Scrooge, or A Christmas Carol (Sarah) - 1990, television

 

Title:

Scrooge, or A Christmas Carol Sarah 

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 4^th and 5^th 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

The Smurfs: A Christmas Carol

Title:

The Smurfs: A Christmas Carol
 
Format:
Animated straight-to-DVD short film
 
Country:
USA
 
Production company:
Sony Pictures Imageworks and Duck Studios, for Sony Pictures Animation
 
Year:
2011
 
Length:
22 minutes
 
Setting:
Fantasy
 
Background:
The titular Smurfs have a long history in the popular cultures of many countries around the world, having been created as comic book characters by the Belgian artist Peyo in the late 1950s. Their international popularity resulted in a 1980s animated TV series, and even when new stories were not appearing their distinctive appearance meant that they remained regular cultural touchstones.
 
Sony had released a Smurfs feature film in 2011, and this short special was commissioned to be released as an extra feature on the DVD release of the film in December that year. In a nice nod to the past, while the Smurfs are CGI as in the 2011 film in the framing story here, the main part of the story is done in traditional hand-drawn animated, harking back to the 1980s TV version.

Cast and crew:
Given the nature of its production, many of the same actors who provided voices for the 2011 cinema film are on duty again here. George Lopez stars as the Scrooge-like ‘Grouchy Smurf’; a stand-up comedian and American sitcom star, I have to confess he was not someone of whom I’d previously heard.
 
Probably the best-known names internationally are Hank Azaria as Garmagel and Anton Yelchin as ‘Clumsy Smurf’. Azaria has voiced a variety of regular characters in The Simpsons throughout that show’s history, while Yelchin found all-too-brief fame as Checkov in the Star Trek movie reboots, before his tragic early death in 2016.
 
On the production side, director Troy Quane gained his first such credit here, although he’d been working as an animator since the 1990s, including on various direct-to-video spin-offs from big animated feature films. Writer Todd Berger seems to have a primary career as an actor, but had credits on various animations since the year 2000 – like Quane, he’d also previously worked on such spin-offs from cinema animated cinema films.

Underdone Potato:
We begin with the CGI Smurfs singing their way through Christmas Eve and enjoying all the decorations around their village, until they get to Grouchy Smurf’s house and find he hasn’t decorated at all. Smurfette, in particular, reacts to this as if they have just come across the scene of a murder.
 
It transpires that, perhaps not particularly surprisingly given his name, Grouchy Smurf isn’t interested in celebrating Christmas. He hates everything about it, and that’s that. Rather than simply leaving him be, the other Smurfs decide that Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without Grouchy being cheerful for the day and agreeing to put the Christmas star on top of their tree. Papa Smurf prepares a special potion to… Well, it’s not quite clear whether it gives him actual visions or this is all a dream or what. But it knocks him out, anyway.
 
Past:
When Grouchy Smurf awakes, he is in a world of traditional hand-drawn animation, and pleased to be looking a lot slimmer because of it. Smurfette arrives down his chimney as the Smurf of Christmas Past – also fulfilling the Marley role, as she informs Grouchy that she will be the first of the three spirits to visit him this evening.

She shows him a vision of a past Christmas when he used to enjoy it, only to become frustrated over the years by never receiving the hang-glider he always wanted, and only a new hat each and every year. He eventually becomes so frustrated that he snaps and declares his hatred of Christmas, also discarding the hat he’d been given, much to the upset of Papa Smurf who’d given it to him.
 
Present:
‘Brainy Smurf’ fills the role of ‘Smurf of Christmas Present’. He shows Grouchy that without him to put the star on the top of the tree, Clumsy Smurf had a go at doing it, and set off a chain reaction that ended up with the village tree and Christmas lights all destroyed.

Grouchy also learns that Papa Smurf made all the new hats he gave them every year personally, tailoring each one to the specific tastes of each individual Smurf. He regrets having been so dismissive of the hats he was given in the past.
 
Yet to Come:
‘Hefty Smurf’ – no, me neither – plays the role of Smurf of Christmas Future, initially in the traditional black robe although he soon takes the hood down and wears it rather more casually. He doesn’t show Grouchy very far into the future – just the next day, when the Smurf village is abandoned because they all went to the ‘West Forest’ to try and find a new tree to cheer Grouchy up.

