The Lost Carols - Scrooge, 1936, television

Title:

Scrooge
 
Format:
Scheduled but never broadcast live performed reading for television
 
Country:
UK
 
Production company:
BBC Television
 
Year:
1936 – it was due to be broadcast live on the BBC Television service twice, both on December 24^th that year
 
Length:
Somewhere between 10 and 15 minutes, approximately
 
Setting:
Unknown, but probably Victorian

 
Background:
This is a very lost Carol. On Wikipedia – until I removed it after researching this article – it used to be listed as the earliest ever television version of the Carol. However, while I was putting together this piece I discovered that, sadly, that’s not the case. It was certainly billed in the listings. But due to the illness of its star, in the event it never actually happened.

Following various experimental broadcasts throughout the early 1930s, the BBC had begun the world’s first regular television service in November 1936. It was not yet the popular mass medium it would become – sets were an expensive luxury, and the BBC had only a single transmitter at their Alexandra Palace studios in London. Thus, the signals were available only to those in London and the surrounding area, although in certain conditions they could be picked up much further afield.
 
The BBC Television Service broadcast for only a few hours a day, and although there were some demonstration and bought-in films, almost all of its output was shown live. This consisted of assorted talks, musical and variety programmes, dramas and readings. One oddity was that there were two competing technical standards for television in use at the time – from the Baird and Marconi companies.
 
The BBC had agreed to start its service using an alternation of the two systems – but the receiving sets were not compatible, so if you only had a set of a certain type, for the first few months of the BBC’s service you could only watch programmes every other week. Christmas week in 1936 fell under the Marconi system, which was regarded as the superior and the Baird system was eventually abandoned.

 
This was to have been a live performance broadcast twice on Christmas Eve, Thursday the 24^th of December 1936, under the title Scrooge. It went out once just after 3pm, and again just after 9pm. I say ‘just after’ as its billing in the BBC’s Radio Times listings magazine is for “Programme Summary, followed by Scrooge,” so it’s difficult to say precisely at what time it would have started or how long it might have been.
 
I have found no information about what, if anything, was broadcast instead of Scrooge that Christmas Eve. It’s possible that a script or other information about the abandoned 1936 version may survive at the BBC’s wonderful Written Archives Centre in Caversham. But until such time as I can perhaps make some enquiries there, it’s difficult to say much more.
 
Cast and crew:
This seems to have been due to be a one-man performance from Bransby Williams, a man with a strong connection to both Dickens in general and the character of Scrooge in particular. Eight years before this he’d starred in another lost Carol, the 1928 short film Scrooge, which is believed to have been the first sound version.

Excerpt from the Yorkshire Observer,
24th December 1936

 
Williams had been born only two months after Dickens’s death, in 1870. He’d been particularly associated with the author’s characters on stage for many years, specialising in such productions as an actor-manager with his own company. Like Seymour Hicks before him, he’d made a particular success of Scrooge in the theatre, having played the part in various productions since 1898, when he gave a one-man monologue version as part of the Christmas bill at the London Pavilion. The one-man show of Scrooge was, then, clearly something he was well-practised at by 1936!
 
Williams had also made various recorded versions of a dramatic readings and performances from the book, the first released as early as 1905. He continued making various recordings as Scrooge for over forty years, with the final one being released on the Decca label in 1948. He’d also played Scrooge for the BBC on the radio on more than one occasion, since at least 1932.
 
Williams did eventually get to play Scrooge for BBC Television in its first full-cast version of the Carol in 1950. Then in 1952, some sixteen years late, he did eventually get to give his one-man version, in a solo performance of “scenes from A Christmas Carol”. This 1952 version may have not been dissimilar to what was due to have been broadcast in 1936, as it’s in a not much longer slot of 20 minutes. That 1952 performance actually survives as a film recording of the live broadcast, and was repeated by the BBC in 1953, 1955 and 1960, but alas I currently have no way of watching it.
 
While researching this piece, I found an article Williams wrote which was published in the Larne Times on Boxing Day 1936 – just two days after he had been due to give television its first Scrooge. Writing about his love of Dickens and the importance the author and particularly A Christmas Carol held for him, Williams wrote that:
 
“If Dickens had written no other story than the Christmas Carol – and be it remembered he wrote twenty-four full-sized stories, hundreds of short ones and hundreds of miscellaneous articles – if he had written no other it is possible his name would be just as famous. He would still have been the man who was Christmas.”
 
This particularly struck me as I wrote something similar in my introductory essay in this blog, about why I love the story so much. Not a particularly original thought, I grant you, but nice to know that someone so important to the performed history of the Carol as Williams felt the same way.
 
In a nutshell:
It never happened.
 
Links:
BBC Genome