A Christmas Carol - 1970, television

Title:
A Christmas Carol
 
Format:
Illustrated reading
 
Country:
UK
 
Production company:
Anglia Television, for the ITV network
 
Year:
1970 – shown at various points by several different ITV regional companies that Christmas season
 
Length:
48 minutes
 
Setting:
Victorian
 
Background:

Anglia Television, based in the city of Norwich, were the East of England regional contractors for the ITV network in the UK, going on-air in October 1959. Although they relied heavily on the network output produced by the larger ITV companies for much of their prime-time output, they were also a fully-fledged TV station and production company in their own right, producing a large number of programmes across a range of genres. They became something of a cultural institution in their region, particularly across much of Norfolk, the county where they were based.
 
They still exist, too, although these days pretty much just as the ‘ITV Anglia’ regional news service for the east. They are still based in their original Anglia House home, however, having disposed of many of its extensions and other buildings they occupied in Norwich down the years. Anglia House must surely be the last 1950s television studio still operating in the UK – the story goes that as a condition of the lease, they have to return it (the old Agricultural Hall) to the condition in which they found it should they leave, which is allegedly why ITV have surprisingly not yet downsized the operation.

 
Although many of Anglia’s programmes made during their glory years were purely designed to be shown in the eastern region on Anglia only, they also produced a number of wider-interest programmes screened on the network – they were particularly successful with their wildlife series Survival, their quiz show Sale of the Century and with a number of dramas down the years.
 
A Christmas Carol is another example of an Anglia programme which was clearly designed to have potential network appeal, with no particular regional ties. It’s an interesting affair; when I was kindly given a copy by James, a reader of this blog, he told me that it was animated, but that isn’t actually – bar one winking face and one moving clock hand – the case. It’s more of an illustrated reading, akin to a long episode of Jackanory in which you never see the narrator. It’s made up of an abridged version of the story, read over a series 150 or so still illustrations, with the cameras panning across and zooming into them at various points.
 
What I found especially interesting about this is that, although I’m no technical expert, it’s pretty clear that there wasn’t a rostrum camera or any film involved. The smooth pans and zooms, the occasional camera wobbles and the clean cross-fades all show that this was an entirely video production, with the artworks shot on studio video cameras and the production assembled on videotape.
 
The Transdiffusion TV history website has an article giving some of the background to this production, although it’s not clear where their information comes from. It seems that A Christmas Carol was one of a series of such productions made by the same team at Anglia in the late 1960s and early 70s, following on from a serialised adaptation of The Wind in the Willows and an original serial called The Winter of Enchantment, and followed by four further serials, including an adaptation of Treasure Island.

 
This doesn’t appear to have gained Anglia a network showing at Christmas 1970, but it seems as if it was broadcast by several of the different regional companies of the ITV network at some point or other over that festive season. Southern and Border both showed it on Christmas Eve, at 11.15am in Southern’s case and midday on Border; Anglia themselves put it out at 3.25 on Christmas Day in the afternoon; London Weekend Television at 9.20 on Boxing Day morning; Westward in two parts, at 10.40 on Boxing Day morning and 1pm on Sunday the 27^th. There may have been others too, but those are the ones I could find in The Times’s Christmas TV listings.
 
Cast and crew:
There are just two people mainly responsible for the vast majority of the work on this version. One of them is Paul Honeyman, who produced it, wrote the abridged adaptation, and also performed it for good measure as well. And the other is John Worsley, the artist who produced all of the illustrations which make-up the visual part of the production.
 
Worsley had had a fascinating life; an official war artist during the Second World War, he was evidently the only one to be captured as a prisoner-of-war. He’d also work for famous comics such as the Eagle, and evidently his Carol illustrations for this production also saw release as a large-format children’s book version of the story.

"Come on mate, time to go..."

 
Honeyman was a staff producer for Anglia in Norwich, who had served in the army before joining Tyne Tees Television as an announcer. Moving to Anglia in 1968, he was initially a reporter for their About Anglia news programme, before moving up the ranks to become a producer and eventually Head of Features and later Assistant Programme Controller. Even through these promotions he continued to work on producing and narrating these children’s productions. He died in July 1978, at the age of just 41, shortly after finishing work on another of his children’s serial collaborations with Worsley, The Whisper of Glocken.
 
