The Lost Carols - A Christmas Carol, 1950, television

Title:
A Christmas Carol
 
Format:
Live television drama
 
Country:
UK
 
Production company:
BBC Television
 
Year:
1950 – broadcast twice, both as live performances by the same cast; first at 9pm on Christmas Day, and then again in the For the Children slot at 5pm on Wednesday the 27^th.
 
Length:
Approximately 90 minutes. That was the scheduled slot, although live dramas could occasionally over- or underrun – but the evidence suggests this ran pretty much to time, as there’s no mention of anything to the contrary in the BBC’s audience research report.
 
Setting:
Victorian
 
Background:
For the second time, Bransby Williams was due to bring to the television screen his performance as Scrooge, which had become well-known on stage throughout much of the 20^th century to this point. And unlike his scheduled one-man performance from 1936, this time it did actually happen – but sadly, once again we are unable to see it now.
 
That one wasn’t really a ‘Lost Carol’ as it never actually happened in the first place, and it could also be argued that this one isn’t strictly-speaking ‘lost’ either. It never ‘existed’ to be lost at all, in a recorded sense, any more than a stage play does. It was performed live, twice, and on neither occasion was any effort made to preserve it for posterity. It simply went out into the either, seen only by those in Britain who had television sets switched-on at the time, and was then gone forever.
 
And yes, it would have been seen by anybody who had a television set switched on – because at this point the BBC was still the only British television broadcaster. Their single channel was now being beamed out from two transmitters, at Alexandra Palace serving London and the surrounding area, and at Sutton Coldfield serving the English Midlands.
 
There were, however, now hundreds of thousands of television viewers, with the number increasing all the time. Television was still a way from being a mass medium at this point, but nor was it any longer the luxury of a tiny few.
 
The live performance, pretty much universal for all British television drama of the time, meant that, yes, the entire cast and crew were there on Christmas Day. It was also common for there to be a second performance, in this case just two days later, put out this time in the 5pm children’s slot so that younger viewers who had not had the chance to watch it first time around would be able to see it.

Bransby Williams appearing on television in 1957

 

All, however, did not go entirely well for Williams in this second performance. Having been forced to cancel his planned 1936 television debut at Scrooge due to illness, the second performance of this full-cast version almost went the same way. On New Year’s Day, the Daily Herald reported how Williams had become ill early during the December 27 transmission, and that he was “in agony for one and a half hours before the cameras.”
 
“I had hardly given my first bellow of rage before I was gripped by the most awful abdominal pains,” he was quoted as having told the paper. “My training prevented the viewers – in Children’s Hour – from knowing anything was wrong. They just saw my face working more than usual. The play ran according to script.” The Herald further added that “the contortions of his face through pain made Scrooge’s rage all the more frightening,” and that Williams had “refused to abandon his part, because there was no understudy.”
 
Several of the newspaper previews and reviews of the production mention how it took up the use of two television studios, rather than simply being done in one as was more usual – although it was not unknown for big productions to be spread across a pair. The Birmingham Post, in a preview on December 14, claimed that “Bransby Williams, in the part of Scrooge, will be working on one set, while the rest of the cast will be performing elsewhere, and the two pictures will be superimposed to give a suitably ghostly effect.”
 
While this was true for certain scenes, it gives the impression that Williams was alone in one studio and the rest of the cast in the other, which was not the case. Only the scenes with the ghosts were done separately in this manner, and not necessarily always in different studios, so that the two could be cross-faded. However, it’s still impressive that Williams and his co-stars were able to play effectively without having one another nearby, whether they were in the same studio at the time or not.
 
“There are about fourteen scenes,” the Huddersfield Examiner reported on the 20^th. “And approximately half the performance will be superimposed to give a suitably ghostly effect.” Producer Eric Fawcett had commented on the difficulties this presented in a preview in the Christmas edition of the Radio Times. “We are trying to keep the ghosts as ghostly as possible,” he told the magazine, “even though this entails the actors playing scenes while standing yards apart. Two-studio production will necessitate such careful work on the part of the cameramen, sound and vision-mixers and engineers – to say nothing of those dyed-in-the-wool enthusiasts, the studio staff.”
 
As to which studios these were, I have no hard evidence but I would say almost certainly the two original BBC Television studios, Studios A and B at Alexandra Palace in North London. The BBC had in 1950 begun using their newly-acquired facility at Lime Grove, a set of ex-film studios, with Studio D having launched at the children’s studio in May. Studio G had been opened for television with a variety spectacular on the Saturday before Christmas, but at this point drama production still seems to have been based at the Palace so it seems almost certain that A Christmas Carol came from there.

Alexandra Palace in 1946, with the transmitter mast above the BBC-occupied wing

Cast and Crew:
I wrote about Bransby Williams’s background playing Scrooge in my piece on the abandoned 1936 production, so there’s little need to repeat that here. It is worth saying, however, that at the age of 80 he must surely have been one of the earliest-born people ever to have starred in a television drama.
 
He did, however, have some level of assistance – The Stage the following month mentioned “Ewart Wheeler, who doubled so ingeniously for Bransby Williams in the recent televising of A Christmas Carol.” Wheeler is credited in the Radio Times simply for ‘other parts’, so you can imagine how he perhaps played Scrooge for certain shots seen only from behind, while Williams was prepared for a following shot or scene.
 
