after this, culminating in Paul leaving her and then her and Marley buying the Dobsons out of their own business and taking the store away from them. I wondered if this latter aspect were perhaps inspired by what Scrooge and Marley do to Fezziwig in the famous 1951 film version.

We then come almost up to date with Marley’s death the previous Christmas, as he sits down to dinner with Ebbie. As illness overtakes him he seems to have something of a reflective epiphany, reminiscing about the old Christmas parties they used to have in the Dobsons’ days, and asking Ebbie what she’s actually saving all her money for. It’s quite an effective scene and is perhaps my favourite addition in this version of the story.

Christmas present, get it?

Present:

The Ghost of Christmas Present takes the form of Rita, another of the employees Ebbie was short with earlier on. She takes the ‘Christmas present’ idea almost as literally as The Jetsons’ version does, with a costume consisting of wrapping paper, pairs of scissors, etc.

We see Roberta’s apartment, once again described as being a poor and humble place, and once again flippin’ massive and luxurious. She has two children, Martha and Tim, but no sign of a Mr Cratchit nor any explanation for his absence. Martha goes on about what a bitch Ebbie is for making her mother working on Christmas Day. Tim has the requisite crutch an once again a mystery, sinister illness. He rather loses sympathy when he starts some treacly singing, however – yeuch!

We drop in on Frannie’s, and her drip of a husband’s. She toasts her aunt’s health but Ebbie notices she doesn’t take a drink and thinks she doesn’t mean it – but it turns out that she’s pregnant! This upsets Ebbie, but the spirit assures her that Frannie is a strong, healthy woman.

We also get an interesting version of the second Belle scene, transplanted from past to present as was also done in the 1979 version. Paul is in his happy family home, contemplatively looking out of the window, and he explains to his wife that he was thinking of an old girlfriend with whom he split up at Christmas. On the basis of seeing her for about ten seconds, Ebbie decides that Paul’s wife is ‘lovely’.

We finish off the section with a bit of Ignorance & Want, with the latter renamed ‘Poverty’ in this version. The two raggedy children do a spot of interpretative dance, and the present draws to a close.

If this doesn't work out, he can always try for a job as a
Commander Data impersonator.

Yet to Come:

Luther the store detective turns up, without much to say but fully visible, similarly to how the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is depicted in some other US TV movie versions with contemporary settings.

He shows Ebbie that she is eventually forced out of Dobson’s in the same way she and Marley forced the sweet old couple out, with the store being bought-out and closed-down to make way for a multiplex cinema. Ebbie then gets herself run over, and dies alone in hospital without anybody coming to see her or being at her side when she dies.

What’s To-Day:

In common with Ms. Scrooge from two years later, we see Scrooge laughing in delight and joy when she wakes, a laugh referred to in the book but only sometimes shown on screen. Instead of calling down to a boy outside the window, she buzzes Ralph the commissionaire at her apartment building on the intercom to find out what day it is.

Weirdly, she still has the red dress that she went to the Dobson’s Christmas party in all those years ago – she specifically says it’s the same one – but it’s at least impressive that she can still fit in it, I suppose. Quite often in these adaptations when Scrooge goes around buying presents for everyone you wonder where was open to sell them, but at least in this version there’s the convenient fact that she owns her own department store.

She makes amends with her employees and with her family, visiting the Cratchits and Frannie, before going back to the Cratchits for dinner and another chorus of Tim’s saccharine bloody song.

Review:

Quite a well put-together version with nice modern equivalents for a lot of the situations and lines. The fact that original lines from the book only occasionally crop up in their unaltered form is more forgivable in a contemporary adaptation than one set at the time of the book, and somehow lends those few lines more power here when they do emerge – most notably Marley’s ‘mankind was my business!’

Lucci and most of the cast are excellent, although I’m not convinced by the character of Paul. As I mentioned above, he just comes across as a bit of a sleaze, and is only really effective in his more reflective scene with the woman he eventually married when he’s thinking back about Ebbie on Christmas Day.

Tim and the Cratchits may be a touch too saccharine – are they ever not? – but the character of Frannie the niece is quite sweetly winning. I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised given that I’ve been pleasantly surprised by others in this sub-genre, but this is another contemporary US version with a female lead made as a cheap-and-cheerful TV movie but which is actually rather better than you might expect.

In a nutshell:

Not a classic, but neither is it awful. Probably not worth making a special effort to seek out, but amiable enough if you happen across it on TV one afternoon over the Christmas holidays.