Aside from Honeyman, there are one or two sound effects used here and there, and also some other voices to give occasional background chatter or laughter. However, the other main presence is the music – by Peter Fenn, who was evidently Anglia’s Head of Music at the time. He employs the services of the Choir of Norwich Cathedral, to give the soundtrack an appropriately festive air.
 
Director John Salway had worked at Anglia for some years, including on the the previous Honeyman / Worsley children’s efforts. Like Honeyman, he also died young, in 1972 while in production on their version of Treasure Island.
 
Underdone Potato:

In spite of the fact that this is an abridged version of the text to fit the running time, we get something here which you get hardly anywhere else – Dickens’s little preface about hoping the story will haunt the readers’ houses pleasantly, which is a nice touch.
 
Aside from that, though, while most of the best-known sequences are all present and correct, most of them have been quite heavily cut down in some way or other. Fred’s best dialogue, the “other creatures on other journeys” bit, is gone, and the two charitable gentlemen also pay little more than a flying visit.
 
The gravy pun is retained during Marley’s visit, however.

 
Early on, as we sweep across Worsley’s vision of Victorian London with the dome of St Paul’s dominating proceedings, there’s a pub sign for The Bell in the foreground – coincidence, or perhaps a deliberate reference to one of Norwich’s best-known watering holes…?

Past:

Worsley does a decent job of trying to render Dickens’s description of the Ghost of Christmas Past as both old and young at the same time, although there’s an odd effect given by the shadowing of its face early on which makes it look rather like it has some bushy black beard. It also looks as if it’s carrying a document folder, given how the cap its holding looks when we first see it, giving it a rather officious, middle-management-ghost sort of appearance.

The transition of Scrooge and the spirit being outside the school to inside the schoolroom is a nice effect that works well, although there’s no Fan at the end of the school sequence. Fezziwig, however, gains a first name in this version – Algernon – and in the break-up with Belle scene the young Scrooge gains some fairly extraordinary-looking yellow trousers.

"How can you possibly not want me, with my magnificent yellow trousers, Belle?"

Present:

While the Ghost of Christmas Past appeared oddly bearded on its first appearance, here Worsley goes against tradition and while depicting Christmas Present as the large, robed figure of Dickens, he has no beard in this version.

Another surprising inclusion, given all the tightening up elsewhere, is lingering on the Christmas fare for sale and retaining the mention of “Norfolk biffins” – which, for those like me who had to look it up, are a type of apple. Bless Anglia Television for flying the flag for their region and being possibly the only people in the history of Carol adaptations to keep that mention in. Indeed, so surprising was it that I actually had to check the original book to make sure it was there and not something Paul Honeyman had added in!

 

We get the educational point about the bakers cooking people’s Christmas lunches for them because they didn’t have their own ovens, but the only ‘main’ scene included is the visit to the Cratchits’ house. There’s no dropping-in on Fred and his house guests and party games in this one.
 
Yet to Come:

This is the most unfortunate section, and probably the reason – or at least one of the reasons – why this version isn’t better-known, and is unlikely to get another run-out on television today.
 
The reason being is that there’s a concentration on the Old Joe scene here, which is fair enough. But sadly, Old Joe himself is depicted as a very Fagin-like figure, in the worst possible sense; as every inch the offensive stereotype which Fagin has so often been played as being in the past.
 
While there are arguments to be had about Tiny Tim and the representation of the disabled, for a piece of literature written in 1843 by an author who had known prejudices, A Christmas Carol is pretty much free of such baldly offensive material, which makes it all the more disappointing that nearly 130 years later Paul Honeyman and Anglia Television saw fit to introduce it here.
 
The visit to the Cratchits is changed here, so that Bob isn’t coming back from visiting the site of Tim’s grave when he arrives home, but actually coming downstairs from his deathbed. To tell the family that Tim’s just died, which makes it seem a bit weird that they weren’t all up there with him.

Es are good, apparently...

 
There’s a common spelling error on Scrooge’s gravestone here, with Worsley adding an extra ‘e’ to label it ‘Ebeneezer Scrooge’.
 
What’s To-Day:
This is the only section which actually contains any of what you might call animation; firstly as Marley’s face on the knocker gets a reprise, giving a wink as it appears again, and secondly at the end when Scrooge watches the clock for Bob’s late arrival at work on Boxing Day, and we see the hand move through the minutes.

