A Christmas Carol - 2019, television

Title:

A Christmas Carol
 
Format:
Three-part television drama serial, shot single-camera in high definition video
 
Country:
UK / USA
 
Production company:
FX Productions / Hardy, Son & Baker / Scott Free Productions, for BBC Television and the FX Network
 
Year:
2019 (first shown in the US on the FX Network there all in one go on the 19^th of December that year, and on BBC One in the UK across three nights on the 22^nd, 23^rd and 24^th of December)
 
Length:
3 episodes – 1 x 58 mins, 1 x 53 mins, 1 x 57 mins
 
Setting:
Victorian
 
Background:
In the 2010s, writer Steven Knight’s Birmingham-set period drama series Peaky Blinders, about a violent gang of criminal thugs, had become a cult hit in the UK and elsewhere, its popularity even earning a promotion to the mainstream BBC One channel in Britain. A deeply grim series, its success enabled showrunner Knight to have his pick of projects, and in November 2017 it was announced that he had been commissioned by the BBC for a run of adaptations of Dickens novels – starting with A Christmas Carol. This was the first proper BBC television adaptation of the novel in over forty years, and with the Corporation’s stellar reputation both for costume drama in general – and Dickens dramatisations in particular – much was expected.
 
Subsequent to the original announcement of its commissioning, the FX cable network in the United States came aboard as a co-production partner and indeed ended up giving the serial its debut screening a few days ahead of the BBC transmission. I’ve therefore included it in both the British and American categories here, although the cast, crew and production were very much UK-based.
 
Cast and crew:
The production companies involved – Hardy, Son & Baker and Scott Free – have some considerable star power behind them, being the personal fiefdoms of actor TomHardy and esteemed director Ridley Scott respectively, both of whom served as executive producers on the serial. Hardy was rumoured to be making a cameo appearance on-screen in the production, although it seems this was just online chatter and he does not, in fact, poke his head around the door anywhere.
 
Knight scripted all three episodes, with director Nick Murphy also handling the entire serial. Murphy began his career in news and current affairs, before moving into documentary-making in the late 1990s and then in the late 2000s beginning to work on directing television drama series. He’d handled episodes of the ITV fantasy series Primeval and BBC Two / Netflix Bernard Cornwell adaptation The Last Kingdom and two feature films of his own, but A Christmas Carol was probably his highest-profile assignment to date.

The starring role as Scrooge was given to Guy Pearce, who has an esteemed body of work behind him but in the UK was probably still at this point best-remembered as a star of the Australian soap opera Neighbours when it absolutely dominated British viewing habits in the late 1980s. I was surprised to learn that Pearce was not actually born an Australian, only moving there when he was three years old, because I found his attempts at an English accent in this to be thoroughly unconvincing. Perhaps part of it is psychological, because I knew – or thought – he was Australian, but for me he’s very much in the Ron Haddrick line of Australian actors who can’t master the accent when doing Scrooge.
 
There was some talk about Pearce being perhaps too young for the part, but I think that’s rather unfair. In the book, Scrooge can’t be too terribly ancient – even if he was a few years older than Belle, she is still young enough to have young children the night Marley died, which can’t put Scrooge much above 60 at the most. Pearce was 52 at the time this went out, so hardly a million miles away – although he does admittedly look rather younger than Scrooge is traditionally depicted, which given the nature of the rest of the production was certainly intentional. Not necessarily to go younger, perhaps, but to go different.
 
Other than Pearce, probably the most familiar performer in the cast to the casual viewer might be Andy Serkis as the Ghost of Christmas Past. Best-known as the actor behind many high-profile motion capture performances, Serkis is perhaps best remembered for his first of that type of role, Gollum in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy in the 2000s. Unusually he gets the chance to do actual real-world acting here, although still buried under a get-up and indeed an accent which might make it difficult to recognise him.

The Ghost of Christmas Past? Or Bad Jesus...?