Among the rest of the cast, one name which leaps out to anyone familiar with the BBC’s 1950s television output is that of Patricia Fryer as ‘Fanny’ – Fryer would later play Margaret Appleyard, youngest of the Appleyard siblings in the BBC’s children’s soap opera-cum-sitcom The Appleyards, taking over the part for the second series in 1953 before outgrowing it herself in 1955, and returning for the one-off Christmas with The Appleyards in 1960. There is no Fan listed in the cast, so ‘Fanny’ is presumably a slightly-renamed version of Scrooge’s sister from the Christmas Past scenes, which Fryer would have been the right age for.
 
As is not exactly common but also not unique, the three performers playing the ghosts here double-up in other parts. Arthur Hambling as the Spirit of Christmas Past also appears as one of the stock exchange gentlemen discussing Scrooge’s death in the Yet-to-Come scenes; Julian d’Albie as the Ghost of Christmas Present – yes, they were billed as a mix of ‘Spirit’ and ‘Ghost’ – is also credited as a ‘portly gentleman’, and WE Holloway as the Spirit of Christmas to Come (no ‘yet’ in the billing) also portrays Marley.

 
Whether this was for effect or for economy is debateable, however it appears to have almost certainly been the former. ‘Young Scrooge’ actor John Bentley also has a credit as a night watchman appearing early on in the play, and similarly Old Joe actor Leonard Sharp appears as a crossing sweeper. Fryer too had a second role, credited as ‘Girl waif’ alongside Michael Edmonds as ‘Boy waif’ – from their placing in the order-of-appearance cast list, almost certainly these are Ignorance and Want from the end of the ‘Present’ section. This perhaps adds weight to the idea that the doubling-up was a deliberate effect, with some of the figures Scrooge encounters through the story having the faces of those who are familiar to him.
 
On the subject of familiar faces, several of the cast were old co-stars of Williams’ – he remarked to the Daily Herald after his illness during the second performance that “there was always one of my old pals – Jimmy d’Albie, Bill Holloway or Arthur Hambling – waiting to give me an arm. Once or twice they half carried me.” Kathleen Saintsbury, who played Mrs Cratchit, was also a friend and regular co-star from the stage, who would appear on Williams’s This is Your Life in 1958.
 

Kathleen Saintsbury appears on Bransby Williams' episode of This is Your Life in 1958

Perhaps one of the most notable names in the cast is Barbara Murray, as Belle – evidently not named here, as she’s only given as ‘fiancée’ in the cast list in the Radio Times. Murray was already a recognisable face from British films at this point, having co-starred in Passport to Pimlico the previous year, and would continue to be a notable screen presence in British cinema for some years to come. So it’s quite impressive that they were able to drag her away from her Christmas dinner to come and do this – although it is possible that her scene could perhaps have been a film insert, especially as Murray is not one of those who doubles up in another role. Such inserts were being used in television drama by this point, although only very sparingly and more often than not for outdoor and action sequences rather than dialogue scenes.

 
It was also the usual practice of BBC television drama at the time for there to be a single person credited as ‘producer’ who performed what might today be understood to be the functions of both producer and director – overseeing the production both administratively and creatively. This was the case here, with producer Eric Fawcett also having written the adaptation – although from an existing stage play version by Dominic Roche, rather than directly from the book. Fawcett had a long career with BBC Television, beginning as a producer on the pre-war service from Alexandra Palace in the 1930s and continuing right through until the 1970s as a drama director.
 
As a Doctor Who fan and someone with a great interest in the creation of that programme, I cannot resist noting the presence of James Bould as the designer. Thirteen years later, Bould would be the BBC’s Design Department Manager and one of those who was not keen about Doctor Who going ahead as he didn’t think his department had the time, manpower and resources to provide for its needs. He was presumably having a happier time here with a different story which went through the barriers of time.
 
Underdone Potato:
Without having had access to the script, it’s obviously very difficult to say anything much for certain about the specific elements of this version. However, with the cast listed in order of appearance in the Radio Times, we do know that Julian d’Albie, Leonard Sharp and John Bentley, later to appear as the Ghost of Christmas Present, Old Joe and Young Scrooge respectively, all appear early on, after only Williams as Scrooge, John Ruddock as Bob Cratchit and Robert Cawdron as Fred, so there seems to have been a deliberate level of foreshadowing there.
 
I have been able to read the BBC’s audience research report on the production, which notes how “There was praise… for the way the atmosphere of mid-Victorian London was suggested, especially in the opening scenes ‘which set the mood for the whole play’.”
 
Past:
The credits for Sean Lynch as ‘Boy Scrooge’ and John Bentley as ‘Young Scrooge’, as well as Patricia Fryer as ‘Fanny’ and Barbara Murray as ‘Fiancée’, indicate that we get the usual scenes of Scrooge as an unhappy schoolboy, and later breaking his engagement – or rather, having it broken.
 
There is, however, no credit for anyone playing Fezziwig, which suggests that the party scene was either omitted or scaled-down. There is a production credit for “Dances arranged by John Armstrong”, which would surely have been mostly likely to have been for a Fezziwig scene. Perhaps it was only briefly shown using extras.
 