While there, they were captured by the Smurfs’ enemy, Gargamel, who also captured Papa Smurf when he came to look for them. Grouchy realises the error of his ways, but too late as he goes tumbling into the bubbling vat of Gargamel’s cauldron…
 
What’s To-Day:
Grouchy wakes up, back in CGI land, and gets up early to restore all the Smurfs’ Christmas decorations. Everyone’s happy again and Grouchy even enjoys his new hat from Papa Smurf, who apologies for once again not getting him a hang-glider. While at the top of the tree putting the new star he’s made (put of his toy hang-glider, in a nice visual but not stated bit), he realises – or gambles – that if Papa Smurf knew he wanted a hang-glider, and he tailors each hat to its wearer, then his new hat must have some glider-like properties. In something of a brave move, he leaps from the tree, and it does indeed function as a sort of parachute.
 
I wouldn’t have risked it, though!

Review:
The Smurfs are one of those pop culture things that are big enough that I was aware of them and certain things about them, but I’d never actually watched or read any of their adventures before. Seeing them properly in action for the first time, I do have to say that they do rather come across as thinly-veiled knock-offs of the Seven Dwarves from Snow White.
 
There’s an interesting question raised about Smurfette, too. Even glossing over the fact she appears to be the only female member of the tribe, she talks more than once during this about them celebrating Christmas “as a family”. But it’s clear that more than one of the other Smurfs fancies her, and there’s even a gag about loads of them queuing up to kiss her when she’s standing under some mistletoe. Which makes you wonder about what kind of “family” they are, exactly…

 
I’m sure the change from CGI to traditional animation would have been a nice nostalgic touch for those who grew up with the older Smurf cartoons. However, while it is a nice idea to delineate between Grouchy’s ‘real’ and dream worlds, one drawback is that the contrast doesn’t really work in the CGI’s favour. I’m in no way anti-CGI, but here the traditional animation just seems much warmer and better-suited to the style of the Smurfs. They were originally comic book characters, after all.
 
In a nutshell:
Not a bad little production for a straight-to-DVD spin-off, but probably only really worth seeking out if you’re already a fan of the Smurfs.
 
Links:
Wikipedia
IMDb
 

A Sesame Street Christmas Carol

Title:
A Sesame Street Christmas Carol
 
Format:
Multi-camera studio video direct-to-DVD special
 
Country:
USA
 
Production company:
Sesame Workshop
 
Year:
2006 (released on DVD in the US on November 14^th that year)
 
Length:
46 minutes
 
Setting:
A fantasy version of a contemporary urban American city street
 
Background:
Sesame Street is one of the most famous television programmes ever made in the English language, designed as an educational aid to young children. By this point it had been running on the PBS public television network in the USA for nearly forty years, but was also very well-known and sometimes re-versioned around the world.
 
This was actually the second time the Sesame Street characters had been involved in a loose adaptation of the Carol. The theme, with even the same Oscar the Grouch character in the Scrooge part, had previously been explored in a 1978 Christmas special for the commercial CBS network, although this version is more explicitly labelled as being an adaptation of the Dickens tale.
 
Sesame Street, of course, stars various Muppet characters created by Jim Henson, and the Muppets of The Muppet Show had also made their own version in the early 1990s – which is now one of the most famous and beloved of all.

Cast and crew:
Sesame Street stalwart Carroll Spinney stars in his regular role as Oscar the Grouch, who is the central focus here. The various Muppet incarnations are always able to rope in some good guest stars, and here British stage and screen regular Tim Curry has a role as the narrator, having previously starred as Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island in 1996 – although his best known role of all is probably as the star of the 1970s cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Less auspiciously, he’d also voiced Scrooge in the bloody awful 1997 animated version of the story.
 
Director Victor DiNapoli had by this point had a very long and distinguished career on Sesame Street and its associated specials, having begun working on the show as a scenic artist in 197. He worked his way up to become a production designer and a director on the show, while also making a few on-screen cameo appearances when background human characters were required.
 