Vinette Robinson in a greatly-expanded version of the Mrs Cratchit role is probably the most prominent performer after Pearce. Robinson had appeared in a supporting role in the blockbuster Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss Sherlock series, so had form with radical reinterpretations of established classics, and had also rightfully gained much acclaim the previous year for her guest starring role as American civil rights activist Rosa Parkes in a justly-lauded episode of Doctor Who.
 
Most of the rest of the featured cast were faces which regular TV drama viewers in the UK would know from major series, without perhaps knowing their names. Lenny Rush as Tim is perhaps the best thing in the piece, and one of the few genuine rays of light Knight allows into the story with his cheerful but never too saccharine demeanour. Rush had starred in the children’s series Apple Tree House on the BBC’s CBeebies channel for younger children, but also had experience portraying Tim – he’d played him previously in a stage version from another well-known British television drama writer, Jack Thorne.
 
Underdone Potato:
Whatever you think of this version of the story, you cannot deny that it at least sets out its stall straight away and lets you know exactly the sort of adaptation it is going to be. The very first thing that happens is a young man pissing on Jacob Marley’s gravestone and calling him a bastard. If that doesn’t let you know that this is not your average adaptation of A Christmas Carol, then nothing will.

Marley takes the piss!

The problem is that it feels like such a departure from the norm that it almost at once seems less like a brave experiment and more like a ridiculous parody. It’s as if The Fast Show or That Michell and Webb Look had done a sketch spoofing what a gritty reimagining of A Christmas Carol might look like. About a quarter of an hour later we get a ‘fucking’ from Scrooge, too. We’re long past the point when strong language on television has much shock value, but it feels perhaps as if they put it in a story where it doesn’t usually feature to try and give it some of that value – again, to show off what a different adaptation this is. But once more it feels as if it’s into the realms of self-parody.
 
It’s some thirty-one minutes before the book starts in this version, which must surely be a record that will never be beaten. There are entire adaptations of the whole story, several of them, which clock in shorter than that. The preceding half-hour is mostly taken up with two original elements; a depiction of Marley’s struggles in the afterlife, and the simmering resentment, or perhaps even hatred, between Scrooge and Cratchit.

 
The Marley element is probably the most interesting of the production, and one that has captured the imagination of other writers in the past. Indeed, as I write this there is a whole Hollywood movie in the works which will apparently show how Jacob procured this chance and hope for Scrooge. The problem with this version, however, is that it discards that element entirely. Here, it’s not Marley who arranged for this final chance for Scrooge. Instead, Marley is at best at the mercy of events, and at worst entirely selfish – he is a part of what’s happening purely because he wants to be able to get out of purgatory. It’s another sign of the more cynical and nihilistic nature of this production, perhaps, where the worst of everyone is seen in the worst possible terms, in a world of unrelenting misery and pain.

 
The notion of each link in Marley’s chain representing a death caused by his and Scrooge’s business is an interesting one, and demonstrates something else about the production. Scrooge & Marley is a much bigger and wider-ranging business here than it’s ever hinted at being in the book, with Scrooge seemingly at the head of some vast, multi-national investment empire. You can at least see what Knight is doing here, changing the nature of the story to reflect criticisms he wants to make about the age in which he was living; attacking corporations and big business, etc.
 
The material between Scrooge and Cratchit is more difficult to understand, as there seems absolutely no reason why Scrooge wouldn’t have fired Bob for the levels of insubordination he shows towards his employer. There’s a lot of ‘tell rather than show’ here as well; I know such supposed ‘rules’ of writing are often complete nonsense, but when they discuss their feelings about one another it does feel very expository. Bob is shown to be good at his job, which is perhaps meant to show us why Scrooge keeps him, although later events in the serial perhaps give the idea it’s one of his strange psychological experiments.
 
Speaking of Scrooge’s psychology, in this version Knight gives him a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder; perhaps this is meant to try and help to explain his behaviour in some way, but in this episode it almost feels as if it’s purely there to give a reason for why he remembers the exact years of the pennies which were placed on Marley’s eyes for his burial.
 