Present:
Again, we can mostly only try and guess at what was shown from the cast list – but we certainly have the scene with the Cratchits, as there are credits for Mrs Cratchit, Martha, Peter, Tim and unnamed ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ Cratchits. Fred was already credited for his earlier appearance at Scrooge’s office, so it’s uncertain whether there was a scene at his Christmas lunch. I am inclined to think not, as there is a credit for ‘Ann Wriggs’ – seemingly an error, and meant to be Ann Wrigg without the ‘s’ – as ‘Mrs Fred’ but not until the very end – suggesting she is not seen until Scrooge visits after his redemption to go and make amends.

 
Yet to Come:
There are credits for the gentlemen who discuss Scrooge’s death, and for Joe and Mrs Dilber discussing the sale of his things, but with the Cratchits having been credited earlier it’s impossible to know whether their future scene was included here – but I suspect it probably was.
 
The unnamed reviewer, credited only as ‘Cathode’, in the Wokingham & Bracknell Times gives us an impression of how the Spirit was realised for this section, and they were not particularly impressed. Having praised the production generally, ‘Cathode’ felt that “the Ghost of Xmas Yet to Come looked too much like a member of the Ku-Klux-Klan.”
 
What’s To-Day:
Again, because most characters who would normally re-appear here have already been credited, it’s very difficult by this stage to be able to determine too many specifics without the script. However, we can say that there was Tony Lyons as ‘Boy with the goose’, and as mentioned above there does appear to have been a scene of Scrooge going to dine with his nephew as Mrs Fred is the final new character credited as appearing. We do know that Scrooge lifted up Tiny Tim at the end of the Christmas Day performance – because the Daily Herald noted Williams was unable to do so on the second performance due to his illness.

 

Review:
Obviously I cannot review the production myself as I have not seen it, and nor sadly will I ever be able to, and I have not currently been able to read a copy of the script. However, fortunately unlike for some lost versions of the Carol we can get at least some impression of what it was like, from contemporary reviews – both professional, and from ordinary viewers.
 
The BBC at the time did not yet compile viewing figure as such. They did, however, have a panel of several hundred families selected as being a representative cross-section of the audience, who recorded their reactions to the various programmes. From their responses, the BBC calculated that some 59% of television sets had been switched on for A Christmas Carol on Christmas Day, with 23% for the repeat in For the Children two days later.
 
The first performance had an average of 4.35 people watching per set in use, and the second performance 3.19. Both received very good ‘Reaction Index’ figures – the indication of how much those in the sample group who watched a programme had enjoyed it. The first performance had a score of 74, and the second 73. This was, as the audience research report noted, “well above the current average (63) for studio performances of plays.”
 
The report does also note, however, that “The audience for this programme, though large by normal standards, was by no means outstanding compared with others during the Xmas holiday period, large numbers of ‘guest viewers’ leading to high ‘viewers per sets-in-use’ figures for nearly all programmes.”

 
In terms of qualitative rather than quantitative feedback, it’s fascinating that the audience research report records an almost reverent attitude towards the Carol. Noting that 94% of the 272 who completed questionnaires related to the programme indicated that the story had already been familiar to them, the report suggests that “because this story now ranks as a Christmas tradition most viewers felt it to be beyond criticism.”
 
Not all, however. “A few admitted a slight feeling of aversion for its ‘outdated’ sentimentality and insistence on a moral ‘which now seems to have lost much of its original point’.” While there was “little comment on individual points,” some viewers felt that “the length of the novel made it a difficult subject for television and that some cutting, especially in the scenes depicting Scrooge’s earlier life, would have done no harm.” Which seems a strange thing to say given it’s quite a short book, and a 90-minute slot ought to enable it to be done fairly well.
 
Williams’s performance as Scrooge was “widely regarded as little short of perfect,” with some who had seen him play the part on stage in the past “delighted to find he could still play it ‘with all the old zest’.” John Ruddock as Cratchit, Thomas Moore as Tim and Robert Cawdron as Fred we also “singled out as especially memorable.”
 
The production techniques seem to have gone down well, also, with report stating that viewers “thought very well of the production and settings, particularly of the camera-work and sets in the spirit scenes. As several said, here the resources of television came into their own, enabling the viewer to see things which were quite impossible to manage on the stage.”
 
Among the professional reviewers, George Campey in the Evening Standard admitted that “the attention of some of my guests wandered during the first hour.” However, he himself “sat enthralled by the encounters between Scrooge (played with veteran knowledge by Bransby Williams) and the assorted spectres in a production which fully evoked the Dickensian spirit. This play must have been a producer’s nightmare. Eric Fawcett, at the helm, handled the tricks and the action with consummate skill.”
 
AE Jebbett in the Evening Despatch liked Williams’s “smooth melodrama” as Scrooge, but felt overall that the production was too long. Cyril Butcher in The Sketch’s round-up of Christmas viewing had no such qualms, praising Eric Fawcett for having “turned in one of the best jobs of work in his career. The story, with its ghosts and spirits, obviously lends itself to a full use of camera superimposition – a dangerous trick used by inexpert hands. But Mr Fawcett’s are just about as experienced as one will find. Nor did he, in this welter of technicalities, forget that he was dealing with a lovely and moving tale which needs most delicate handling. Thank you, Mr Fawcett.”
 