Links:

Wikipedia

IMDb

A Christmas Carol - 1982, television

Title:

A Christmas Carol

Format:

Animated television special

Country:

Australia

Production company:

Burbank Films

Year:

1982

Length:

69 minutes

Setting:

Victorian England

Background:

This was an early production from the Sydney-based Burbank Films – indeed, some sources list it as their very first production, as they’d been founded the year this was made. It was one of a series of Dickens adaptations the company made for the Australian television channel the Nine Network, and coming after the 1969 version must make Australia perhaps the only country other than Britain or the United States to have produced two animated versions of the tale. Or indeed two or more versions full stop.

Sources vary on when this was first broadcast on the Nine Network – both December 15^th and 22^nd 1982 are quoted in different places online.

Cast and crew:

The star of the 1969 version, Ron Haddrick, returns to the role here, suggesting that he was either perhaps particularly associated with the role in Australia, or the makers couldn’t think of anybody else for the part. Other voices of note in the cast include Robin Stewart, who’d played Syd James’s son in the UK sitcom Bless This House before subsequently relocating to Australia, and Barbara Frawley, who had several animated credits to her name and would provide voices in other Dickens adaptations for Burbank. Perhaps most notable of all among the voice cast, however, is Anne Haddy – later to become famous as Helen Daniels in Neighbours.

Alexander Buzo was primarily a playwright whose works had at times created controversy; quite a serious choice for a children’s adaptation of the Carol. Oddly, no director is credited on-screen – Wikipedia gives the credit to Jean Tych, but in the actual credits on the film she comes up under ‘character design’. Perhaps there’s a story there to be looked into…

Underdone Potato:

There’s quite a strange beginning to this one, wherein we see a child or young teenager – hard to tell quite how old they’re supposed to be – stealing a loaf of bread from a bakery because they’re hungry. They then bump into Scrooge, who presumably due to some sort of extrasensory powers shakes them, the stolen bread falls out from beneath their coat, and… Nothing. They run off, and Scrooge just sort of glowers without doing anything. Presumably designed to show how desperate the young person is, but as there’s no readily identifiable reaction from Scrooge either to have them arrested or anything like that, it doesn’t really tell us much.

Things then proceed much as usual, although with various differences to most versions. Instead of the sections in Scrooge’s office all coming at once, Fred and the charitable gentlemen visit in the morning, when an appreciable gap of time until the evening when he asks Cratchit wanting the whole day off tomorrow. There are some extra bits of business around Fred putting a wreath on the door – much to Scrooge’s displeasure – and Cratchit coughing when the gentlemen suggest that Marley’s generosity might be well represented in his surviving partner. When Bob does finally get to leave the office, we get him sliding on the ice as in the book, but it’s not a flat patch. Instead, it’s an ice slide which looks positively lethal.

Back at Scrooge’s set of rooms, which do look suitably drab and dreary, it’s a handbell which starts ringing rather than any bell on a pull, which is also something the 1959 television version did. Marley himself is less striking and more human-looking than his counterpart in the 1969 Australian version, and indeed becomes very human-looking indeed when we see a rare flashback to him in life. We also see Marley die – seemingly quite out of his blue sitting at his desk.

Marley’s ghost throws something of a hissy fit before he leaves, throwing a wooden chair onto the fire. When he does go, after Scrooge follows to the window and we get the bit not many versions do of the old miser seeing other spirits powerless to help the living.

Careful Bob! That thing looks lethal!

Past:

The Ghost of Christmas Past is a barely-dressed young blond man, wearing some sort of Greek toga-type micro dress. I bet he caught a chill going out and about with Scrooge to these cold old Christmases! He’s also quite sharp and combative with Scrooge verbally, with not much in the way of sympathy on display.

At the school scenes we get another bit not often done, the discussion of Scrooge’s enthusiasm for the childhood stories of his youth; Ali Barbar gets a mention, as in the book, here appearing to Scrooge out of the window in his imagination. Fan comes to get him as usual, and then we’re off to the Fezziwigs’ Christmas party, which is a bit drab and uninspiring and sparsely-attended in this version – just Ebenezer, Dick, the Fezziwigs and their two daughters, and the fiddler.

True to the book but again unusually for an adaptation there’s no Belle at the party, and we also get both of the Belle scenes. This means there’s something of a continuity problem when we hear Belle’s husband tell her that Scrooge’s partner is dying, given that we saw him die quite suddenly in the flashback earlier. We can only assume perhaps that on this particular occasion Marley recovered and the died later, the same wiggle room that Tony Jordan just about gets away with in Dickensian.