I mentioned that it’s thirty-one minutes before we get to anything from the book, and it comes in the form of Fred’s arrival. However, don’t expect the friendly nephew you may be familiar with from other versions, and indeed from the book itself. This scene is, I think, important as it indicates why Knight either has no understanding of or no interest in the sentiment or meaning of the original story. Instead of being a cheerful invitation, Fred’s desire for his uncle to come round for Christmas is instead a grim ultimatum; Fred makes it clear they will never see one another again if he does not come this year. That’s then it for him in this version – he’s been jettisoned from the rest of the story, never to be seen again.

"We really should get someone to clean this bloody window..."

Also jettisoned, presumably because it wouldn’t fit the pessimistic tone of this version, is all of Fred’s dialogue. Indeed, even scenes which are versions of those in the book – and there aren’t all that many of them across the three hours – have lost almost all of Dickens’s dialogue. I appreciate it often needs changing or updating to better suit a performed work or the understanding of a contemporary audience, but Knight clearly wants his characters speaking in a non-Dickensian style. Which seems odd when you’re doing a costume drama Dickens adaptation set in its original period, but there you go.
 
By my reckoning we don’t get a full-on bit of Dickens until about forty minutes in, when Scrooge meets a man soliciting charitable donations – out on the street, rather than in his office. We then have a few lines of the whole ‘surplus population’ exchange, but there’s not much more from the original in the first episode, all of about half a dozen lines or so across the hour. And there isn’t a great deal more which you could say are versions of the original lines, either – even Marley’s arrival results in nothing much that is directly taken from what Dickens wrote.
 
Past:
Andy Serkis had already appeared in the first episode as the Ghost of Christmas Past, meeting Marley in the afterlife and informing him of how his fate and Scrooge’s are interlinked, but this is where his Spirit comes into its usual section. As in some other versions he’s depicted as an aged and bearded spirit, but unlike those other instances there’s no danger of mistaking this version for the Ghost of Christmas Present, or Father Christmas himself. No, this version is more of an old and decrepit Jesus.
 
Like Pearce, there’s something not quite right about Serkis’s accent here – he’s definitely putting some sort of voice on, and it feels as though he’s aiming for Irish and not really quite getting there. If it is Irish he’s going for that’s interesting, as it’s the same accent Jim Carrey tried with his version of the same spirit in the 2009 version. Serkis’s, though, is a much deeper and less ‘theme pub’ version, even if it still doesn’t really convince.
 
One innovation in this version is that the Spirit appears in different forms relating to different memories of Scrooge’s at various points. So when the haunting begins Scrooge sees his former pet mouse, complete with Christmas bow – which, evoking memories of Blackadder’s Christmas Carol and its nailing-a-puppy-to-the-wall line, Scrooge promptly throws out of the window in a moment which is almost impossible to take seriously.
 
It’s not just animals, however – when we get the visit back to Scrooge’s school days, there is a cue taken from the book with the Spirit transforming for most of this section into Ali Baba. Baba rarely gets a mention, much less an appearance, in most versions – the only other one I can think of where you actually see him being with another Aussie-accented Scrooge in the 1982 animation. Here he takes on a full-blown role, with Kayvan Novak as the Spirit as Baba taking up the majority of the school section.
 
And what a bleak section it is, in keeping with the rest of the adaptation. Knight decides for his script that Scrooge was deliberately kept at school for the Christmas holiday in a done thing between his father and the headmaster, so that the headmaster could sexually abuse him. Yes, we really are going that far down into a deep, dark pit of despair. Things then swing from the depressing to the ridiculous, as Scrooge’s sister arrives in a gun-toting rescue scene. Yes, she actually pulls a gun on the abusive headmaster! Said sister is not called Fan in this version but Lottie, in a piece of random renaming which seems to have neither rhyme nor reason to it.
 
