Blackadder's Christmas Carol

Title:

Blackadder’s Christmas Carol

Format:

Multi-camera video television sitcom

Country:

UK

Production company:

BBC Television

Year:

1988 (first broadcast on BBC One on December 23^rd that year)

Length:

43 minutes

Setting:

Victorian England (mostly!)

Background:

The Blackadder series was one of the best-known and most popular sitcoms on British television in the 1980s, and at the time this special one-off episode was made it was pretty much at the height of its powers. After an initial series in 1983 which has something of a mixed reputation, it really took off into the pop culture stratosphere in the UK with its second and third series, in 1986 and 87.

Each series of Blackadder is set in a different time period, with the eponymous anti-hero Edmund Blackadder being depicted as a different generation’s member of the same family, accompanied by a cast of supporting characters some of whom continue through various incarnations, others of whom are more heavily connected to one or two particular versions.

The genesis of Blackadder’s Christmas Carol came from the show’s co-writer, Ben Elton, having tried to write a couple of episodes of a Victorian version of Blackadder to follow the Elizabethan and Regency incarnations of the second and third series. While this never amounted to a full series – when the fourth run turned up in 1989, it was set during the First World War – the idea of a Victorian setting was adapted into this one-off.

British television has a great tradition of popular shows producing one-off Christmas specials for broadcast over the festive period, as Christmas has traditionally been a prestigious time of year for a show to be transmitted, with very high viewing figures as families gather around to watch. While this Blackadder special didn’t go out on the day itself, over the next twenty years it would get several outings on the BBC’s main channels, BBC One and BBC Two, becoming almost certainly BBC Television’s best-known version of the story – and possibly the best-known of all UK television adaptations of the Carol.

Rowan Atkinson as Ebenezer Blackadder.

Cast and crew:

As with all of Blackadder bar for the first series, the script was a collaboration between Richard Curtis and Ben Elton. Elton was very well-known as a stand-up comic and TV presenter in Britain at the time, and subsequently became a successful novelist, while Curtis would later find more worldwide fame as a feature film screenwriter and director, with Four Weddings and a Funeral being perhaps the best-known of his cinema screenwriting credits.

Director Richard Boden would go on to a raft of UK studio sitcom credits over the next thirty years, including the widely acclaimed Blackadder Goes Forth in 1989. He also directed the comedy A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong in 2017, set behind-the-scenes at a fictional BBC adaptation of the story. Producer John Lloyd has a similarly stellar reputation in TV comedy to the other talent involved, having been responsible for hits such as Spitting Image and QI.

The cast features most of the Blackadder regulars, many of them household names in Britain in their own right. Rowan Atkinson is probably at least as well-remembered in his home country for his lead role as Edmund (here ‘Ebenezer’) Blackadder as he is for Mr Bean, although the latter character has brought him more worldwide recognition. Tony Robinson is one again Blackadder’s inept sidekick Baldrick (here performing the closest equivalent of the Cratchit role), probably best known for this part but also a familiar face from his many years in the 1990s and 2000s presenting the Channel 4 archaeology series Time Team and as the Sheriff of Nottingham in his own children’s creation, Maid Marion and Her Merry Men from 1989 to 1994.

Stephen Fry returns as his Blackadder II character Lord Melchet – Fry had already become hugely successful at this point writing the book for the new version of the musical Me and My Girl and would become increasingly well known both in the UK and abroad as an actor, writer, campaigner, presenter and all-round Renaissance Man. His comedy partner Hugh Laurie also returns as the Prince Regent from Blackadder the Third – in the 2000s Laurie became a famous face on American television as the star of the medical drama House.

Miranda Richardson reprises her role as the Queen from Blackadder II, as does Patsy Byrne as her constant companion Nursey, although the other regular from that series and the first, Tim McInnerny is absent as he had been for most of Blackadder the Third (he would return the following year for Goes Forth). Fry, Laurie, Richardson and Byrne all also appear here only in insert scenes of the visions, rather than in the main Victorian-set body of the story.

Well-known faces also abound in the guest cast – Robbie Coltrane, who’d previously made guest appearances in the show, gets bearded up more than a decade before he started playing Hagrid in the Harry Potter films. Fellow future Harry Potter performer Miriam Margolyes makes for a memorable Queen Victoria, and future Academy Award winner Jim Broadbent is her absent-minded, comedy German husband, Prince Albert. Doctor Who fans will recognise Nicola Bryant, who until a couple of years beforehand had been playing the Doctor’s companion Peri, as Blackadder’s irritating goddaughter.