Scriptwriter Rickey Boyd had been a puppeteer and voice artist on various Henson company projects since the late 1980s. This linking script is one of only a handful of writing credits he has gained, having mostly continued to work as a performer.

Underdone Potato:
The special begins with a quite a nice, instrumental, Christmas-ified version of the famous Sesame Street theme tune, with some suitably plummy introductory narration from Curry, who’s only really a peripheral presence – he only has a few brief passages at the start and end, but I suppose adds a certain suggestion of old-world Englishness. He also has some interaction with Oscar, doing a bit of fourth-wall breaking.
 
Oscar, as you might expect, declares himself to be not a fan of Christmas, and has decided to sleep through the whole thing and pinned a note on the outside of his trashcan home to tell everyone so. However, he is rudely awoken by ‘Joe Marley’ of the ‘Scaredy Pants Delivery Service’, who has been instructed – we are never told by whom – to deliver three different ‘Ghost-a-Grams’ to Oscar throughout the evening, in order to attempt to cheer him up and introduce him to the Christmas spirit.

Past:
The first ‘Ghost-a-Gram’ is a CGI version of one of Oscar’s… species, I suppose you’d call it? ‘The Grouch of Christmas Past’, a famous grouch from London 1843 – a nice little touch as that was the year when the book was published. There’s a slight mixing of imagery from the book, however, as the character also wears chains – more usually associated with Marley, of course. Why it’s wearing them is not gone into.
 
The Grouch of Christmas Past shows Oscar two visions, although they’re not specifically related to his own life, but more general. It’s here that you realise that, actually, this is quite a cheap-and-cheerful affair, as almost everything Oscar is shown by all of the spirits by which he’s visited consists of archive material from previous Sesame Street productions.

This works well with the very first vision, however, a sweet little lesson about the gift of giving starring Sesame stalwarts Bert and Ernie. It works well because its archive nature is in its favour; it also features Sesame Street’s famous – and by this point long-dead – local store owner Mr Hooper, so would have been a nice little nostalgia-fest for some of the parents watching this with their own children when it came out.
 
The second vision shows Big Bird missing his / her / its best friend Snuffy on Christmas Eve, and singing a song to him / her / it down the phone. Not being particularly well-versed in Sesame Street I wasn’t sure if this was also archive material or newly-shot, although it became clear as things went along that all of the main visions were from previous Sesame Christmas productions.
 
Present:
Specifically labelled as a ‘Ghost’ this time, the Ghost of Christmas Present is a cheery talking Christmas tree which springs from a jack-in-the-box again delivered by Joe Marley. Once again it’s rendered in CGI, which I’m not sure really meshes particularly well with the traditional puppetry of Oscar. Certainly, character of Oscar must be about fifty years old by now, and looks much less dated than the CGI does here.

Anyway, she shows Oscar four more visions. Firstly, a couple of excerpts from an Elmo Christmas special where he meets Father Christmas and then later sings a song about realising it would be rubbish if it were Christmas every day. She then serves up a traditional Sesame Street educational segment, showing two families celebrating Hannukah and Kwanzaa, with a child from each family explaining to the viewer in voiceover a little about the respective festivals.
 
There’s a song to finish with, and Big Bird being reunited with Snuffy in a sequel scene to the one we saw in the ‘Past’ section, clearly lifted from the same previous special.

Yet to Come:
Nothing frightening or imposing here – no black-cloaked figure of death, but instead another cheery CGI creation. This one a sort of flying robotic football, a little reminiscent of those things from Terrahawks.
 
It only shows Oscar one vision, an animated short done in a kind of Hanna-Barbera style, showing a family taking a trip on a kind of theme park ride which shows them what Christmas will be like in the future, with pre-decorated trees and the like. One of the children of the family points out that they already have those.

What’s To-Day:
There’s a brief wrap-up section where Oscar emerges from his trashcan on a bright Christmas morning, and the whole thing appears to have actually been a dream. The ‘Joe Marley’ puppet is recycled as ‘Joey Dickens’, who sort of takes the role of the passing boy Scrooge hails from his window in the book. He’s come to bring Oscar a gift – a big sicky ball of used wrapping paper. Oscar in return gives him a smelly old shoe. It’s interesting to note that Oscar does not appear to have been significantly changed in any particular way by his experience.