It’s not the only female name which Knight doesn’t feel is right for his version, however. Despite keeping all the male names he also decides to rename one of the other female characters from the story – and there are few enough of them originally – by discarding Belle’s name and changing her to Elizabeth. It’s not just her name which is got rid of, however; her entire character is almost entirely excised from the story. Scrooge is given a brief silent movie show of the life he could have had with her, complete with children, and that’s it. Oddly, I suppose it’s more of a version of the second Belle scene rather than the first, when most adaptations tend to do the first and not the second.
 
Many adaptations also put Belle at the Fezziwigs’ Christmas party, of course, but that’s not possible here as there is no Fezziwig scene. Nor indeed any other scene you’d recognise from the book – the rest of the Christmas past section aside from the school has been jettisoned. Instead, the majority of the material is made up of entirely new material from Knight, showing Scrooge and Marley building their business empire by destroying others, and the lives they ended or ruined along the way.
 
There is perhaps one part of this which it’s possible to say was inspired by the book, although by the Christmas present section from Dickens rather than the past. In the book, Scrooge is shown by the Ghost of Christmas Present some mineworkers celebrating the festivities. Here, Christmas Past takes Scrooge down into a mine, although it’s to show him a disaster caused by his penny-pinching.

The episode then takes another grim turn – as if it could possibly get any darker – when we are shown a more recent Christmas, with Cratchit in Scrooge’s employ, Marley dead, and Tim already born. Mrs Cratchit – given not only an expanded role but a first name here, Mary – comes to see Scrooge at his office early one morning, before Bob has arrived. She begs for a loan to be able to pay for an operation which Tim needs, and to be able to pay it back over the course of several years with stoppages from Bob’s wages. There’s an odd bit here where she assures him that Bob will be in for work as usual, even though it’s Christmas Eve and she claims working on that day isn’t normal. It seems strange to suggest that Christmas Eve wouldn’t have been a normal working day for the vast majority of people at the time. Especially in a version which is going out of its way to avoid any trace of festive sentiment most of the rest of the time.
 
Anyway Scrooge, as you might imagine, isn’t particularly receptive to this idea but instead suggests she comes around to his place on Christmas Day and he’ll give her the money in return for… something. Yes, it’s clearly hinted and suggested that Scrooge wants to force Mary to have sex with him in return for the money, which seems to come rather out of the blue and be somewhat an out-of-character turn – although to give Knight his credit, things aren’t quite as they appear.
 
By this point, the drama is two of its three hours in, and they haven’t even finished with their visions of the past yet, leaving you think they’re at least going to have to pick up the pace and start going some to fit all of the remaining story into the final episode. Indeed, the past then spills over into the first section of said remaining episode, when we see what actually transpired the Christmas when Mary went to see Scrooge.
 
It turns out that he’s actually basically psychologically torturing her, making her think she has to have sex with him for the money when he actually just wants to see if she’d actually be prepared to go through with it. He doesn’t tell her this until she’s started stripping of, of course, in a thoroughly nasty and sadistic scene, which usually you’d say felt entirely out of place in any version of A Christmas Carol, but if you’ve stuck with this version into the final episode you’re pretty much resigned to it by now.
 
Mary takes the money, of course, because she wants to save Tim, but she is utterly disgusted with Scrooge. As she leaves, she issues an interesting threat which perhaps takes this version’s ‘real’ characters rather further into the supernatural than has hitherto been the case – she tells Scrooge that she can set spirits on him, again ignoring the original’s claim it was Marley who set this up, and making everything that happens more of a punishment than an opportunity of redemption.
 
Present:
The traditional idea of the Ghost of Christmas Present from the book and the vast majority of other versions is completely abandoned here, and instead the Spirit is someone known to Scrooge – it’s his gun-toting sister, Lottie. Given that she is his otherworldy guide in this section, it’s perhaps surprising that there’s no visit to Fred’s – or rather, it might be surprising, if this version hadn’t already demonstrated it has very little interest in doing anything other than borrowing the basic structure of the book and throwing out almost everything else, be it scene or sentiment.
 