‘Cathode’ in the Wokingham & Bracknell Times “had that queer feeling that one gets when one visits an entirely strange place and feels ‘I have been here before.’ For everything in the play was just as I had imagined it. The brilliant Scrooge by that Grand Old Man of the stage, Bransby Williams, really made old Ebenezer live, and Dorothy Summers gave an excellent portrayal of Mrs Dilber.”
 
Apart from the aforementioned reservation about the costume of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, the only criticism ‘Cathode’ made was that “the Ghost of Xmas Past was not nearly as awesome as it might have been.”
 
In a Nutshell:
An important milestone in the Carol’s television history, it’s a shame we can’t see this today – but that’s nobody’s fault, it’s simply the way things were. You may as well blame a stage play for ‘not existing’.
 
Links:
IMDb
Radio Times

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

A Christmas Carol - 2020, play

Title:
A Christmas Carol
 
Format:
Live online streaming relay of stage play
 
Country:
UK
 
Production company:
The Old Vic
 
Year:
2020
 
Length:

2 hours approximately, including a 15-minute interval
 
Setting:
Victorian
 
Background:
Into the twenties! This is the first review on this blog of a Carol from the 2020s, although the text of this particular version actually pre-dates this. This theatrical adaptation had first been performed at London’s Old Vic in 2017, and had become something of a modern festive tradition – returning for runs with new leading men for Christmases 2018 and 2019. It had also seen successes when transplanted overseas, with productions having run in Broadway and Dublin, but due to the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic it was all change for 2020.
 
Instead of being able to have audiences in for a new stage version, The Old Vic did what they’d also done for other productions during the pandemic and made it a part of their Old Vic: In Camera series. So every performance in the run would be staged live by the cast and crew in the otherwise-empty auditorium of the theatre, with a limited number of tickets available for each performance to view an online stream via Zoom. These performances, we are assured, would not then be available on a catch-up service – each one was unique, and live, and once they were gone they were gone.
 
This attracted me because it seemed like the closest you could get to experiencing the earliest days of live television drama. Of watching something on the screen that was being performed live many miles away, and yet could never been seen again.
 
Cast and crew:
This year’s Scrooge is actor Andrew Lincoln, who first came to fame as one of the stars of the critically-lauded, zeitgeist-seizing BBC Two drama series This Life in the mid-1990s. He then starred in Channel 4’s drama Teachers and had a prominent film part in the Christmas movie Love, Actually, before finding a whole new group of fans as the lead in the US cable television zombie apocalypse drama The Walking Dead.
 
Of the rest of the cast, most familiar to me personally was Clive Rowe as Fezziwig – Rowe had had a prominent guest role in the blockbusting Doctor Who Christmas special Voyage of the Damned in 2007, and would also be familiar to a generation of British children’s television viewers for his regular part in The Story of Tracy Beaker. Lenny Rush, who had been one of several boys sharing the role of Tiny Tim in the first two years of the Old Vic version in 2017 and 2018, returned to share it again this year, although on the night I watched it the part was played by one of the others sharing it. Presumably off the back of his success in the part on-stage, Rush had also played Tim in the 2019 television version.
 
Writer Jack Thorne is one of the most acclaimed television scriptwriters working in Britain today. He wrote for Skins and Shameless, collaborated on the various This is England series with Shane Meadows, and is the writer for the television adaptations of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series. No stranger to fantasy material, he also wrote the Harry Potter play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

 
Underdone Potato:
We open with a nine-person chorus made up of members of the supporting cast, each taking it in turn to perform lines from an edited version of the book’s opening passages, dressed – and indeed performing – as a group of handbell ringers. I liked this, and thought it worked particularly well when they would suddenly all come together to say the same word or phrase at once, when particular emphasis was needed.
 
It’s quite a condensed version of the opening ‘stave’ of the book, and moves along at a fair old pace. The charitable gentlemen have been replaced in this version by a group of carol singers, with whom Scrooge exchanges most of the usual lines from that segment as he attempts to chase them away from his door.
 
Fred’s visit has also been cut down, although it does preserve one of my favourite lines which is often cut – the one about being fellow passengers on the journey to the grave. Thorne clearly likes it, too, as it get repeated towards the end as we shall see.
 
Interestingly, the exchange between Scrooge and Cratchit about the latter wanting “the whole day tomorrow” is gone. Instead, it’s taken as read that Cratchit won’t be in the following day, although Scrooge does mention wanting him in earlier on “Boxing Day” – which I think might be slightly anachronistic, or at least on the early side, for 1843, although in fairness it’s never stated when exactly within the Victorian era this version is set, and as in many cases throughout it’s an example of modern language for a modern audience.
 
In an addition from Thorne, Scrooge sends Bob out on some ridiculously long errands so he won’t be home until late on Christmas Eve – something Bob protests about because his son Tim likes to wait outside for him. This is a Chekhov’s gun of a line which literally comes back to haunt Scrooge later.
 
After Bob has gone, Marley appears very quickly. Most of this scene is played fairly intact to the Dickens, although with some interesting tweaks. Scrooge’s line about Marley being “particular, for a shade” (although changed to “phantom”) survives when it is often lost, and seems to have informed quite a bit of Thorne’s interpretation of the character – a sort of biting sarcasm which is present throughout.
 