This is probably the section which departs most from the original; not massively, but there is a bizarrely, Disney-ish diversion when Scrooge laughs to himself at the change which has overcome him, as he does in the original. In this version, however, we see illustrated and are told about the birds on the windowsill outside being surprised to hear this noise from him, and they gather there to hear it.
 

We get the main sections, as per usual – meeting one of the charitable gentlemen, going to see Fred, and then playing his trick on Bob at the end.
 
Review:
When I first began watching this, I did wonder how well it would hold the attention. I’ve nothing against a reading of a book, but usually - unless it’s some sort of performance of the type Dickens himself used to give – you’re not also watching it at the same time. Honeyman’s reading would work equally well as an audio book without the illustrations, although it would fall down on not being a complete version.
 
The illustrations are nice, though, and director John Salway does a decent enough job of not just keeping them statically in frame the whole time, but keeping the cameras moving across and into them.

Worsley doesn’t try to ape John Leech’s original illustrations and has a style of his own, albeit one which feels very in-keeping with the Victorian setting. He’s also good at creating mood and atmosphere, with Marley and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come both being particularly effective in this regard.
 
Honeyman does well as narrator, too – I found a review in The Times from the time of the original transmission crediting him for not attempting to go over-the-top in acting it, but rather giving a good reading instead, and I think there is indeed a difference. It’s just a shame about the Old Joe sequence, which leaves a bitter taste in the mouth and means this can’t, in all good conscience, be recommended as a highlight in the Carol canon.
 
In a nutshell:
This isn’t a bad version by any means. It’s well-read, and the illustrations are nice – it’s just that there are better-read unabridged versions if that’s what you want, and more exciting versions visually, making it hard to think of a particular reason to recommend it.
 

 

A Christmas Carol - 2017, straight-to-DVD

Title:
A Christmas Carol
 
Format:
Single camera one-man performance
 
Country:
UK
 
Production company:
That’s My Cue Productions
 
Year:
2019
 
Length:
57 minutes
 
Setting:
Victorian
 
Background:
Martin Prest first performed a one-man-show version of A Christmas Carol on-stage in Cambridge in 2012, and has continued to tour the performance ever since. This recorded version was released straight-to-DVD in 2017 for sale via the production company’s website, and has subsequently been made available on streaming services such as Amazon Prime.

Cast and crew:
Evidently creating this show was a “lifelong dream” for Prest, who doesn’t have more than a handful of other credits to his name in visual media, but whose company That’s My Cue Productions has expanded into further stage shows since that initial Carol production, including Three Men in a Boat and Dracula.
 
It’s also Prest’s adaptation, rather than using Dickens’s own performance version. The director of this recording was Jack Spring. Spring’s first feature film, Destination: Dewsbuy, was released a couple of years after this, in 2019, and according to his website he’s currently working on another Carol-related project, about a struggling director trying to put on a theatre performance of the story, so presumably he’s a fan!

 
Underdone Potato:
This is, at just under an hour, obviously a trimmed-down version of the Carol, although all of the major elements are present and correct. The editing does, however, mean that some of my personal favourite little touches and flourishes of Dickens’s writing are missing – Marley saying that Scrooge’s chance and hope is one of his procuring, for example.
 
Speaking of Marley, he’s portrayed in a much more desperate and whimpering fashion here than is usually the case, and to my mind than comes across in the Dickens. Fred is also a lot more cockney than usual, too, although perhaps it’s true to say that in other versions he’s usually portrayed as being rather too much on the plummy side.

Past:
The Ghost of Christmas Past initially seems far more creepy than you might expect, and then after its initial encounter with Scrooge it comes across a lot of the time as a lot more smirking, perhaps. Prest also turns Belle into quite a whiny creature, and there’s an interesting bit in the editing of the text after her scene where the Spirit says that it is going to show Scrooge one shadow more, but he snuffs it out before we get to the second Belle scene of the book.
 
Present:
The Ghost of Christmas Present has probably the least successful of Prest’s attempts at putting on an accent. At first I thought he was doing Welsh, but then it seemed to veer more into Glaswegian at certain points, but he’s in good company with having such a wandering accent for this particular part, with it bringing up memories of Jim Carrey’s unsuccessful efforts in the 2009 animated version.
 