Review:
This is an interesting one in the sense that it’s clearly a cut-and-shut job mostly made up of linking material shot on a single set with a very limited number of characters, around already-existing material, and obviously aimed at very young children. And yet in spite of all of that, it remains surprisingly watchable. Throughout the whole thing, Oscar has some nice lines moaning about and generally mocking everything, and the script never takes itself too seriously.
 
There are some nice gags at the expense of modern living, such as Oscar being asked by Joe Marley to rate the service he has received, and the vintage Bert and Ernie sequence is pleasant to see. Perhaps surprising, too, given that an important part of it revolves around a cigar box – an empty one, admittedly, but not something you’d expect a production for very young children to be allowed to make any reference to these days. So I’m pleased they didn’t feel this precluded them from including it.
 
Obviously it’s all very insubstantial, but against the low bar I judge all such child-focused versions against – the 2006 CGI monstrosity – it’s vastly superior. A direct-to-video… I hate to say ‘cash in’, but… Well, anyway, whatever it is, it has at least had a certain amount of care and attention taken with it, as you’d expect from the Sesame Workshop. The only criticism I’d made would be the use of CGI ghosts instead of puppets, and the Hanna Barbera-style animation – neither of which felt as if they sat particularly well alongside the more traditional Sesame Street techniques.
 
In a nutshell:
Better than it needs to be for what it is. But then again, what it is is a direct-to-video linking story around a whole load of old clips.
 
Links:
Muppet Wiki
IMDb

Quantum Leap - "A Little Miracle"

Title:

A Little Miracle
 
Format:
Single-camera filmed television drama episode
 
Country:
USA
 
Production company:
Belisarius Prodctions, for Universal Television / NBC
 
Year:
1990 (first broadcast on the NBC network in the US on December 21^st that year)
 
Length:
45 minutes
 
Setting:
New York City, December 24^th 1962

Background:
Quantum Leap was an American science-fiction series which ran from 1989 to 1993, portraying the adventures of Dr Sam Beckett, the scientist behind the Quantum Leap project in the futuristic year of 1999, exploring the possibility of time travel. When Beckett stepped into the machine at the beginning of the series he began leaping from life to life, inhabiting the bodies of different people across the period of his lifetime in the late 20^th century, never knowing where he’s going next and aided only a hologram of his friend and colleague Al. This episode came in the show’s third season, although the second to be full-length.
 
Cast and crew:
Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell are present and correct in their regular roles as the series leads Sam and Al. Stockwell had been a child star in the 1940s, while Bakula’s name was made by Quantum Leap. He would later take the lead role in the Star Trek series Enterprise and a supporting part in the Oscar-winning feature film American Beauty.

 Charles Rocket is the episode’s main guest star, as the Scrooge-type businessman Michael Blake. Rocket had become famous, or perhaps infamous, as a member of the comedy troupe on the American Saturday night sketch and entertainment show Saturday Night Live, from which he was fired after swearing live on-air. He had notable film appearances in Dumb and Dumber and Hocus Pocus. Melinda McGraw is the other significant guest star, as Salvation Army officer Captain Downey; if like me you’re a fan of The West Wing you may remember her making several appearances as an advisor to Alan Alda’s presidential candidate character in the final season.
 
This particular episode of Quantum Leap was written by Sandy Fries and Robert Wolterstorff, from a story by Fries. Fries had written for an assortment of shows through the 1980s, including animated efforts such as The Smurfs and Thundercats and also an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. This was Fries’ only credit on a Quantum Leap episode; Wolterstoff did work on a couple of other episodes of the show, and like Fries had also written for other fantastical series, such as The Incredible Hulk. He’d also co-created the short-lived Street Hawk, which suffered from accusations of being “Knight Rider but with a motorbike,” mainly because it was… well… Knight Rider but with a motorbike.
 
Director Michael Watkins handled several episodes of Quantum Leap, although this was the first. He went on to have a long and extensive career in high-profile American TV drama series, directing episodes of very well-known series such as The X Files, Grey’s Anatomy, NYPD Blue and Law & Order.