Another line from the Marley sequence which I have always liked, but isn’t always included, is his one about this opportunity for Scrooge being “a chance and hope” of Marley’s procuring. Thorne keeps it, but also makes an intriguing addition – saying that this came for Marley as “not little cost.”
 
When Marley departs, there’s a very nicely-staged sequence of him being dragged away by his chains, which works very well.
 
Past:
The Ghost of Christmas Past is female in this version, and doesn’t appear to have any particularly candle-like qualities. There’s an interesting similarity to some other versions as the first vision of Scrooge’s schooldays begins, with Scrooge calling out the other boys’ names. When the Spirit tells him that the visions have no consciousness of them, she adds a new line from Thorne: “unless we let them,” which quickly becomes relevant.
 
We see Scrooge as a schoolboy and have some of the often-omitted material about his younger self’s love of the fictional characters in the books he read. We meet Fan, and then we spear away from Dickens to also meet Scrooge’s father. In common with several other versions, Thorne goes much further than any implication found in the book and makes Scrooge’s father a drunken, abusive debtor – perhaps drawing more from Dickens’s own real life than from the fiction of A Christmas Carol.
 
This drawing from Dickens also includes some cross-pollination from the author’s other famous work, with Fezziwig’s business being specified as an undertaker’s here. Being apprenticed to an undertaker was, of course, briefly the fate of the eponymous character in Oliver Twist. It’s very common for adaptors of the Carol to add Belle into the Fezziwig party scene, but here Thorne goes even further – he makes her Fezziwig’s daughter.
 
Lincoln as Scrooge isn’t just watching these visions unfold before him – he enters into them, playing the part of his younger self in all but the school scene. There’s a perhaps surprising lack of subtlety at one point here when Thone gives Belle a line about, “those with can afford to support those without,” which is of course one of the messages of the book but feels a little on-the-nose. Then again, according to a caption ahead of the performance I watched, this is aimed at anyone from the age of eight upwards, so perhaps he just wanted to ensure even the youngest members of the audience got the message.
 
There’s an extra scene of Scrooge with Fan and his father at home, but no actual break-up scene with Belle. The second Belle scene isn’t here, either, but it isn’t omitted entirely – instead, it’s been moved to the ‘present’ section, as we shall see.
 
Present:
This was probably my least favourite section of the play – I think perhaps because it should have such moments of light in it, but in this version it really held only darkness.
 
The Ghost of Christmas Present is, like the first spirit, female – nothing wrong with that. But its manner is far from the jovial figure of the original and of most interpretations. Instead, throughout the spirit is very hard and harsh with Scrooge, which makes the whole segment feel rather unnecessarily bleak and cheerless.
 
There’s no doubt that the Spirit in the original Dickens can be like this – for instance, which it throws the “surplus population” line back in Scrooge’s face, or when it unveils Ignorance and Want to him (something which doesn’t happen here, perhaps not so surprisingly for a stage version). But I feel that’s all the more effective because it comes from a character we’ve seen to be so cheerful so much of the time – but when faced with Scrooge’s attitude it’s driven to such hardness. Whereas here, the hardness is ever-present.
 
There is a nicely-observed line from Thorne where Scrooge points out that the ghost is, “of the present, not the future,” presumably derived from Thorne’s thoughts on the exchange in the book between the two of them about Tim’s future. The Spirit, however, has a decent retort later, saying she is the “ghost of present causes” when she doesn’t just suggest that Tim is going to die, but actually shows Scrooge his moment of death. Tim doesn’t have any specific ailment in this version, but we are reminded of the fact he had been out standing and waiting for his father in the cold.
 
We also see Scrooge’s father again in this section, begging for a loan from his son, and we learn that old Fezziwig was also one of Scrooge’s debtors before he died. The latter presumably being inspired by the similar addition made to the 1951 film version. The scene of Belle and her actual husband is moved to this segment of the story, and as might be expected isn’t so light-hearted as the equivalent in the book, with Belle accusing her husband of regularly spying on Scrooge!
 
Yet to Come:
After the interval, we come into the second half of the play here. There is a brief suggestion of the traditional Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come – or as Scrooge calls it here, rather in the American fashion, the “Ghost of Christmas Future”. Its description is given by the chorus, but after this cameo its role in proceedings is quickly taken over by Scrooge’s sister, Fan.
 
This is where Thorne really veers away from the book, throwing out Dickens almost entirely for the whole segment. Instead of the mourning Cratchits, the relieved young couple, the mocking businessmen or Old Joe’s lair, we are given a series of brief monologues delivered by mourners at Scrooge’s funeral – Bob, Fred and even Belle. The Bob one is particularly odd, suggesting a gratitude to Scrooge even after having been fired by him following his falling apart from Tim’s death. I half-wondered whether there’s meant to be some suggestion Bob has become or is becoming as hard-hearted as Scrooge and is grateful to him for that, but there doesn’t seem quite enough of a thread to pull on there.
 
In some versions of the story the only vision Scrooge is presented with in the future is that of his own gravestone, which is ridiculous as everybody knows that everyone eventually dies. Thorne clearly thinks the same as he has Scrooge make the point here that it’s not exactly a shocking revelation to know that he’s going to die someday.

