Another Song
for Christmas
Format:
Single-camera filmed
television drama episode
Country:
USA
Production
company:
Michael Landon
Productions, for NBC
Year:
1984 (first
broadcast on NBC in the USA on December 19th that year)
Length:
48 minutes
Setting:
Contemporary
United States
Background:
This is one of
several retellings of the Carol down the years which have been done as
episodes of existing ongoing series, in this case from the American drama Highway to Heaven. Highway to Heaven was an example of the ‘wandering
stranger helps those in need’ genre, along with the likes of The Fugitive,
The Littlest Hobo and Quantum Leap, the latter of which also did
a Carol episode which we will come to in due course.
In Highway to
Heaven’s case, this was the 13th episode of the first season.
The premise of the show saw relegated angel Jonathan and his human
friend Mark travelling around America helping these needy cases. I’m not sure
it’s a show which ever gained much traction here in the UK, although I do
remember repeats of it turning up on the ITV network here when I was a child in
the early-to-mid 1990s. It was certainly popular in its country of origin,
however.
Cast and crew:
Regular Highway
to Heaven stars Michael Landon and Victor French are present and correct as
their characters Jonathan and Mark. Landon had been a big star on American
television since the late 1950s, appearing in the hit western Bonanza
and then on Little House on the Prairie, both of which also gained
success in the UK and elsewhere. Highway to Heaven was made by his own
production company.
The episode was
written by Dan Gordon, who was one of the main writers of the show throughout
its run and also directed three instalments. This one, however, was directed by
Michael Landon himself. Various intriguing claims are made about Gordon’s life
and career online, none of which I am quite sure how much to believe – it is interesting,
however, that he seems to have got the main writer gig on Highway to Heaven
without having much previous television writing on his CV.
 |
| Jonathan and Eddy look back on Eddy's childhood. |
Underdone Potato:
The episode
revolves around Edward “Honest Eddy” Barton, a millionaire used-car salesman,
played by the episode’s main guest star, Geoffrey Lewis. In an extremely
unsubtle series of encounters in the first section of the episode, we see him
con an old couple into buying a dodgy car, fire his honest new mechanic Ratchet
(see what they did there?) for refusing to alter the milometers on some of the
cars, and refuse to give a donation to the upkeep of a local orphanage. Then,
just for good measure, when he gets home he refuses to give his butler Joseph
tomorrow off for Christmas Day, with a little echo in their dialogue of the
conversation between Scrooge and Cratchit about having the day off. Except poor
old Joseph, unlike Bob, doesn’t get it.
Having been
quickly chased off Eddy’s car lot for pointing out the sorry state and
fraudulent mileage of one of the cars or sale there, Jonathan stops Ratchet
from robbing a toy shop to get toys for his children, and he and Mark set up
for the night in a motel room. After having bumped into Jonathan’s old friend
‘Chris Cringle’ along the way. Of course.
Mark falls asleep
reading a copy of A Christmas Carol, taking us into the ghostly
visitations section without any Marley equivalent or any warning to Eddy of
what’s to come.
 |
| Special guest star! |
Past:
Jonathan is first
up on ghost duty, standing in for Christmas Past, which he shows Eddy by having
him open his bedroom door and discover a scene of a childhood Christmas in the
1940s at his grandmother’s house in Arkansas. While it is nice that Eddy, while
moved, isn’t immediately won over by this – dismissing his friendly neighbours
at the time as “hayseed suckers” – in common with much of the rest of the
episode it’s very treacly, and the actor playing young Eddy is very
poor. His “I love you” exchange with Eddy’s grandmother isn’t so much endearing
as it is downright creepy.
Present:
This is the first
time I have ever sat down and watched an episode of Highway to Heaven,
so I’m not really sure of how the format usually works, but I was surprised
when Jonathan’s human friend Mark appeared to be given some of Jonathan’s
angelic powers here, deputising for the Ghost of Christmas Present. Well, he
does have a beard I suppose.
Eddy is taken to
the orphanage that it turns out he isn’t only just refusing to donate to, but
actually owns the land is stands on and is having them evicted on Christmas
Day. The internal consistency of this seems rather all-over-the-place, even
just within this one scene – Eddy’s lawyer has come to deliver the eviction
notice, and goes from hard-hearted cynic saying that Christmas is just another
working day to him, to saying he’ll stall the paperwork while Millard the
orphanage boss goes to speak to Eddy.
This is still
better, however, than the dreadful scene at the Ratchets’ home which follows,
with more unconvincing child actors being forced to deliver some truly
atrocious dialogue.
 |
| Well, he's got the beard for it... |
Yet to Come:
We’re back to
Jonathan on ghostly duties here, and in common with several versions of the
story – mostly ones from the black-and-white era – the only vision Eddy is
shown is that of his grave, although it is at least established that he’s going
to die relatively soon, with the date on the gravestone being December 23rd
1986. There’s an interesting bit before he looks at the stone with a couple of
gravediggers doing a sort of Hamlet bit talking about him, before the
visions come to an end and he’s deposited back in his bedroom.
What’s To-Day:
In contrast to some
versions where Scrooge’s conversion seems to be complete too soon, here it
doesn’t really feel soon enough – there’s an odd change of gear with Eddy
waking up as a completely new man, kind and generous. He gives Joseph the
morning off, gives the couple of conned his own car, writes a $500,000 cheque
for the orphanage, and not only gives Ratchet his job back but takes his
children a shedload of toys and promises his son Bobby – Bobby Ratcher, ya see?
– that he’ll pay for an operation to make him well again. In fact, it all feels
so forced that you could suspect he’s deliberately putting it on and
overplaying it to convince Jonathan and Mark he’s reformed until they bugger
off and he can safely go back to his normal life, but sadly it’s not that kind
of series.
Mark had also
woken up in bed, still with that copy of A Christmas Carol, having
apparently dreamed the whole thing – rather suggesting that Jonathan had
somehow used his consciousness in the visions he produced for Eddy while his
friend was asleep. Without his prior permission. Which doesn’t really feel on,
the angelic git.
 |
| "Can I play with you?" |
Review:
I do appreciate
that it’s unfair to judge a single episode of a series I haven’t seen anything
else of – bar the end titles being on before something else I wanted to watch
when I was a child – this is a pretty poor version of the Carol. It’s
all done in extremely broad strokes with the emotion laid on an inch thick,
something you always have to be careful of with this story because if you don’t
do it well, it can very much come across as far too saccharine.
That isn’t the
only problem here, however. Much of the dialogue is atrocious, and often
extremely poor delivered. The whole exchange near the end when Eddy tells young
Bobby that he wants them to “play together” is just sinister rather than
endearing, and I don’t think that’s purely saying it through modern eyes. Given
that Landon was the director as well as star of this, and that it was made by
his production company, it does have something of the feel of a vanity project
about it, and it could have done with someone else putting in another layer of
editorial control – at the scripting stage, if nothing else.
In a nutshell:
I would be
surprised if this were considered by fans of the show to be one of the higher-end episodes of Highway to Heaven – I’m sure there are much better examples.
Poor.
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