"Oh boy...!"

Underdone Potato:
Sam finds he has leaped into the body of one Reginald Pearson, valet to a greedy, cold-hearted millionaire businessman called Michael Blake in New York City. It quickly becomes apparent that Blake wants to demolish a local Salvation Army mission, and has to do so by New Year’s Eve in order not to lose the contracts to build his dreamed-of “Blake Plaza” tower block. Captain Downey of the Salvation Army has come to his apartment to try and persuade him otherwise, but he sends her away.
 
During an early scene, Sam and Al are surprised when it turns out Blake and see Al, whose holographic form should be visible only to Beckett, which I think may have been a first for the series. Al explains this away as Blake having neurons close to Sam’s, and “changes frequency” so that Blake can no longer see or hear him, but unsurprisingly this becomes relevant later.
 
Sam is usually at a particular place and time to prevent a tragedy, often a death, but Al says he seems to be here for a very different reason on this occasion – to save Blake’s soul. To do it, Sam comes up with the idea that “We Scrooge him”.

"Facing mirror images that were not his own..."

Past:
By a quite extraordinary coincidence, it turns out that the Salvation Army mission Blake wants to demolish to build his tower block is on the very street where he grew up as a child in the 1920s – oddly, he doesn’t appear to realise this until Sam conspires to find a way to take him down there in his car.
 
Blake appears to soften very quickly during this segment, and it’s not entirely clear whether what follows is an extraordinary coincidence or something that Sam has deliberately engineered with help from Al’s ability to research Blake’s life. They bump into Captain Downey – which certainly was set up – but also Blake’s old childhood friend Max, who is selling chestnuts on the street.
 
Blake and Max reminisce about their childhood, and Blake asks what happened to his former best friend Charlie. Max explains that Charlie killed himself after losing his job at a bakery called Henderson’s – which we know from dialogue earlier in the episode was a business which Blake had bought up and fired most of the staff from by turning its processes over to automation. Blake storms off, upset, and Max leaves the ambiguity hanging as to whether or not he was set up to be there by Sam by turning and asking him and Downey, “Did I do something wrong…?”

Present:
Moping back at his apartment, a drunk-ish Blake is persuaded to go back out to the area of the mission by Sam, who’s been persuaded by Al that their efforts to change Blake’s outlook are working. Sam manages to persuade Blake to go back to his old neighbourhood again, where they end up hearing those in the mission singing the Carol of the Bells, and go inside.
 
This is where it all starts to be laid on a bit thick. There’s a gap-toothed orphan child, and for reasons which are never adequately explained Captain Downey just happens to be an expert in making traditional Polish Christmas treats which take Blake right back to his childhood.
 
It’s all too much coincidence – or even if you’re being charitable and saying Sam set it all up, him overdoing things – but the episode manages to pull itself back from the brink by undercutting things here. Blake himself realises that it’s all a bit much, decides he’s being tricked and storms out, leaving Sam having to try and come up with another way in which to save the day.

Yet to Come:
Sam realises, as he probably should have done a lot sooner, that if they’re going to “do a Scrooge” on Blake, then they really ought to go the whole hog and take advantage of the fact that Blake can actually see Al – and have Al play the part of the “Ghost of Christmas Future” as that particular spirit almost always seems to be referred to by Americans.
 
At first, Blake isn’t particularly convinced by this, remembering meeting Al in the lobby of his apartment building earlier on. He also points out that Al is wearing chains, whereas the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come had a cloak, and it was Marley who wore the chains. However, he quickly changes his tune when it transpires that he can walk right through the hologram, and nobody else can (apparently) see or hear it.

Once again we go down town to the mission location, where through the medium of photographs and future news footage, Al is able to put the frighteners on Blake. Oddly, the previous versions of the Carol which the episode most resembles here are some of the silent ones – where the Scrooge figure is shown projections rather than actually stepping into the visions himself, and is also shown a picture of his grave.
 
Blake has a bit of a breakdown and finally becomes a changed man, knocking on the mission door and asking Captain Downey is she has room for one more lost soul.
 
