Title:
Scrooge, or A
Christmas Format:
Multi-camera studio VT children’s comedy
Country:
UK
Production company:
BBC Television
Year:
1990 – transmitted on BBC One on December 29 that year
Length:
41 minutes
Setting:
Contemporary
Background:
Going Live! was the BBC’s live Saturday morning children’s television programme from 1987 to 1993, one of the best-known shows from a tradition of such live sequence programmes which were a fixture of weekend children’s viewing in the UK from the mid-1970s until into the 2000s. Both the BBC and ITV developed strong contributions to the genre down the decades, although they rarely if ever both had strong, popular shows of this type at the same time – perhaps inevitably, it would swing back-and-forth between the two as to who had the most successful format at any given point.
That said, the formats were broadly similar – the shows would be studio-based, led by a duo or perhaps a team of presenters, with live guests including various young pop stars and actors of the day. There’d often be an audience full of children in the studio, regular items, games, interviews, and episodes of cartoon series interspersed throughout. The best-known examples of these shows would become well-known pop culture touchstones, and part of the childhood television memories of a generation.
Going Live! is certainly one of those best-known examples, and by 1990 was probably at the height of its powers. Being from the Saturday between Christmas and New Year this particular example was not, in fact, a live show, but a pre-recorded version retitled Gone Live! and consisting of the regular teaming linking between the usual cartoons and other items without the audience or guests. The final 40 minutes was then all built around this adaptation of A Christmas Carol, using the Going Live! team as the stars of the story.
Cast and crew:
The presenters of Going Live!, Sarah Greene and Philip Schofield, had already become well-known on children’s television through the 1980s through presenting Blue Peter and the Children’s BBC ‘broom cupboard’ weekday afternoon strand respectively. They take on the main Scrooge and ‘Scratchit’ roles here, with Greene probably getting the Scrooge part – Sarah Scrooge – because of her greater actual acting experience, having previously appeared in the likes of Doctor Who. Schofield clearly did also have at least some acting ambitions himself, as not long after this he took over the lead in Jason and His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat in the West End, but Greene was clearly the stronger and more confident actor. As a six-year-old at this time, I labour under the misunderstanding that Schofield’s name was “Philips Gofield.”
Also a well-known element of Going Live! were the comedy duo Trevor and Simon, Trevor Neal and Simon Hickson, who had been brought onto the programme to give a child-friendly version of the kind of alternative comedy of the Young Ones and Blackadder generation which had become popular through the 1980s. Trevor and Simon’s material, however, still had plenty to engage and amuse across the generations, and they appear in multiple roles here – framing the story as their regular ‘World of the Strange’ paranormal storyteller characters, and also popping up in their ‘Swing Your Pants’ folk singer guises.
Most importantly, however, Hickson and Neal actually wrote the whole thing, too. Peter Leslie was the director and David Mercer the producer, with the special being recorded across two days earlier in the month, on the 4th and 5th of December.
Underdone Potato:
The ‘World of the Strange’ wraparounds take place in a timeless, cod-Victorian misty street setting, but the actual main action of the story is very firmly of its time. Sarah Scrooge runs a typically yuppy-looking, late-Thatcherite hard-nosed big business empire, with big shoulders, big cordless phones, big green-and-black computer displays and Stock-Aitken-Waterman second-ranker Sonia, exactly the type of person you would expect to turn up as a guest on Going Live!, as one of the charity collectors. The other charity collector is Peter Simon, who presented Going Live!’s game show segment, Double Dare.
Schofield is poor Philip Scratchit, office underling, who we see in a scene from home is ‘married’ here to the Going Live! cookery slot presenter, and future co-presenter of the show’s Saturday successor Live & Kicking, Emma Forbes. Their offspring is of course Schofield’s sidekick from throughout his children’s television presenting days, the puppet Gordon the Gopher, here rechristened ‘Tiny Gordon’ for the occasion. Oddly, despite the workplace setting being contemporary, the Scratchits’ home is a very 1950s-type set-up.
Scratchit is invited round Sarah’s trendy early 90s flat for Christmas Eve, but this turns out to be a trick so she can frame him for being arrested for stealing her hi-fi system – another very of-its-period prop. Sarah is then visited by the ghost of her former business partner Jacob Marley, who is played by Rowland Rivron. Rivron is one of those performers who most of the audience might recognise as being someone they have seen in something, but would be unable to place or name without a bit of help, who has nonetheless spent many years since the 1980s cropping up in a range of British musical and comedy – and sometimes both – TV shows.
The Marley played by Rivron is something of a departure – no chains, instead the hell of constantly having to keep a white suit clean, which isn’t a bad substitute gag. The thing is, though, it’s made clear he’s not actually being punished – he was a nice person who enjoyed Christmas, and it’s Scrooge who’s the only bad one. He also gets a gag about being off to Elvis Presley’s Wild Sherry Party, which reminded me that for years and years, through all my growing up certainly, Elvis was pretty much the most famously dead person whose being dead could be safely joked about without fear of offending or upsetting anybody. Is there a modern day equivalent of this, I wonder…?