What’s To-Day:
There’s no boy for Scrooge to shout down to from a window – instead, Scrooge welcomes a couple of charity collectors into his home and confirms with them that it is indeed Christmas. He also showers them with money, in a scene reminiscent of some of those you see in certain silent and animated versions of the story.
 
The best of Thorne’s additions to the story comes here, as Scrooge decides to make his first port of call Belle’s house. It’s a melancholy and touching little scene, as he confesses that he wishes he had done things differently, but she says that she does not wish that she had. She points out that in waiting for Scrooge, she waited long enough to eventually meet and marry the man with whom she was happy, and she would not change that life.
 
There’s some lovely dialogue from Thorne here, as Belle tells Scrooge: “you are part of my story, and I’m delighted with how my story turned out.” His slightly mournful pleasure that “I was a part of your story” reminded of unrequited lover Ishmael’s line towards the end of David Guterson’s novel Snow Falling on Cedars – “I hope when you’re old and grey and looking back, you’ll remember me, just a little…”
 
Although admittedly, Andrew Lincoln standing in a doorway face-to-face with the woman his character loves in a Christmas production probably puts most people in mind of something else entirely.
 
The three spirits – well, Fan and the other two, depending on how you count them – get a cameo here, wondering what Scrooge will do now. What he does do is go to Fred’s, quoting his “fellow passengers” line at him and arranging for his entire Christmas dinner to be transported lock, stock and barrel to the Cratchits.
 
Things go from serious, moving drama to pantomime here, as there are all sorts of antics with various vegetables being thrown about, and Lincoln taking the piss out of a member of the crew who is presumably taking the place of a volunteer from the audience from the usual stage version.
 
“God bless us, every one,” from the chorus isn’t the very end of things here after the visit to the Cratchits. Instead, there’s a cameo with Scrooge and the spirits – including Marley – where there’s some debate over how changed Scrooge is and what this actually means now for his future life. Or indeed, whether or not it was all a dream. Interestingly, despite Marley saying Scrooge can only help himself and not him, he isn’t wearing his chains here.
 
There’s just time for a spot of carol-singing and a bit more bell-ringing, and that’s that.
 
Review:
I suppose the other adaptation with which this can be most closely compared is the 2019 television version by Steven Knight. They are both written by highly-acclaimed authors of esteemed British television dramas, and they both attempt to take a new look at the old classic through a decidedly 21^st century eye.
 
I’ve seen the pair of them the ‘wrong’ way around, because although this was a new production for 2020, Jack Thorne’s script of course was first written and produced before Knight’s version got off the ground. And I cannot help but think Thorne’s work must have been to at least some degree an influence on Knight. They both, for example, choose to make Scrooge’s sister one of the three spirits, something which I’m not aware of any other version ever having done.
 
Except that Knight seems to have decided to take some of the darker elements Thorne introduced and gone rather overboard with them. For example, whereas here we have only a brief allusion to Scrooge being mistreated by his schoolmaster, in Knight’s interpretation this was a full-on case of sexual abuse.
 
I made no secret of the fact that I loathed Knight’s script, but I will say that’s far from being the case with what Thorne has done. While I certainly enjoyed the first half of the play a great deal more than the second, Thorne both stays a lot closer to Dickens for the most part but also brings a touching quality to at least some of the extra or different scenes he introduces into the story – particularly to Scrooge’s final meeting with Belle after his redemption.
 
I do think, however, that the error both Thorne and Knight make is in feeling that the tale needs more of a moral lesson than it already possessed. As if they felt Dickens’s morality tale had become too chocolate-coated, too cosy in the retelling and the familiarity we have with it. That may be true, but unlike the pair of them I think you can still give it its power by stripping it back to what’s actually there, rather than adding what is not.
 
I can have no complaints, however, about the cast, although I do wonder about Scrooge’s sister having a Scottish accent. But it’s theatre, of course, and theatre – particularly in time of covid – is definitely a heightened reality where such things don’t really matter. And it was supposedly an Edinburgh gravestone which inspired Scrooge’s name in the first place, after all.

 
The only aspect of the staging which I found at all distracting was a lot of business with imaginary doors being opened and closed with accompanying sound effects. However, I’m not sure whether this was a deliberate stylistic choice, or more of a necessity for this production to ensure lots of different people weren’t having to touch the same door handles.
 
You could tell, of course, that this was theatre in the midst of a pandemic, with everyone keeping their distance, but it was staged and shot so well that I’m not sure you’ll have necessarily noticed that if you didn’t know. It would make an interesting case study for anyone looking back at theatre during covid-19 in the years to come, anyway.
 
Zoom of course will be a brand name forever associated with this time, and it seemed to hold up very well through the performance I watched – there was the very occasional stutter, but nothing serious and the picture held up very well. The sound quality was excellent throughout, and the camera work in capturing the live performance was on the whole very good. There was the occasional swiftly-adjusted out-of-focus shot, the odd spot of camera wobble and even a time or two when there had to be a sudden pan to find an out-of-shot actor. But I can easily forgive all that, and indeed it added to that long-lost atmosphere of live television drama which I wanted to see if this production might capture a little of.
 