What’s To-Day:
Not much of this, although Al is able to use the database at his disposal to tell Sam that the mission is saved, becoming part of the Blake Plaza development Blake builds, and that Blake and Downey end up getting married. Sam comments on Al’s projection of a Christmas star to lead Blake to Downey’s door, but Al says this wasn’t him – we then get some snowfall to go with it, before Sam leaps out to his next adventure.

And he's off!

Review:
This is not a particularly good episode of Quantum Leap. I hadn’t watched the series for many years, although I had enjoyed it as a child, but I bought a second hand copy of the series three DVD box set to be able to watch this episode, and ended up going through the season from the start. I might have enjoyed this more in isolation, but ten episodes in it clearly lacked the wit of many of those around it.
 
That said, it’s by no means awful, and it does save itself by having Blake point out just how overly saccharine everything is getting and refusing to be taken in by it. We then get the highlight of Dean Stockwell clearly having a whale of a time as Al hamming it up as the ghost, perhaps enjoying the opportunity of having something a bit different to do with the character for a change.
 
This probably isn’t worth especially seeking out unless you’re keen to watch Quantum Leap again, although I would certainly recommend that – it still holds up as a very enjoyable show. And this is clearly miles ahead of the Highway to Heaven effort, which is probably the closest comparable Carol I’ve covered on he blog so far.
 
In a nutshell:
Not the finest episode of Quantum Leap by a long chalk, but in terms of established series using the trappings of the Carol there have been far worse efforts.
 
Links:
IMDb
 

Nan's Christmas Carol

Title:

Nan’s Christmas Carol

Format:

Multi-camera video comedy special, with single-camera inserts

Country:

UK

Production company:

Tiger Aspect Productions, for BBC One

Year:

2009 (first broadcast on BBC One on December 25^th that year)

Length:

50 minutes

Setting:

Contemporary UK

Background:

That rarest of things – a British television adaptation of the Carol actually getting its debut broadcast on a major channel on the day itself! Nan had been one of the central recurring characters in The Catherine Tate Show, a vehicle for the eponymous actress and comedian which had made it and her both hugely popular in the 2000s. The foul-mouthed, plain-speaking Nan was a perfect candidate for the Scrooge role in this admittedly rather fast-and-loose parody of the tale, and Nan’s Christmas Carol was the last big offering of BBC One’s Christmas night line-up this particular year.

Cast and crew:

Catherine Tate is an accomplished actress of both stage and screen, having starred in major roles on the West End and also being a co-star of Doctor Who during one of its biggest periods of popular success and critical acclaim, in 2008. In fact she’d returned for the then-annual Doctor Who Christmas special just a few hours before Nan’s Christmas Carol was broadcast – Christmas Day at this point still being a major day for the main British broadcasters, when they made a big effort to win the higher-than-usual audiences of gathered families on offer.

As he had in the sketch shows, Matthew Horne plays Nan’s grandson – he’d starred in his own runaway comedy success in the decade, the BBC Three sitcom Gavin & Stacey. Tate’s Doctor Who co-star David Tennant puts in a guest appearance as the Ghost of Christmas Present, as does actor and comedian Ben Miller of the Armstrong & Miller duo, as Christmas Past. Roger Lloyd-Pack, veteran of many a BBC One Christmas Day centrepiece from his role in the sitcom Only Fools and Horses, rounds out the trio as the final spirit.

Tate co-wrote the script with regular collaborators Aschlin Ditta and Gordon Anderson; Anderson also directed, as he had done on the main series.

This is Madness!

Underdone Potato:

Nan is visited by her grandson Jamie on Christmas Eve, and as the audience would expect she’s in a typically foul mood and unimpressed by the idea of festive fun. After turning away some carol singers – who are, randomly the band Madness – their relatives the Cratchits turn up, Nan having drunkenly invited them to spend Christmas with her at a previous family gathering. The father of the family is, of course, Bob, and as well as two children they have a dog called Tiny Tim.

Nan, particularly unimpressed by the fact that their Christmas present to her is a donation on her behalf to the Mobile Library of the Sudan, sends them packing, leaving them with nowhere to spend Christmas. After Jamie leaves in disgust, Nan goes to bed, where she is haunted by the ghost of her late husband, Jake, who died seven years ago this very night.