There is a fun touch of Scrooge describing Belle’s children as “brats”, then remembering that the spirit is there with him and putting on a show of saying what lovely children they are!

Put some bloody trousers on would you mate?

Present:

The Ghost of Christmas Present is very much closer to the Father Christmas look than usual here, with a red robe and a long white beard. Having that colour beard means he doesn’t visibly age at the end of the section, but instead starts to fade in an out a bit. Scrooge mentions what he experienced “last night,” a reminder that originally the visitations were supposed to be happening on successive evenings, something usually edited out of Marley’s warnings and which even Dickens seems to have realised was a bad idea as they all needed to be over and done with by Christmas morning.

The spirit’s torch only appears in his hand when he needs it to drop Christmas cheer – seemingly instead of making a meal seem grander, actually increasing the sizes of people’s turkeys so they are more grand. We spend quite a bit of time outside a bakery, info-dumping about why the poor needed to take their birds there to be cooked and using the spirit’s festive cheer to stop an argument, before heading off to the Cratchits’.

Tiny Tim here seems much younger than he’s usually depicted, only just being into full walking and talking age, perhaps. There’s the usual toast to Scrooge and Mrs Cratchit’s less-than-thrilled reaction to it, before we get another bit not usually included – the trip to the lighthouse. We drop in on Fred’s Christmas lunch, which like the Fezziwigs’ party earlier seems a much smaller and quieter affair than usual, before we finish up with the spirit showing Scrooge Ignorance and Want, and giving his grave warning about them.

Yet to Come:

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is a traditional version, floating along in a hood with only darkness beneath it. Something about the hood and the way in which it floats along does bring to mind Orko from the Masters of the Universe cartoons, though.

In a move which it’s perhaps surprising isn’t done more often, the gentlemen discussing Scrooge’s death are the chartable gentlemen from the beginning. There’s an odd bit at the inn where Scrooge is shown someone else sitting in the place where he usually sits for lunch, before we’re with Old Joe for an almost entirely faithful recreation of almost all of that scene.

We see the Cratchits grieving for Tim, and then an example of someone else living a better life than Scrooge by actually giving some money to the charitable gentlemen. We finish up at Scrooge’s grave, where he clings to the spirit begging to be told these events can be changed, before he wakes up clinging to the bedpost.

What’s To-Day:

The boy outside Scrooge’s window is promised half a crown straight off to run to the butcher, rather than told he can have it if he’s back in five minutes. The whole section is quite brief, really, but then again it is in the book as well.

Scrooge goes to Fred’s for lunch where he is warmly received, and even has a go at singing a bit of Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. Not very well, admittedly. We don’t see anything of the Cratchits on Christmas Day, but we do get Scrooge pulling his little joke on Bob the following morning, before revealing all is well and the end credits roll.

Review:

It’s hard to decide quite what to make of this version overall. It certainly includes a lot more of the book than many other adaptations do, but in other respects it frequently isn’t as true to the story as it might be. All the way through, a lot of the best-known and most memorable lines from the book are delivered as rough approximations or simplifications of the original dialogue. Of course this will always be necessary to some degree, but never as much as it is here – it’s as if they perhaps panicked a little about what their audience in 1982 might understand or be prepared to put up with.

You might think this would only irk a purist and not matter to most people. Perhaps, but unfortunately, I think it means that a lot of the dialogue isn’t as good nor as sharp as it could and should be. Some of their invented bits of business also feel strange or just don’t work. Scrooge throws a bit of coal on the fire near the beginning, for example; I get that perhaps they were trying to show how mean he was by only putting a small lump of coal on, but the fact that he did it at all makes him seem less of a miser than he ought to at this point.

There’s also the same problem faced by the 1969 version, in that while Haddrick is quite spirited in the role, he’s no much good at an English accent and Scrooge sounds Australian. Indeed, the problem is more prominent here as unlike the 1969 version several of the other characters also have Australian accents, perhaps most notably Marley and the Ghost of Christmas Past.

But for all that, I’m not saying that I hated this version, or that it’s an awful one. In terms of incident and content it’s very faithful to the book, far more so than many others, and it’s certainly a cut above the likes of the 1997 and 2001 animated adaptations. I just wish perhaps they’d had more confidence in the abilities of the original author and his dialogue; he is Charles Dickens, after all!

In a nutshell:

By no means bad, and would certainly work as an introduction to the story for children, I think. But also not up there with the very best versions.

Links:

Wikipedia

IMDb