A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong

Title:

A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong
 
Format:
Multi-camera HD video scripted television comedy special
 
Country:
UK
 
Production company:
BBC Studios
 
Year:
2017 (first shown on BBC One in the UK on December 30^th that year)
 
Length:
50 minutes
 
Setting:
Contemporary Salford (although the show-within-a-show is Victorian London)
 
Background:
This is a slightly complicated story of a story-within-a-story. In real life, Mischief Theatre was a group specialising in comedy, formed by some students from the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art in 2008. They created the fictitious “Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society”, whose efforts to put on various shows formed the central stories of their successful productions such as The Play That Goes Wrong, Peter Pan Goes Wrong and The Comedy About a Bank Robbery.
 
Peter Pan Goes Wrong was adapted for television by the BBC, with the original Mischief Theatre team, for New Year’s Eve 2016. Its success saw A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong, this time not based on an existing stage show, made for the following Christmas season. Off the back of its further success, the team returned to the BBC two years later with their own sketch show, The Goes Wrong Show.

Cast and crew:
Director Richard Boden had helmed a BBC spoof of the Carol before, having been behind the cameras for Blackadder’s Christmas Carol in 1988. The script was written by the Mischief Theatre’s artistic directors Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, with the three of them also taking leading roles as the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society actors Robert, Dennis and Chris respectively, and the assorted characters they’re trying to play in A Christmas Carol.
 
The two biggest names in the cast, however, are the stars sending themselves up as caricatures – former Avengers star Dame Dina Rigg as “Auntie Diana”, and Sir Derek Jacobi who is supposed to be starring as Scrooge in the show-within-a-show being invaded by the Cornley cast.
 
Underdone Potato:
What’s interesting about this version is that, like Scrooged, it’s spoofing something which doesn’t really still exist – live multi-camera studio drama. Or at least, it’s using the framework of it to create a spoof of the Carol. Although the continuity announcement into it on BBC One didn’t claim it to be live, they did join in the conceit of it being A Christmas Carol starring Derek Jacobi, and in the fiction of the thing it must have been ‘live’ to allow the characters of the Cornley Polytechic Drama Society to hijack things as they do.
 
The production opens on the day of Marley’s funeral, with Jacobi as Scrooge having some invented lines about funerals being a waste of money and how Marley would not have approved. However, things are quickly brought to a halt by the invasion of the Cornley crew, some of them dropping in Mission: Impossible-style on wires, while others storm the studio gallery and take charge of the whole thing.

Leaving aside for a moment the fact it’s obviously not a ‘real’ version of the story, there are some interesting changes made. Fred has become a niece instead of a nephew and is now Frances, and the two charitable gentlemen have become a charitable couple, man and wife, who bring a young orphan into Scrooge’s offices in with them.
 
Even though – like many of the decisions made, which is fair enough in a comedy – it’s a set up for a gag, I enjoyed the fact that for the door-knocker sequence they actually had Marley’s face poking through a cut-out in the door, doing it as a physical effect in camera rather than as a visual effect in post-production.
 
Past:
A quite amusingly literal approach to Dickens’s description of the Spirit is taken here, as she appears in the form of… A candle. An actual candle costume, with a cut-out face hole in it.

There’s only one scene done from the usual past segments, however. It’s the scene of Belle leaving Scrooge, which ties in with some behind-the-scenes drama going on with members of the group outside of the context of he show-within-a-show, after some camcorder footage from a party has accidentally been shown during one of the greenscreen segments.
 
Present:
“Just as Jacob Marley said…” intones Dame Diana on narration duties, but he didn’t – he didn’t give any indication of when the second spirit would arrive, he merely said that the first would come at one. However, I’ll be charitable to them and say that this is another gag rather than their own continuity slip-up!

Not-quite-so-Tiny Tim!

 
We get visits to both Bob’s and Frances’s houses, the former very hurriedly being redressed as the latter, a gag which enthusiasts of television history who enjoy spotting redressed sets in old multi-cam productions will probably enjoy!
 
Yet to Come:
This is, of course, a spoof version of the Carol, but a lot of it still looks great, and never more so than with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come costume here. Yes, it’s played for laughs as it keeps hitting low-hanging pieces of set and falling over, but it really does look brilliant. You could put it in any ‘straight’ adaptation of the Carol and it would still impress.

 
Scrooge sees his coffin and his grave, and the show and show-within-a-show stories come together as the warring members of the Cornley cast are able to put aside their differences… Although they do then have to flee the studio to try and escape the wrath of Jacobi.
 
What’s To-Day:
The whole thing has been taking place at the MediaCity UK studios in Salford, and as the cast run into the night they attempt to keep improvising and ending to the Carol with stolen cameras, claiming that they are going to the ‘poulterer’s’ when in fact they end up stealing a packet of chicken goujons from a nearby supermarket.

Returning to the BBC reception they are able to set off a fire alarm and get back into the studios, where all’s well that ends well. ‘Auntie Diana’, who has been delivering her lines via phone and tablet while she drives to the studio, arrives just in time to drive her car in through the scene dock and run Jacobi over to prevent him having the whole thing started again with him as planned, and all’s well that ends well.
 
Review:
It’s a bit of an oddity, and a shame, that for all their acclaimed Dickensian adaptations down the years, the BBC has never really made a first-rate ‘straight’ adaptation of the Carol. However, what they have made is some excellent spoof ones – two of them directed by Richard Boden. While this is a very different type of humour to the Blackadder’s Christmas Carol that Boden helmed nearly thirty years before, it’s also hugely enjoyable.
 
Yes, there are some obvious gags – having to read lines off pieces of the set, poor special effects, etc. And yes, some of the gags perhaps go on for a little bit too long. But overall I found this to be hugely enjoyable, very funny and particularly so if you know the Carol and its adaptations well. It’s another demonstration too of why the Carol always works so well as a spoof, because it’s a story that so many people know so well that you don’t have to explain too much. You can just have the basic structure of it, and hang your gags off that.
 
It’s also an interesting watch as it’s something of a reminder of a lost age of multi-camera studio production. Yes, obviously there were various single-camera inserts and so forth, but it’s nice to see a glimpse of a lost world in some ways. I know there’s a good reason why multi-camera drama no longer exists, but things like this give a tease of what it could look like if it still existed.

It’s very well-produced. Most of the dodgy effects shots are there for laughs, and there are only a couple – the Diana Rigg inserts on phones and tablets – which are actually dodgy rather than deliberately so for effect. Well-written, too – when they do change and add to the original Dickens, it’s almost always as a set-up for a gag rather than simply for the sake of it, and there are plenty of all the well-known moments from the story still included, so you never get confused about what you’re watching. It is clearly done with love, by people who know the story well.
 
In a nutshell:
A very enjoyable spoof, and well worth watching if you ever get the chance.
 
Links:
BBC
IMDb