Guest stars Jim Broadbent an Miriam Margolyes.

Underdone Potato:

The opening section is the longest, as it sets up the principal gag of the whole thing – that, contrary to what the audience would expect from a member of this family, moustache shop owner Ebenezer Blackadder is in fact “the nicest man in England,” and generous to a fault. A succession of visitors on Christmas Eve take advantage of his generosity and kindness, showing he’s regarded as a soft touch in the neighbourhood, the most relevant to the Carol being “Mrs Scratchit”, played by Pauline Melville, who pleads for assistance with her son “Tiny Tom” – who, as Blackadder points out, is actually some fifteen stone.

Meanwhile, at Buckingham Palace, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert prepare for their “annual Christmas adventure,” going out to reward a philanthropic member of society with a gift of fabulous wealth.

Past:

With all his Christmas money and goods taken from him, Blackadder retires to bed, where he is disturbed by the “Spirit of Christmas”. In some other version of the Carol it’s Marley who stands in for all of the other Spirits and shows Scrooge all of his visions. On this occasion there is only one spirit, but with no Marley equivalent Coltrane’s character is clearly based on the traditional depiction of the Ghost of Christmas Past.

The Spirit has just popped in to congratulate Blackadder on being so good, but on being asked how he gets people to reform mentions that he sometimes shows them visions of their ancestors. Mentioning that this would take some time with Blackadder’s, he allows him a little look back, and we are treated to extra, newly-shot scenes featuring most of the main casts of the second and third Blackadder series. Which does make me wonder – the costumes and wigs were presumably the BBC's own stock or hired back in, but did they have to rebuild the sets from scratch...?

Unfortunately, this has something of the opposite effect to what was intended, with Blackadder beginning to realise that there is “something to be made out of being bad.”

Present:

This is a fairly loose and inexact parody of the Carol, and as such there isn’t actually a “present” section in the visions, probably because all of the current set-up has been dealt with in the opening section. It might have been useful for Blackadder if there had been, however, as then he might have had the opportunity to see what the Queen and Prince Albert had in store for him!

Robbie Coltrane as "The Spirit of Christmas".

Yet to Come:

Blackadder asks to see what the future would be like for his family if he were to turn bad, which the Spirit reluctantly shows him, and then contrasts this with what would happen if he stayed good – a vision the Spirit refuses to show, but which Blackadder is able to summon forth by copying his wibbly hand movement.

This section contains two different, brief versions of the same scene, a parody of the worst excesses of over-the-top gobbledegook science-fiction dialogue. One in which this future version of Blackadder ends up as supreme ruler of the universe, and the other in which he’s left with nothing more than Baldrick’s posing pouch. You can guess which version the Victorian incarnation finds the most appealing, and despite his insincere promises to the Spirt of Christmas, his conversion into bad guy seems to be complete – as he tells the Spirit, “bad guys have all the fun!”

What’s To-Day:

There is a boy at the window, but unfortunately for the boy it’s up on the first floor and he is shoved back onto the pavement by the newly-bad Blackadder, who sets about wreaking revenge on all of those who ransacked him on Christmas Eve, much to the dismay of his servant Baldrick who wishes he would become kind again instead of repeatedly punching him.

Blackadder ends up a considerable amount of money to the good and with a slap-up Christmas dinner, but unfortunately also sees off the Queen and Prince Albert in disguise, thus missing out on the reward they had come to bestow upon him – something Baldrick casually reveals at the very end.

So he was nice, but lost everything he had for Christmas… and then was bad, but got it back and more… but then lost out on even more… But what was only material wealth, so would it have made the good Blackadder happy? Is there a lesson here at all? Well, probably not!

Review:

This seems such an obvious idea for a parody version to do that it’s amazing it hasn’t been done more often – someone who is good and kind is transformed by his Christmas visitations into being a selfish git. But like so many good and clever ideas, perhaps, it only seems obvious in retrospect – and it’s certainly true that such an idea does work much better with an established antihero like Blackadder than it would do for a one-off version, especially with the existing past versions to look back on.

It could also be suggested, perhaps, that the opening scenes showing the good Blackadder being taken advantage of show us what might have befallen poor old Scrooge after his night with the Spirits, with all and sundry now seeking to exploit his generosity.

Whatever the case, there are plenty of good jokes along the way and much to delight even the most casual fan of the Blackadder series. Yes, some of the jokes might be a bit obvious – the “Humbug” one, for example – but you’ll be laughing as well as groaning along. If you’re also a fan of the Carol as well, then this is a perfect Christmas treat.