The scene at the Cratchits’ house is the only one – barring any edits, of which more below – where I noticed Prest ever being in danger of losing his way, as he stumbles over a couple of lines in quick succession. There are two way of looking at this. The charitable one is that if they’re trying to recreate the experience of seeing the book read on-stage, then that’s fair enough. The other way of looking at it is that it makes the thing feel a bit sloppy and amateur.
 
On a script note, it’s interesting that while Ignorance and Want are included, there’s no mention in this version of the Spirit having aged through his encounter with Scrooge.

Yet to Come:
There’s another of those bits here which you can more easily forgive if you decide you’re watching a recorded stage performance, as Prest sips from his glass of water a bit more often than he has through the rest of the production.
 
The Old Joe section is slimmed down to him having just the one visitor, and although much of the dialogue abut the bedsheets and such is intact, there’s another of those instances where I miss one of the original lines, her saying that she wasn’t so fond of him she’d have taken the bedsheets if he’d died of anything catching.
 
What’s To-Day:
This section contains the only instance I noticed of an edit. It’s carefully done in that they pick up with him as much as possible standing in the same spot, but unless it’s simply a mistake in the editing, there’s a definite cut here. It comes as Scrooge meets the charitable gentleman in the street on Christmas morning, and as they were happy to leave in those stumbles in the Christmas Present section, makes me wonder what went so wrong here as to cause a cut?

Review:
This is by no means an awful performance. If you’d paid to go and see it in the theatre, I don’t think you’d be disappointed. Prest does a commendable job of maintaining his concentration across such a large chunk of text, and I like the way he differentiates between when he’s playing the narrator and when he’s playing the characters – looking directly down the camera when he’s narrating, and away from it when he’s in character.
 
However, I do also have to say that something about his very ‘Actorly’ style and voice and his determination to show off an array of different accents does make this feel a little like something you might see in a comedy sketch of an actor doing a one-man show of A Christmas Carol. This isn’t helped by the scenery – while the alternating backdrops for inside and out are quite nice paintings, and often well-lit, the shaky manner in which they go up-and-down does give a very amateurish feeling to proceedings.
 
This may well be intentional, of course. I get the impression the whole thing is designed to feel like a theatrical experience. But the problem is it feels a bit too much like an am-dram one, which would be fine in a village hall but I don’t think can quite hack it when subjected to this kind of glare, especially when compared to the likes of the 1982 or 2018 performed reading versions.
 
In a nutshell:
A worthy enough effort, but if you want a one-man-show version, there are simply better options out there.
 
Links:
Amazon Prime
IMDb

A Christmas Carol - 1982, television

Title:
A Christmas Carol
 
Format:
One-man performance with illustrations, on multi-camera studio video
 
Country:
UK
 
Production company:
BBC Television
 
Year:
1982 (first broadcast on BBC Two in the UK from December 21^st-24^th that year)
 
Length:
4 episodes, each of approximately 15 minutes
 
Setting:
Victorian
 
Background:
Done in the style of the famous children’s series Jackanory, with an actor doing a performed reading of a condensed version of the story, these four short episodes roughly correspond with the first four ‘staves’ of the original story – with the fifth and final ‘stave’ added into the fourth episode. The episodes were originally – and, as far as I can tell, only – transmitted on BBC Two in the UK at 3.40pm on consecutive afternoons in the run-up to Christmas, from the 21^st to the 24^th of December 1982.
 
Presumably, given its Jackanory style, it was designed as something to help keep the children entertained in the afternoons once the schools had broken up for Christmas, but it’s not an explicitly youth-orientated version of the story. Perhaps that’s why, despite it being made by an experienced Jackanory team, it didn’t go out under that programme’s umbrella – so that adults wouldn’t be dissuaded from watching it thinking it was purely kids’ stuff.
 
It’s perhaps fitting that the BBC made such a version, as their first ever television adaptation of the Carol had been a one-person telling, starring Bransby Williams – a well-known stage Scrooge – in 1936. Williams had again performed a one-man versions for BBC Television in 1952, the latter the earliest British TV version to exist, being film recorded and regularly repeated for several Christmases thereafter. Michael Horden also did a reading for the BBC, in three parts in 1963.
 