In a nutshell:
It was fun to watch for the novelty of a live theatrical relay, and well done to them for getting it on at all. But I can’t hand-on-heart say I loved this version, which is a shame as it did start very well.
 
Links:
Wikipedia

The Stingiest Man in Town - 1956, television

Title:

The Stingiest Man in Town

Format:

Live television musical

Country:

USA

Production company:

Theatrical Enterprises, for NBC

Year:

1956 (broadcast live on NBC in the US on December 23^rd that year)

Length:

80 minutes

Setting:

Victorian England

Background:

Live anthology series were some of the staples of early British and American television drama, although live productions died off in the early 1960s, as did using multi-camera studios for drama at all in the US. There, bigger budgets and different market demands saw almost all scripted productions bar some sitcoms move onto film much earlier than happened in the UK and much of the rest of the world.

This isn’t a straight drama, however – like the 1954 American TV version this is a musical, but unlike that one this is indeed live. It was an episode in The Alcoa Hour (despite being longer than an hour!), a fortnightly anthology series named for the aluminium company which sponsored it, which alternated with Goodyear Television Playhouse on NBC from 1955 until 1957. This particular episode was broadcast live from New York, although I don’t know whether it was then performed live again a few hours later for the West Coast audience.

The Stingiest Man in Town seems to have been one of the highest-profile and best-remembered episodes of Alcoa Hour, with an original soundtrack album having been recorded by the cast, as advertised at the end of the broadcast. It lived long enough in the American popular consciousness to be considered worthy of an animated remake in 1978, although the 1956 version which survives today is a rather grimy film recording of the live broadcast.

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Cast and crew:

Basil Rathbone as Scrooge really does seem to have been Mr Christmas Carol in the 1950s. Two years before this he’d played Marley in the earlier American television musical, and three years later he was Scrooge again in another TV adaptation, this time a non-musical version made in Britain. There can’t be many people who’ve had three such prominent roles in three different versions of the Carol, and all within the space of five years, too.

Young Scrooge is played by Vic Damone, perhaps better known as a singer but one of the biggest names in the cast. Martyn Green as Bob was well-known as a leading man with the D’Oyly Carte company in their Gilbert & Sullivan productions, while Patrice Munsel who plays Belle was a distinguished opera singer, so they certainly didn’t hold back on getting a powerful singing cast in.

Janice Torre wrote the script and lyrics, with Fred Spielman handling the music. The pair were an established songwriting team whose best-remembered work these days is probably the song “Paper Roses”, written in 1960 but perhaps most famously a hit for Marie Osmond in 1973. Director Daniel Petrie had a hugely long and distinguished career in television, first directing for the medium in 1949, and his last work being a TV movie over half a century later, in 2001. A Canadian, he also worked in film and his 1980 film Resurrection saw two of its performers nominated for Academy Awards.

Underdone Potato:

Fans of David Croft sitcoms may like the opening line-up here – instead of a ‘You Have Been Watching’ sequence of shots of cast members at the end, we get a sort of ‘You Will Be Watching’ version, complete with voiceover of who each one of them is.

Unusually we don’t begin from Scrooge’s perspective, nor even from Bob’s as has occasionally been done in the past. Instead, in common only with the 1938 film version so far as I can recall, we begin with Fred, singing and dancing in the streets about “an old-fashioned Christmas,” which has a certain irony to it as many of the festive traditions we now regard as old-fashioned were either brand new or not yet established when the Carol was first written.

Also unusually for Fred, he has a present for his uncle when he finally finishes his song and goes in to visit him, although as you might imagine it’s not one which is particularly well-received, and we don’t really get a clear look at what it is. Scrooge sees him off, as well as the two charitable gentlemen, before Bob heads home with Scrooge being very specific on this occasion about how much earlier he wants him in on Boxing Day – two hours.

There’s an early appearance for Mrs Dilber in this version, wanting paying for doing the cleaning, and then she, a “rag-picker” character named Harry Hawkins who’s an invention of this version and a group of four beggars get the title number, “The Stingiest Man in Town”. The beggars are played by a singing group called The Four Lads, who also act as sort of Greek chorus, giving quick recaps of the story coming out of the advert breaks.

It seems odd that none of the main characters are present for the title song, which does seem to be there purely to allow time for Rathbone to get set-up in bet for the next scene, the visit of Marley’s ghost. Like Nephew Fred’s Johnny Desmond, Marley actor Robert Weede doesn’t even attempt to hide his American accent despite it being clearly a British-set version, but that’s more forgivable in a heightened-reality version such as a musical, I think.

We get a taste of Scrooge seeing some of the other helpless chained spirits, and a moment from the book which hardly any other version – perhaps no other version – does when Scrooge recognises one of them. I was interested and amused to see that as he does in the 1959 version, Rathbone sees Marley off with a little wave goodbye as he goes!

Bye bye Marley!

Past:

The Ghost of Christmas Past is an older, bearded man, going against what’s in the book and making for less of a contrast with the following visitor. He talks to Scrooge about his schooldays and his sister Fran, but we don’t see them – instead, we head straight to the Fezziwigs’ Christmas party, where as usual for most adaptations Belle has been introduced into the action early. As with Bob Cratchit being told exactly how early he has to be into work for the day after Christmas, they’re very specific about timing in this version – the spirit tells Scrooge that this party was “forty years ago.”