In a nutshell:

It probably doesn’t make much sense, if any at all, if you’re not familiar with Blackadder. But if you have seen any of that series then this is highly recommended if you haven’t already caught it.

Links:

BBC website

Wikipedia

IMDb

Carol For Another Christmas

Title:

Carol For Another Christmas

Format:

Black-and-white filmed television movie

Country:

USA

Production company:

Telsun Foundation

Year:

1964 (first broadcast on the ABC network in the USA on December 28^th that year)

Length:

84 minutes

Setting:

Not made absolutely explicit, but appears to be pretty solidly the contemporary United States, around the time of first broadcast.

Background:

The ‘Telsun Foundation’ wasn’t some independent production company which had taken the idea for a new adaptation of A Christmas Carol to the American television networks. It was actually a sort of propaganda arm of the United Nations, with the idea being they would make a series of television movies which would help promote the idea of the UN to the American public through the medium of television – and in this particular case, deliver a lesson about the evils of nuclear war at the same time.

The film's Ebenezer Scrooge equivalent - Daniel Grudge, played by Sterling Hayden.

Cast and crew:

Given the background – and probably not harmed by a huge cash injection from the Xerox company which helped bankroll both this production and the others in the series – several stars were attracted, although not all of them were big at this point. Britt Ekland and Peter Sellers (who were marred at the time) as original characters in the ‘Yet to Come’ section, and Robert Shaw as that section’s ghost himself, are the names which probably jump out most readily from the cast list to modern eyes.

Behind-the-scenes, Rod Serling’s name on script-writing duties is probably the one which stands out – in 1964, he would have been just after the success of The Twilight Zone, which finished its original run that year. Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz was also no slouch, however, having twice won the Academy Award for Best Director. He’d also been the producer of an earlier adaptation of the Carol, the 1938 MGM feature film version, which while no classic is undoubtedly much better than what he served up here.

With Henry Mancini on musical duties this was clearly a powerfully-assembled team. Just a shame it all went to waste on such a disappointing production…

Underdone Potato:

The first section isn’t bad, by any means, but gives a warning of what’s to come. That’s not just for our Dickens equivalent, one Daniel Grudge – played by Sterling Hayden – but for the viewer as well. It’s all just so very slow. Most of the action is carried by very long exchanges between Grudge and his visiting Nephew Fred, who’s rather more hard-bitten and less jolly than in most other versions.

There are little hints and gesture towards other part of the story – Grudge’s manservant, Charles, is the closest we get to any kind of Bob Cratchit, and while Marley is present in the form of Grudge’s dead son (lost to an unnamed military conflict), he never speaks and is only glimpsed very briefly. There is no warning for Grudge about what is to come, he pretty much just steps into the past section and that’s it – taking it all in without a great deal of surprise, it has to be said.

Steve Lawrence as the Ghost of Christmas Past.

Past:

This is probably the best of the sections, with Steve Lawrence giving an enjoyable performance as a world-weary, ‘New Yoik’ style American soldier on a sort of ‘barge of the dead’ carrying bodies from the various conflicts of history.

Like all of the sections, however, the problem is that the hectoring and the lecturing of the script goes on for a very long time indeed. Grudge is taken back to a scene from his own life, visiting Hiroshima just after the end of the Second World War, and showing the injured schoolgirls there is very effective.

The problem is, however – and I appreciate that this isn’t unique to this adaptation – that Hayden in no way looks twenty years younger during this part. It also turns out to be the last and indeed only bit of his own personal story with which he interacts during the whole thing.

Present:

The dullest of the three sections. Serling takes what’s a poignant moment in the original – the hungry and poor out on the cold streets – and uses it as the only element in this section. While Pat Hingle as the ghost does have elements of the literary source, he has none of the joie de vivre, presumably because this is supposed to be a ‘gritty’ and ‘realistic’ interpretation of the story.

Yet to Come:

Definitely the strangest part of the whole thing. Grudge is whisked off to his local town hall in a post-apocalyptic landscape, which isn’t a bad idea when the whole production is meant to be warning about the dangers of nuclear war. But the group of people he sees there – a very weird, ultra-isolationist death cult led by a manic Peter Sellers – offer the viewer nothing but a bewildering and off-putting scene of grim, surreal depression.