Cast and crew:
The Jackanory feel is very much confirmed by a look at the talent working on this behind-the-scenes. The adaptation was written by Janie Grace, who over the previous decade had written nearly 100 episodes of Jackanory – and had also directed for the series. Grace went on to have a stellar career as a producer and executive producer in British children’s television, becoming head of Nickelodeon in the UK in the mid-1990s and later head of Children’s ITV.
 
Director Christine Secombe had also been a Jackanory regular, as well as helming multiple episodes of a variety of hugely well-known and popular British children’s TV shows, such as Grange Hill, Play School and Jonny Briggs.
 
That this is a Jackanory without the branding is perhaps finally sealed by the presence of Angela Beeching as producer. She had been producing Jackanory since the early 1970s and would continue to do so until towards its end in the mid-1990s, overseeing many hundreds of editions of the programme.
 
The reader is actor Michael Bryant, who had form with BBC Two Christmas specials – ten years earlier, he had played the lead in Nigel Kneale’s famous Christmas ghost story for a modern era, The Stone Tape. He also had various supporting parts in famous films to his name, such as one of the Titanic’s officers in A Night to Remember, and Lenin in Nicholas and Alexandra. Bryant had also done several readings for Jackanory down the years, as well as for a 1980 series made by the Jackanory team called Spine Chillers, which broadcast telling of ghost stories aimed at older children.
 
As was common with Jackanory, Bryant’s reading is accompanied by specially-commissioned illustrations. These were done by Paul Birbeck, another regular contributor to Jackanory, who had also created the opening title sequence for the BBC’s famous 1980s Miss Marple series, and the backgrounds for the Glynis Barber Jane adaptations.

Underdone Potato:
Bryant doesn’t so much seem to represent Dickens as much as a generic Victorian gentleman and general omniscient narrator, although he does so from locations representing where Scrooge is at different parts of the story. This is most evident in this first episode, which opens in a set representing the offices of Scrooge and Marley, before moving into the street for the door-knocker scene, and finally into Scrooge’s rooms.
 
This is, fairly obviously, an abridged version of the story, but Grace’s script keeps almost all of the most famous and familiar elements – with perhaps one curious exception. She chooses not to include the “surplus population” line, which seems a strange decision given that it is perhaps one of the most famous in the whole story. Perhaps she simply thought that it was too grim for younger viewers, although this seems unlikely given that equally grim elements are kept.
 
Birbeck’s illustrations are also good at representing little nooks and crannies of the narrative – so, for example, over the passage relating people’s reactions to Scrooge in the street, such as blind men’s dogs pulling their owners away from him, we see an example of his in the particular illustration for that sequence.
 
There are some nice moments where Birbeck’s illustrations aren’t always full-frame, and are mixed in with Bryant – for example, when Marley appears to Scrooge, and we have the ghost on one side of the screen and Bryant on the other.

Past:
Given that Bryant is reading Dickens’s description of the Ghost of Christmas Past from the book, with its strange old-young appearance, Birbeck has a bit of a job on his hands to attempt to realise that, but he does a pretty good job, I think.

 

There’s only one set for this episode, Bryant remaining on the Scrooge’s rooms set as he does for both this and the third episode. We get all the main points of these visions – the school, the Fezziwigs’ party, and both Belle scenes.

Mr Fezziwig's fiddler!

Present:
The Ghost of Christmas Present is rendered by Birbeck not just as big and cheerful, but with a hell of a belly on him, too. We have the scene of he and Scrooge out and about in the streets – including the part about people having to take their Christmas meat to be cooked at the baker, which is usually forgotten – and the main visits to the Cratchits’ and to Fred’s house, although the latter is rather cut down in favour of the former.

Tiny Tim, it must be said, does actually look somewhat less-than-tiny in the illustration of him being carried into he house on his father’s shoulders. But Birbeck more than makes up for that with a suitably haunted-looking depiction of Ignorance and Want beneath the Spirit’s robes
 
Yet to Come:
There’s a bit more adjustment in where Bryant reads from here, as we have a graveyard set for much of Scrooge’s encounter with the Spirit. Again, there are all the usual visions of the future, with the Cratchits mourning Tiny Tim being cut down rather. Although I do have to admit, I’m not entirely sure it does that scene any harm, and Grace does retain that section’s best line, about remembering the first parting among them.

 
What’s To-Day:
This is all part of the same fourth and final episode as the Yet to Come section, and for the finale Bryant is back in the set for Scrooge’s rooms, but made to seem much brighter and more cheerful by the change to daylight coming through the windows. Plus a Christmas tree, which Bryant lights some candles on at the end.
 