Past:
Smashing through a wall in Sarah Scrooge’s apartment much like Robbie Coltrane as the ‘Spirit of Christmas’ in another BBC spoof version of a couple of years beforehand, it’s Red Dwarf computer face Norman Lovett as a Hell’s Angel-type spirit wearing a winged motorcycle helmet left over from an old Doctor Who story. I quite liked this, as it placed it very much within the BBC of my youth, where all the shows the BBC made and had ever made all seemed to exist together within Television Centre.
Anyway, the Spirit shows Sarah some of the action from the office at Christmas time a few years beforehand, and there’s an implication that she might have killed Marley by kicking him out of a window. She insists she didn’t, but it’s not clear how much we’re meant to believe her – and as the Spirit points out, who would anyway, with her reputation? We also see her declining the offer of a mince pie from Marley on the basis that she’s a vegetarian – a nice little reference to the pies’ real origins. Or juts one of the man fun, throwaway gags in the piece, one or the other!
Present:
Much like Rivron, the actor cast as the Ghost of Christmas Present here is someone many in the audience will know by sight but then get frustrated they can’t remember who it is. It’s Susie Blake, who certainly at this point would have been familiar to many for her work with Victoria Wood, most notably as her blunt in-vision continuity announcer.
There’s a nice gag which it’s surprising hasn’t been done more about the Ghost of Christmas Present literally being the ghost of a Christmas present – complete with box-on-legs type costume. The whole thing is filled with corny gags of this type, but it knows they’re corny and isn’t earnestly trying to sell them to you. The whole thing is a send-up of itself, a knowing nod-and-a-wink to the audience as their Saturday morning favourites mess around, which is exactly the kind of thing that A Christmas Carol being so familiar a trope allows you to do. This being the time period that it is, there’s also a gag an the expense of Channel 4’s famous 1982 animation The Snowman and its “Walking in the Air” song, both very much as strong a part of the secular British Christmas as the Carol at this point.
The Spirit takes Sarah Scrooge to see the Scratchits being very poor indeed, and there’s an interesting bit at the end of this section where Scrooge has left the scene upset, and the Spirit then turns to the family and congratulates them on their performance – so in this version, they’re in on it with the Spirits.
Yet to Come:
The Spirit initially appears in its traditional guise, but is eventually unmasked, or unhooded, as… rapper and television presenter Normski, for no apparent reason other than yes, he is also exactly the sort of person who might have turned up on Going Live! at this point.
We tick forward a decade to the year 2000, where we see Sarah’s desk at work being cleared away, although it isn’t entirely clear what’s supposed to have happened to her. Of course the set hasn’t been changed at all from the 1990 version, so it’s still filled with those green-and-black displays which would have been long gone by the real 2000 – it would have been Windows machines by then. Not that anybody making this would have known or cared about that, but it was an interesting reminder of just how quickly some things really did change over those ten years, as the internet era arrived.
What’s To-Day:
Sarah and Normski agree to skip a couple of pages of unnecessary dialogue, so they can get to the big party scene at the end. Sarah does get to have a chat with a boy at her window, and arranges for a nut roast to be sent to the vegetarian Scratchits. We then have the big party at her place, which is an excuse for the show’s second interminable musical number, and a whole bunch of cameos from various musical, acting and presenting names of the time – Kim Wilde, Rosemarie Ford, Annabel Giles and Andi Peters are among those present. At the finale Sarah, having signed over all her money to Scratchit, asks to borrow the taxi fare she needs – and we see his eyes go devil red, as it’s suggested he is perhaps now the miner… or miser, sorry, to repeat one of the show’s own gags!
Review:
I don’t remember watching this at the time, although I can’t help but feel that I must have done, as I was every inch the Going Live! viewer, and I know for certain that I did see one of the preceding shows that morning, the final episode of Breakfast Serials. I wish I did remember more about it from the time, as I would probably have got more of the gags and references to people and things from Going Live! which time has wiped away from my memory – well it has been 32 years now, after all!
It does what it does very well, though – takes those presenters and characters and references and running jokes with which the intended audience will already be well-versed, and uses the familiar tale of the Carol as a framework upon which to hang them. And remember, they didn’t have to do this. For a pre-recorded programme on the weekend between Christmas and New Year, they could simply have shot a few links joining together a load of cartoons and ‘best of’ bits. The fact that they took the time, effort and trouble to mount a full-on 40-minute production of the Carol, as cheap and cheerful as it doubtless was comparatively-speaking, is to be applauded.
I love the whole world in which this is set – not just that Saturday morning, Sarah and Phil and Trevor and Simon world of my young childhood, but also the world of BBC Television Centre and the types of stars who could have been wandering the corridors there to be roped into this, and of the time and place. When Sarah smashes her square clock-radio-alarm thing and then gives herself a new one for Christmas, I’m watching it thinking ‘I had one like that!’ It’s of its era, no question, but for someone who was a child at the time that only makes it all the more appealing.
The one thing I could have done without were the two musical numbers, from acts way down the 1990 cast list – Twenty 4 Seven and Hothouse Flowers. They just seem to bring the whole thing grinding to a halt, and you’d much rather have Trevor and Simon back on the screen doing something amusing. Or just some more of the running joke about Sarah being unable to remember it’s “Bah humbug!”, so we get hobnobs, hotpants and more!
In a nutshell:
If you grew up watching Saturday morning BBC Television in the late 1980s or early 90s, you’ll very probably enjoy this – but anybody else may just be left a tad confused!
Links:
IMDb