We do, admittedly, get the customary scene of the Cratchits’ Christmas festivities, although it isn’t the usual happy Christmas scene most adaptations would typically serve up. For one thing it’s a much sparser version of the Cratchit family here – just the two children, Tim and Belinda, with Martha present but changed to being a family friend in this version.

Not-so-cheery Bob Cratchit

In the past section we’d seen that Scrooge as a child could see the spirit when he was in his Ali Baba form, and a similar thing happens in this section – not with the spirit of Lottie, but with the apparition of Scrooge himself. Mary Cratchit can sense that he’s there and is decidedly unhappy about it, bellowing at him to get out of her house. She’s also not particularly happy because her husband has revealed that he’s leaving Scrooge’s employ for a better job – and Scrooge had told her during their secret encounter that if this ever happened, he’d tell Bob all that had passed between them.
 
From this less-than-cheery Christmas scene, Lottie takes her brother to see a memorial service for those who died in the mining disaster we saw earlier. We learn here that the boy who was pissing on Marley’s gravestone at the start – a gravestone which, incidentally, shows that Jacob died only one year prior to this version of the story taking place, rather than the usual seven – is a survivor of the disaster who lost his father and two brothers in it. Thus he’s decided to take a train to London every Christmas Eve to piss on Marley’s gravestone.

The location for this, Trechloddfa, seems to be a product of Knight’s imagination, and a rather confused one – it sounds Welsh, but the accent of the pissing boy is very much English, possibly north-east England somewhere, so it’s almost as if it’s a strange fictional merging and mish-mash of working class mining areas. Possibly Knight didn’t want to be too specific as Lottie claims the boy gets a train to London every Christmas Eve for his ritual with Marley’s gravestone – difficult, for it to be a tradition as she suggests given it was only one year earlier, but still – and he didn’t want to be tied down about where you could actually have caught a train to London from in 1843.
 
After a final heart-to-heart with Lottie outside the church, she leaves him to the tender mercies of the final spirit, warning her brother that this will be the one who makes the final decision about his redemption.
 
Yet to Come:
This is by far the shortest section of the three visitations – which I suppose it is in most versions – but it does feel it here, especially compared to the opening and ‘Christmas Past’ segments. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is the closest to one of the traditional depictions of the three spirits, but instead of being hooded the face of actor Jason Flemyng is visible, looking bleached and with stitched lips to emphasise his silence and make him seem very much a walking corpse.

Flemyng was actually a late replacement in the role. When the cast was originally announced, the esteemed Dutch actor Rutger Hauer was going to play the part. However, it transpired that Hauer was actually too ill to take up the role, and he died in July 2019 at the age of 75.
 
Scrooge himself, we learn here, is due to die in eight years’ time, in 1851, shown to us via the medium of another pissy gravestone, with the angry young survivor of the mining disaster helpfully washing the snow away so we can see the date. Before this, however, we get the main vision the Spirit presents, and it’s only from the very next day as far as Scrooge is concerned, which is usually what Christmas Present is concerned with.
 
He learns that in his eagerness to take part in the festive skating, Tim Cratchit will borrow his sister’s skates, fall through a crack in the ice and be killed. This does seem to upset Scrooge, but he still isn’t ‘cured’, as it were – he merely thinks that he deserves all that’s coming to him and doesn’t want a chance of redemption. As he mopes by his gravestone, Marley turns up for a second appearance – in a similar place to where he does in some other versions – to have a final crack at trying to persuade Scrooge to give life another go. Although admittedly we know full-well that even Marley doing this is for his own purely selfish reasons, so that he can finally be allowed to rest in peace himself – something which he does finally get to do, settling back into his coffin, unchained, with the coins back on his eyes.
 
What’s To-Day:
This is where Knight really runs into a problem with his version of the story. For a start, he faces the same issue which Tony Jordan did with Dickensian; his version of Ebenezer Scrooge is simply so utterly unpleasant that not only is it difficult to believe that he would actually successfully undergo any sort of redemption, but it’s also tricky to bring the audience along with you and make them want him to.
 