Speaking of candles, in Birbeck’s illustration of Bob’s surprise when Scrooge springs his surprise upon him on Boxing Day shows a candle being upset from the clerk’s table. I hope it didn’t then go on to burn the building down and put a rather sour end on things! (Luckily, there is no sign of such a thing. This isn’t the 2019 TV version, after all!)

Review:
I don’t remember always watching Jackanory when I was a child, but I certainly did sometimes, and there are some of its late 80s and early 90s readings which stuck in my young mind – Rik Mayall doing George’s Marvellous Medicine and Sylvester McCoy doing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in particular.
 
I can well imagine this version of the Carol being a fond memory for many children who watched it in Christmas week of 1982. While it’s obviously just a performed reading rather than a full-on adaptation, such things can work very well when done with effort and care – as this is. Bryant is an engaging narrator with a rich and warm voice and a perfect tone for telling the story. It’s also been very sensitively adapted, and would be an excellent introduction to the book – as I expect it was for many younger viewers.
 
Birbeck’s illustrations are also, apart from the above-mentioned not-so-Tiny Tim, excellent. He isn’t tempted to try and ape John Leech’s style, and gives it a distinctive look and feel of his own.
 
In a nutshell:
A reading rather than a dramatisation, so not to everyone’s tase. But if you don’t mind that, this is a fine little retelling of the tale, in the best Jackanory tradition.
 
Links:
BBC Genome (episode 1)
British Film Institute

A Christmas Carol - 2018, television

Title:

A Christmas Carol

Format:

Filmed one-man performance

Country:

UK

Production company:

BBC Films / The Space

Year:

2018 (released to cinemas on December 11^th that year, and the broadcast on BBC Four on December 16^th)

Length:

72 minutes

Setting:

Victorian (sort of… the tale is being told in an anonymous space, but it is the original version)

Background:

Years after he wrote the Carol, Dickens became well-known for his personal readings of an abridged version for live audiences, something he carried on doing right up until the end of his life. In the years since others have performed one-man or -woman show of the Carol – such as Patrick Stewart, who we’ll come to tomorrow – but probably none so deliberately attempting to evoke some of the style of Dickens himself as Simon Callow.

Callow is a great lover of Dickens’s work, and has long been associated with A Christmas Carol. As well as performing his one-man version of the book based on Dickens’s own reading, including in excerpts for the BBC in 1996, he has also played the man himself on film and television on several occasions. The year before this film was released he played the book’s original illustrator John Leech in The Man Who Invented Christmas, a film about how the Carol came to be written.

Publicity for the film tied it in with the Carol’s 175^th anniversary, and it was a good idea to capture for posterity Callow’s performance of the story. Although it did have a short cinema release across 444 cinemas in the UK and Ireland, most people are likelier to have seen it five days later when it was broadcast on the BBC’s arts and culture-focused channel, BBC Four. For this broadcast, there was an option to listen to it in ‘binaural stereo’ via headphones – the process which apparently makes it seem as if the sound is all around you.

Cast and crew:

Being a one-man performance, the cast of course numbers just one – the aforementioned Simon Callow, finally getting to star in a version of the Carol worthy of his talent and love of the story, some seventeen years after lending his voice to Scrooge in the 2001 animated version. He was also seen as Dickens in some versions of that film, bookending it with live action sequences of the author performing one of his readings, and had played him in other productions including two episodes of Doctor Who in 2005 and 2011, both of which referenced the Carol.

Although he does have some other film and television credits to his name, director Tom Cairns is mostly a man of the theatre, where he has helmed both ‘straight’ productions and operas, including for the Royal Opera House. He’d also both directed and designed for Callow’s stage version of his one-man performance of the Carol, which made him the perfect choice to helm this – he’s also credited alongside Callow for the adaptation, so was undoubtedly one of the driving forces behind the project.

Musicians and sound designers Ben and Max Ringham are responsible for the atmospheric and evocative soundtrack, having also done extensive work for the stage, including for the National Theatre.

Scrooge, PI.

Underdone Potato:

This is all very intriguingly set up. You might expect it to take place in some Victorian study by a roaring fireside, with Callow all done up as Dickens, reading from some enormous leather-bound volume.

