The Lost Carols - Christmas Night

Title:
Christmas Night
 
Format:
Live television ballet performance
 
Country:
UK
 
Production company:
BBC Television
 
Year:
1946 (broadcast live on the BBC Television Service at 9pm on December 25^th that year)
 
Length:
60 minutes
 
Setting:
Victorian
 
Background:
Ten years after what ought to have been the very first television adaptation of A Christmas Carol in Britain – and, indeed, the world – had failed to happen due to the illness of its star, the BBC Television Service finally got in on the act with the debut of the Carol on British television. Although in the meantime, there had been versions broadcast by the fledgling commercial television operations in the United States.
 
The BBC Television Service had been shut down for the duration of the Second World War in September 1939, and did not resume until a year after the conflict had finished, in the summer of 1946. This, then, was British television’s first post-war Christmas, and it had not yet come to dominate the day in the UK as it would through the second half of the 20^th century. For one thing, the number of people who had sets was numbered in no more than the tens of thousands at the very, very most.
 
For another, the BBC’s broadcasts were still limited to anyone within range of the transmitter above their Alexandra Palace studios – which basically meant London and the surrounding counties, although in practice in favourable weather conditions the service could be picked up a great deal further away. For example, when going through the files related to the television coverage of the 1948 Olympic Games at the BBC’s Written Archives Centre when I was making a documentary about the football commentator Jimmy Jewell, I found a mention of their “viewer in the Channel Islands” having enjoyed the coverage of the opening ceremony!
 
Whether said viewer had a set by this point and was able to watch Christmas Night is almost certainly lost to history, of course. Although one day I would like to try and organise a visit to the WAC to see what if any files they hold on some of these early Carol adaptations!
 
The personnel and technology of the BBC Television Service from Alexandra Palace in 1946 were almost identical to the service which had been suspended seven years earlier. The vast majority of programmes were broadcast live, and although there was now a BBC Film Unit, they did not concern themselves with fiction or entertainment as such. Videotape technology did not yet exist, and film recordings of studio output were not yet in operation, so the entire cast and crew of Christmas Night came in to produce the thing live at Alexandra Palace on the day itself.

Cast and crew:
There’s some heavy musical firepower in operation here, as the music for Christmas Night was by the esteemed English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams – The Lark Ascending and all that. Whether or not the music was actually for this production, however, I’m not so sure. Vaughan Williams had written for the BBC recently when this was broadcast, having composed a piece called Thanksgiving for Victory for them to mark the end of the Second World War.
 
However, he’d also written a “masque” called On Christmas Night twenty years earlier, in 1926, apparently as an American commission. Like the BBC Television Christmas Night, this was based on A Christmas Carol – or “freely adapted” from it – and evidently combined singing, dancing and mime, so it seems very likely, in fact I would say almost certain, that the 1946 television piece was based on it.
 
The producer was Philip Bate, a Scottish-born musicologist of English parentage, who’d been working as a studio manager and then a producer for BBC radio since the mid-1930s. In these early days of BBC Television, ‘producer’ combined what would now understood to be the separate roles of both producer and director, and in these very early days frequently the scriptwriter too, so Bate would have been very much the driving force behind the whole production.
 
Bate had started making programmes for television from Alexandra Palace in 1938, frequently about music in a more educational or general interest capacity rather than musical productions as such. However, he’d also begun to produce concerts and ballets and other such musical specials, and then returned after the break, even producing a section of the special re-opening programme in June 1946.
 
The only cast member named by the BBC’s Radio Times listings magazine at the time was Hubert Foss, who gets a ‘story told by’ credit. Presumably as some form of narrator, although whether he appeared in-vision or only in voiceover I cannot say. I cannot find a record of an actor named Hubert Foss, so I assume he is the Hubert J. Foss who was a journalist and Musical Editor of the Oxford University Press. This Foss had been a regular broadcaster on music programmes for BBC radio and was also an expert on Vaughan Williams, so it seems almost entirely certain that this was he.
 
Underdone Potato:
The character descriptions in the Radio Times billing certainly match up with the titles of the individual pieces from Vaughan Williams’s 1926 On Christmas Night, so we can get some clues as to the content.
 