Of course, being a prequel, this was an issue which Dickensian never really had to face up to. Knight does have to try and sell it to us – and it isn’t the only problem present here. It also feels pretty clear that Knight doesn’t particularly think Scrooge deserves a redemption either, and such is the grim and miserable nature of this adaptation that you get the impression he didn’t really want to have any sort of happy ending, and has only been reluctantly forced to by the nature of the original story.
 
So it’s perhaps no surprise that we have as unhappy a happy ending as can possibly be managed, after Scrooge has very reluctantly accepted his second chance. It probably goes without saying that we don’t get any of the traditional post-awakening scenes of calling down to a boy or buying a turkey, etc. Instead, Scrooge falls on his arse, steals a bag of gravel and there’s then a rather weak scene of him scattering it over the frozen lake so that nobody can skate there today, and thus Tim won’t fall through it and die. It doesn’t look particularly covered in gravel from what we see.
 
He then rushes off to the Cratchits’ house, where he is extremely unwelcome and remains so. There’s a bit of a smile raised by Tim – who wonders if Scrooge has been at the laudanum – but on the whole the adult Cratchits remain shocked and unhappy Scrooge tells them he’s going to close down the business, give them five hundred pounds, and let Bob go to his new job. He also tells Tim not to skate on the ice today, just in case his trick with the gravel didn’t work or had been cleared away by someone with a brush and a couple of minutes to spare.
 
Just to really hammer home the point in case you didn’t get it, as he leaves Mary Cratchit tells him that while his five hundred pounds will be welcome, there is no forgiveness for him; he in turn tells her that he isn’t seeking any. There’s no visit to Fred’s, no cheerful closing narration, nothing but the same sense of bleakness and misery which has been present throughout.
 
Review:
There is nothing at all wrong with trying to make a version of A Christmas Carol which is different. Indeed, if this blog does nothing else it hopefully at least demonstrates just how many very varied adaptations there have been down the decades. So it’s a laudable aim to try and take the old classic story and attempt to tell it in a fresh way, with some imaginative interpretation which has not been seen before.
 
And there are plenty which do that. There’s the light-hearted, almost pantomime fun of ADiva’s Christmas Carol. Peter Bowker’s contemporary take in the 2000version starring Ross Kemp. And if you want a more down-to-earth, grittier take, the Depression-era-set An American Christmas Carol from 1979 shows how to do it with a rather more skilful hand than was displayed here.
 
What all of these versions had which this one lacks – indeed, what pretty much every other version has, even the dreadful 2006 CGI disaster – is at least some basic understanding of why A Christmas Carol is such an enduring story. Yes, Dickens had a message – that is undoubtable. But his writing in the Carol also has a light and life and a joy and a humour which is totally absent here. Every single ounce of those things has been removed. Watching this version is a soulless, unhappy experience; a production more to be endured than enjoyed. Even the very worst versions normally realise that this is a story of hope and optimism; two qualities with Knight seems stubbornly determined to keep well away from his scripts for the three episodes.
 
There are also the structural problems of its length and format. A Christmas Carol, unlike much of Dickens’s other work and indeed much of Victorian literature as a whole, is a short book which whips along at a fair old pace. You can read it in a single sitting. On screen you could probably do pretty much everything in the book in about two hours, and most versions down the years have come in at around ninety minutes or so.
 
So three hours really overdoes it – it takes all that zip and pace of Dickens’s writing and reduces it to a sluggish crawl. I also don’t think it’s really the sort of story you want to see split up; there’s probably a good reason why it’s hardly ever, if at all, been done as a multi-part serial on television before. It’s a story you want the satisfaction of seeing all in one go, although of course that might be debateable in this version given that there isn’t a great deal of satisfaction to be had from surviving to the end here.
 
In a nutshell:
This is, of course, purely my own personal, individual, subjective opinion. But I feel very strongly that this is the very worst adaptation of A Christmas Carol that has ever been made. (Although having said that...)
 
Links:
BBC
Wikipedia
IMDb