Instead, Callow is in a modern suit in what looks like it might be some abandoned warehouse or office building at any point in the late twentieth or early twenty-first centuries. There is the occasional relevant bit of scenery or a prop, and clocks on the wall or the floor showing the relevant times, but for the most part he seems to be wandering through some melancholy otherworld.

I formed the view across the production, as Callow walked between various different but similar set-ups, that perhaps these were the places mentioned in the Carol but many years later. Scrooge’s counting house and home, Fezziwig’s business, the old school, all abandoned and empty, long after Scrooge and everyone else in the story is dead and gone. It’s probably not right, but I liked the idea of it.

Callow does a good job of always making sure you know which character is speaking in dialogue scenes without ever straying into silly voices or overly-extravagant gestures. It’s an absolute tour de force from him, as you’d expect – this is the sort of thing he was born to do.

It isn’t all entirely Callow talking to the camera. To add a bit of variety, there are one or two voiceover scenes, including of Callow walking up the stairs as Scrooge arrives home which makes the thing seem a little like some hard-bitted detective drama. When he is home and Marley arrives, this was the one part I felt they’d compressed a little too much – Marley’s visit seemed to be over and done with very briefly, and without as much of the original Dickens dialogue as I would have expected.

Past:

There was a nice jump scare at the beginning of this – I knew there was going to be a final ‘bong’ from the clock, but they make it sound really quite creepy. Callow’s reaction probably helps to sell it as well.

We get some snow indoors which adds a sort of magical realism feel to proceedings, and this was when I first began to wonder if the locations might be the settings of the story long abandoned, with the large, bright, barn-like room through which Callow walks here perhaps being the abandoned school.

There’s a lovely little bit in the Fezziwig scene where Callow does line about “her brother’s particular friend, the milkman,” with a sort of implied raised eyebrow which could be indicating any one of a number of different things about what’s going on there!

Argh!

Present:

There’s a very nice use of shadow at the start of this section to have Callow as Scrooge turn and look at his enlarged shadow on the wall, representing the spirit. We get the usual trip to the Cratchits’ and to Fred’s part, both rendered very well and faithfully, although nothing of the other bits and pieces from this section in the original story.

Yet to Come:

The text about the body seems quite different here – I haven’t read Dickens’s performance version, so I don’t know if these were changes he made, or ones made for this production. The Cratchit scene is different here, too, with Bob coming down from upstairs with Tim’s body rather than in from having been to visit the site of the boy’s grave, although he does discuss it as usual.

What’s To-Day:

We get a precise time for how long the boy took to come back from the poulterer’s – four minutes and twenty-seven seconds! We also get an exact street address for Bob over in Camden Town.

Review:

This version is based on Dickens’s own performance version of the Carol, which was obviously abridged but was also tweaked and subtly changed in various places, evidently right up until the end of the author’s life – he could evidently never quite resist tinkering with it. All of the main familiar scenes and characters are there, but if you’re very familiar with the original 1843 book you’ll notice certain chunks of text shortened or missing, or some moments different to how they were before.

The only part of the story where any of this really pulled me up short, however, was in the Marley section, which as I mentioned above did seem to have been cut rather to the bone. Or should that be to the chain…? But aside from that, this is a full-blooded version of the story, with Callow giving it gusto without ever going over-the-top. There is a danger with these sorts of one-man shows that they can veer into being unintentionally comic, but the only place I found I had a laugh that wasn’t meant was with Callow’s cry of ‘Belle!’ at the end of the Christmas past section. This put me in mind of no less a character than The Fast Show’s Rowley Birkin and his meandering, only semi-intelligible monologues – but for there to be only one such moment in a production of this nature is probably quite a good thing!

One element which did, however, feel slightly less successful than everything else was the sound design. I like the idea of having sounds and elements from various parts of the story coming in under and around Callow’s voice at various points, but at times I felt this was rather overdone and could have been used more sparingly and subtly. I wonder if they got over-excited about the idea of it being broadcast in binaural stereo for those with the relevant equipment, and decided – or were told – to add as much in for such viewers / listeners as possible.

In a nutshell:

A one-man performance won’t be to everyone’s taste, of course. But if it’s the sort of thing you think you might enjoy, I highly recommend this – a wonderful, comfort-viewing telling of the Carol to luxuriate in at Christmas time.

Links:

BBC

IMDb