We know that after some sort of introductory section, some of the music of which draws from existing Christmas carols such as God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen, Jacob Marley’s ghost puts in an appearance.
 
I’m confident in saying that the setting of the whole thing is or was Victorian, as one of the musical pieces in Vaughan Williams’s 1926 work is called Victorian Drawing Room, and the Radio Times article previewing BBC Television’s Christmas programmes refers to “a flavour of Dickens” (I know that can just about mean Georgian or… erm… Williamian or whatever, but something Dickensian would commonly be understood to be mid-Victorian).

 
Past:
As with several silent film versions of the story, it does not appear that there are three different spirits in this version, but instead one combined “Spirit of Christmas” – exactly the same name that this combined ghost was given in the 1910 silent film. I wonder if Vaughan Williams had seen it…?
 
The Radio Times stated that “a highlight of the programmes is expected to be a musical version of Mrs Fezziwig’s ball,” so it would seem that a version of this part of the book was something of a centrepiece. Which would make sense in a production focused on music and dancing, as this is the part of the story where it most naturally occurs.
 
Assuming the “Mrs” isn’t simply a typographical error, than the focus on Mrs rather than Mr Fezziwig would seem to be a development of this television version – the track names (as I’ve been desperately trying to avoid calling them!) of Vaughan Williams’s work just use the more generic ‘Fezziwig’ without specifying Mr or Mrs. The Fezziwig section does take up a good third of the musical runtime, however, so it does seem to have been a major focus. It’s pleasing to see that a version of Roger de Coverley makes an appearance, as specified by Dickens.
 
Present:
There are sections of the music titled Bob Cratchit’s Christmas Party and Bob Cratchit’s Toast, so it seems as if there was some sort of version of the Cratchit ‘Christmas Present’ scene, but more than that I cannot tell you.
 
Yet to Come:
The Cratchit music is towards the end and appears to be immediately followed by the finale, so I’m unsure as to whether there was a ‘Yet to Come’ section in this version.
 
What’s To-Day:
It all seems to end with a version of the English folk dance Black Nag and then Procession of the Nativity, so perhaps had a more overtly Christian conclusion than elsewhere.
 
Review:
I only wish I could tell you more! I can listen to versions of the music, of course, which I suppose is more than can be said for other lost versions. It certainly sounds appropriately festive, and you can see – or rather, hear – why it seemed like a suitable candidate for television, as it does have a lot of the feel of what we might now regard a Christmas film soundtrack. I like the way Vaughan Williams works in bits and pieces from various existing carols and other Christmas music.
 
Sadly, I have so far been unable to find any contemporary reviews of the production.
 
In a nutshell:
Not so much ‘lost’ as aired live once and never recorded, but it has its place in history as British television’s very first version of A Christmas Carol.
 
Links:
BBC Genome
British Film Institute

Charles Dickens' The Christmas Carol

Title:

Charles Dickens’ The Christmas Carol

Format:

Short all-film production made for sale to US television stations

Country:

USA

Production company:

Jerry Fairbanks Inc, for The Teletec Company

Year:

1949

Length:

25 minutes

Setting:

Victorian – a mention of Bob’s wages being “15 shillings” suggests we’re supposed to be in Britain, although the accents are almost all American, and evidently shillings did survive as common currently in parts of the USA deep into the 19^th century.

Background:

We’re in the very early days of television here, and this is what the Americans would later come to call a direct-to-syndication production – meaning not something made by or for one of the main broadcast networks, but made independently for sale to individual stations across the country. This is presumably part of the reason why it’s a film production, rather than something made live in a television studio as was still common in the USA – and remained so for much longer elsewhere – at the time.

Cast and crew:

The most famous name on display here is that of Vincent Price, the actor most commonly associated now with his horror film roles, or perhaps his narration on Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Only really being personally familiar with him from the latter, I was rather surprised by his somewhat camp performance here. Still, he’s a cheerful enough presence as an on-screen narrator who provides linking scenes “reading” from a copy of the book in a modern living room – although you’d think that if they had a copy of the book handy, they might have at least got the title right…

Speaking of errors, Taylor Holmes here plays “Ebeneezer” Scrooge, with two Es in the middle, although I’ll be kinder on them for this mistake as it’s one I myself made for several years when I was a younger man! Holmes had enjoyed a long career on the stage and in film, managing to survive the transition from silent to sound films, and perhaps his highest-profile screen credit is a small part in Marilyn Monroe’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. He was in his 70s by this point, and quite lively for it, but his melodramatic and over-the-top “Ebeneezer” will not go down as one of the great screen Scrooges.