Neither Vic Damone as young Scrooge nor Patrice Munsel as Belle budge from their American accents either, but there is some nice live production work (saving the dip into view of a boom mic, impressively the only one I spotted in the whole thing) to transition from the party to a sort of dream sequence of their possible future together and them then drifting apart. There are some nice lines in their song together here with Scrooge saying he’s built a wall of gold to protect them, and Belle saying the wall of gold is now between them.

Said song does drag on, for a bit, however – I wondered whether perhaps this was deliberate, to give Rathbone a bit of a rest given that he’s in almost every scene.

The Ghost of Christmas Past.

Present:

The Ghost of Christmas Present is perhaps a little younger than usually depicted, but is his usual jolly self and even brings some backing dancers with him for his initial visit to Scrooge’s rooms. They play toys such as fairies and clockwork soldiers, and even manage to cajole Scrooge into a little bit of a dance with them.

Rathbone does a nice performance of being nervous and worried about being taken into the Cratchits’ house uninvited, concerned that Mrs Cratchit might hear him and the ghost talking. He also has a fun little bit of business with her when he takes a seat by the fire, and has to hurry out of it when she decides to sit down.

There’s a full bevvy of Cratchit children, with Martha unusually being the focus. She gets a song of her own, which takes the British Christmas tradition and crosses it over with the American as she sings to reassure her brother in a song which might as well be called “Yes, Timothy, There is a Santa Claus” – indeed, she has the very line, ‘Yes, there is a Santa Claus’ within it.

We then get a trip to Fred’s party, where he also gets a song, focusing on the nativity scene model set up at the side of his living room and giving a reminder of the Christian side of Christmas. There’s quite a good point made in this about gold being a rather pointless gift for Jesus when he was supposedly the supreme ruler of the universe.

Scrooge concerned about whether Mrs Cratchit will notice him.

Yet to Come:

The Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come has the traditional robes but human hands, and shows Scrooge a version of the Old Joe scene with Mrs Dilber and her friend Harry the rag-picker coming out of his office / house (the same building in this version, sensibly in a live production to save on sets and compact studio space) with their ill-gotten gains, including the clothes taken from his dead body.

We don’t see anything of the Cratchits mourning for Tim, but instead we go straight to Scrooge’s gravestone, where a group of dancers who might be spirits or perhaps demons of the underworld do a bit of interpretative dance which verges on ballet. Indeed, the bit with them carrying Scrooge around may remind you of a scene from over a quarter of a century later of the ballet dancers and Freddie Mercury in the video for Queen’s “I Want to Break Free”.

There’s something interesting here which isn’t often done – although is in more comic form in the more famous musical version from 1970 – when Scrooge has a chain of his own added by the spirits. As he begs on his knees for another chance, he see hands clasping at the spirit’s robes – but cleverly, they’re not Rathbone’s, as he’s nipped off back to bed on the set next door to be ready for the start of the final section.

What’s To-Day:

The 1951 film version was only a few years old at this point, and I wonder if the fact that Scrooge sees Mrs Dilber and joyfully greets her after he wakes was an influence on the same happening here? (Although as I’ve said before, the antecedence of that scene, like other elements of the 1951 film, seems to be in the 1935 version). She also takes the place of the boy out of the window, telling Scrooge what day it is.

Scrooge heads off to the Cratchits’ with presents for them all, and I like the way in which he interrupts part-way through the scene we have already seen in the Christmas present section. This means Tim doesn’t get his song about Santa Claus from Martha, but he confirms he does indeed believe in him after Scrooge’s visit. Luckily, the turkey Scrooge provides is already cooked, saving them the trouble of having to do it.

Scrooge declines the invitation to stay for lunch, instead heading off to Fred’s although we don’t see it. We do seem him lined up with the entire company to wave us farewell, although before we get the end credits we have a filmed advert for our sponsors, extolling the virtues of Alcoa Foil this Christmas time.

Review:

If, like me, you’re interested in the history of television and how it was made, then this is a fascinating production. American television abandoned live productions and indeed multi-camera shooting for most scripted shows aside from sitcoms far earlier than the UK and much of the rest of the world did, so this is a glimpse into a world and a type of television that before long would disappear altogether.

I suppose part of the problem is the fact that the audience would have been familiar with epic Hollywood musicals, so even the most ambitious live multi-camera studio production could ever compete with that. Nevertheless they certainly do their best, and while some of the songs do outstay their welcome a touch, they’re certainly much better than the ones in most of the other musical adaptations of the tale, barring the 1970 musical and perhaps the Muppet version.

For a live production with so much singing and dancing, there are impressively few missteps, too. There’s one boom shot I spotted, which I mentioned above, and perhaps one or two very minor line fluffs, but apart from that the cast all do extremely well. Rathbone in particular is excellent – a very good Scrooge, and it’s a shame that perhaps his performance has been forgotten over time.

In a nutshell:

If you’re not used to or don’t enjoy watching grotty, smeary film recordings of archive TV broadcasts then this may not be for you. But if you can stand that, then I think it’s an enjoyable and interesting watch.

Links:

IMDb