Jake isn’t chained, although he does complain that as the suit she had him buried him was the one he married her in, it is rather small for him and the belt now constantly bites into him. There’s quite a fun joke about the number of spirits he warns Nan will be visiting her – does the three include him, or not? – and a surprising moment of pathos at the end of his section too, as he laments that he misses her and it’s lonely in the afterlife without her.

Tate playing closer to her actual age, as the younger Nan.

Past:

Ben Miller plays the Ghost of Christmas Past as a bumbling, incompetent spirit of someone from the 19^th century, who smashes through doors and tables rather than passing through them insubstantially, insisting that he is out of practice as it is “seasonal work.” He does, however, impress Nan by being able to instantly transport her to her childhood in the 1930s.

We also see the 1950s and the 1970s, with the production having the same advantage that the Albert Finney version did – their Scrooge is played by a younger person aged-up, so they can appear younger in the past sections without the old-age make-up on. It’s quite fun to see the younger versions of Nan delivering some of her typical lines, including this version’s equivalent of “bah, humbug” – “Christmas – what a load of old shit!”

Present:

David Tennant gets a big reaction from the studio audience when he dances onto set to the Ghostbusters theme tune. He plays the Ghost of Christmas Present as a rather camp cross between Russell Brand and Alan Cumming, and if I had to guess I would say that this section was the one which had the most cut from it in the edit.

He shows Nan only two scenes – the lottery syndicate she’s been scamming checking their numbers, and the Cratchit family waiting at a bus station to go home. When taking Nan from one to the other, the ghost says that there is “one more family” he wants to show her; an odd line if he’s only shown her one anyway, so perhaps a ‘present’ section with grandson Jamie was cut?

In any case, we see the Cratchits feeding Tiny Tim a crisp, which kills him – so another version where the Scrooge equivalent is blamed a bit more directly for Tim’s death.

David Tennant as the Ghost of Christmas Present.

Yet to Come:

Oddly, despite having his face visible and speaking, Roger Lloyd-Pack seems the closest to the traditional depiction of his spirit – although he is called “Christmas Future,” which usually happens more in American versions rather than British ones. Perhaps he just seems to suit the character because he’s quite tall and, well… deathly! He is dressed more in the traditional manner, anyway.

He shows Nan her syndicate’s numbers coming up the following Christmas – but of course she hasn’t bothered buying the tickets for them, only kept the money herself. We also see her grandson having abandoned her, and she’s left sad and alone with nobody coming to visit her in an old people’s home – just abuse from those she swindled.

What’s To-Day:

Surprisingly, Nan does seem to have a genuine change of heart about Christmas, calling to the ‘boy’ outside – actually Jamie again – to go and get her a goose, or at least a frozen chicken from the corner shop. Everyone is invited round for a sumptuous feast prepared by celebrity chef James Martin, about whom there’d been a gag earlier in the show, and there are even gifts for the Cratchit children.

Madness turn up again, and the whole thing turns into a variety show as they break into Baggy Trousers, with Suggs and Tate taking up hand mics to sing it together. There is, however, a post-credits scene which may give the sting in the tail many of the audience would perhaps have been expecting, as Nan feeds a crisp to Tiny Tim the dog, suggesting that she wants to kill him off and perhaps isn’t so changed after all.

Review:

This isn’t laugh-a-minute, and isn’t in the same league as probably its closest similar version, Blackadder’s Christmas Carol. But it is quite good fun, and especially so if you’re familiar with Nan from The Catherine Tate Show. However, unlike the Blackadder version it probably does still work as a stand-alone, too.

There are some nicely-taken gags about the Carol, such as whether or not Marley is counting himself as a Spirit, and the likelihood of anywhere being open on Christmas Day. Some of the other jokes, though, are interesting in the sense that even just ten years on, I wondered whether or not they would do some of them ‘these days’. Not that they’re particularly controversial, but there might be more of a sensitivity about causing offence or being crass, perhaps.

In a nutshell:

Not the greatest or most spectacular version of the Carol ever made, but as an out-and-out comedy / parody version, not bad.

Links:

BBC

Wikipedia

IMDb