Future Bond girl Jill St. John, who appeared opposite Sean Connery in Diamonds are Forever, has a small role as one of the Cratchit children. She was just nine years old at the time, and credited here as Jill Oppenheim.

Adapter and director Arthur Pierson had been both an actor and a director for some years, but probably did his most notable work after this, as a story supervisor on animated classics The Jetsons and The Flintstones.

Underdone Potato:

Just a visit from Fred to the money-changing chambers, with no businessmen trying to solicit a donation from Scrooge. Fred’s visit is brief, before Scrooge heads off home, and we don’t even have the door knocker scene here. Marley looks quite good, and the scene between him and Scrooge probably plays out about as faithfully as anything in this production does – things go off the rails a bit later on!

Vincent Price - he's no Gonzo, more's the pity.

Past:

As you’d expect from such a short version of the story, all of the visitations from the spirits are quite brief. However, one thing this version does get surprisingly right – and almost no other version does – is that Scrooge is so shocked by his visitation from Marley that he goes to bed still dressed, and remains so throughout his time with the spirits. (Although having said that, the original’s illustrator, John Leech, seemed to make the same mistake back in 1843).

The Ghost of Christmas Past is male rather than androgynous, and doesn’t have any sort of cap for snuffing out. He shows Scrooge a single vision of himself as a boy at school, and then oddly threatens to show him his love leaving him (Belle isn’t named here), specifying that it was “forty years ago.” However, Scrooge begs him to leave him be before he can present this vision.

Present:

He has the fur-lined coat but not the beard of traditional versions, and this Ghost of Christmas Present is more of a stern, muscular bully than a jolly giant. He doesn’t seem at all celebratory, as he shows Scrooge the Christmas dinner scene at the Cratchit household. Martha is there but doesn’t hide, there’s not even a small goose to be had, and Robert Hyatt looks utterly delighted with himself for managing to remember his “God bless us, every one,” line as Tiny Tim.

Yet to Come:

An intriguing-looking Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. He has something of the traditional appearance, but the fact we can see his hands and more importantly, his eyes in a thin slit between his hood and some sort of scarf covering the lower part of his face makes it look more like he’s wearing a niqab than a grim reaper costume.

He shows Scrooge the Cratchits mourning Tiny Tim, and then his own grave, although by this stage Scrooge was already well on the way to becoming a reformed character, having submitted fairly meekly quite early on.

What’s To-Day:

Scrooge does shout down to a boy, although we don’t see him – just Scrooge at the window. He isn’t sent for a turkey, either, as the whole thing suddenly goes drastically off-piste. We go to the Cratchits and find Fred and his wife surprisingly coming to the door – Bob seems oddly happy to see them, but apologises that they can’t offer much. Fred says that’s fine… and in comes the reformed Scrooge behind them, carrying gifts and food. Cheerful “Ebeneezer” also tells Tiny Tim that he met “an old friend of mine, a famous surgeon” at church, and that he’s going to help make Tim better again.

"I am the Ghost of Christmas Present, and I am a mean bastard!"

Review:

Despite having the advantages of twenty-odd years’ worth of production advances and most importantly the addition of sound, this doesn’t even manage to be as decent a retelling of the story as the 1923 silent version, which had a similar running time. When they don’t even have the attention to detail to get the title and the main character’s name correct, you can tell that they aren’t really paying attention.

It’s a cheap version, and cheapness is no sin in itself as many a necessity has been the mother of great invention in film and television down the years. But it all seems very slapdash, especially when skipping so quickly through so many of the visions. What’s all the more inexplicable, given the short running time, is that it spends the first two minutes just having a choir warbling over the opening titles.

In a nutshell:

Another one for the completists. Save your attention for any version which at least manages to get the title right.

Links:

Wikipedia

IMDb