The Cratchit equivalent, Charles, puts in an appearance as perhaps the past sane man on Earth, but is shot dead by a small child – whose mother is played by Britt Ekland – in what might be some sort of this-is-how-Tiny-Tim-turns-out-in-this-world message, or may not.

The ghost in this section is played by Robert Shaw, and isn’t all that different in terms of character to the previous spirit. He speaks and interacts with Grudge in a way totally divorced from the manner in which the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is usually depicted, even in satirical and comedy versions of the tale.

Peter Sellers, in bizarre form.

What’s To-Day:

There’s no great change in Grudge when he returns from his time among the spirits. He perhaps seems very slightly nicer, and goes and drinks his Christmas morning coffee in the kitchen with Charles and his wife. That’s about it.

Review:

There are two main problems with Carol for Another Christmas, I think. The first is in terms of characterisation – Grudge may be gruff, cynical and an isolationist, but he is nowhere near as bad a person as the traditional Ebenezer Scrooge. And Serling gives him actually pretty solid motivations for being the way he is – he wants to keep America out of the world’s conflicts because he has seen first-hand the horrors of war, and lost his own son to them. Unlike Scrooge, you may not like Grudge’s world view, but you can at least understand it. And Grudge is never really particularly personally unpleasant to anybody, also unlike Scrooge.

The main problem, however, is just how dull the whole thing is. One of the strengths of the Carol is its pace and zip, so it seems almost criminal to throw all of that away for the many, many, many tedious scenes of lecturing which we get here. It all feels so sluggish and pedestrian. Making the Carol a parable of anti-nuclear war sentiment, especially at the height of 1960s Cold War paranoia only a couple of years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, is an admirable idea. The tale is, after all, often adapted to suit the times in which any new version is being made.

But this production is very, very clearly from the PR arm of the United Nations, and as such it comes very close to self-parody at times, lurching towards The Simpsons skewering the educational film format with its “You wanted to live in a world without zinc, Jimmy!”

Serling also has to take much of the blame here, with his plodding script. He’d won great acclaim with his live TV dramas in the 1950s, and at times this is very much what that feels like – a multi-camera production performed more in the manner of a stage play. Being limited to a studio is no sin, of course, and some of the greatest television dramas ever made have been in that format. Despite having the advantage of being shot on film, however, and all the pace an energy and sheen that ought to be able to give them, this never has any spark of life to it at all.

In a nutshell:

Perhaps of interest to students of Cold War paranoia or the history of how the UN has tried to publicise its work. For everyone else – best avoided. Given the talent involved, a huge disappointment.

Links:

Wikipedia

IMDb

A Christmas Carol - 1971, television

Title:
A Christmas Carol

Format:
Animated television special

Country:
US / UK – the funding was American, but it was made in the UK

Production company:
Richard Williams Productions, for ABC

Year:
1971 (first broadcast on ABC on December 21st that year)

Length:
25 minutes

Setting:
Victorian London, and we are explicitly told at the start that it’s 1843 – the same Christmas that the original book was first published.

Background:
Made for the ABC television network in the United States as a one-off animated special, it was later given a cinema release, and actually won the Academy Award for “Short Subjects (Animated Films)” at the Oscars of May 1973. This apparently went down like a cup of cold sick with many in the film industry – given that it was originally made for television, and not for the big screen – and so the rules were later changed so that no production which had its debut on television rather than in cinemas could be eligible.

It remains the only adaptation of A Christmas Carol ever to have won an Oscar, of any sort.

A roll of the eyes for Nephew Fred's foolishness!

Cast and crew:
There was clearly inspiration taken here from the 1951 live-action feature version of the tale, as that film’s Scrooge and Marley – Alastair Sim and Michael Horden – also take the same roles here. Michael Redgrave was enlisted to give suitable gravitas to the narration, while fans of British comedy of the 20th century will note the presence of Melvyn Hayes and Joan Sims as Mr and Mrs Cratchit.

Fans of British television science-fiction, such as myself, will also spot Paul Whitsun-Jones, who played the journalist James Fullalove in the original version of The Quatermass Experiment for the BBC in 1953, among the voice cast. Tiny Tim is performed by Alexander Williams, the son of director Richard Williams.

Williams was born and raised in Canada, but moved to Britain in the 1950s, where he produced most of his work. Perhaps his most internationally-recognised production role was as animation supervisor on the 1988 live action / animation mix Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Distinguished Warner Brothers animator Chuck Jones also worked with Williams on the film, while Ken Harris is credited as “Master Animator”, while oddly but rather nicely all the other animators receive the credit “Craftsmen”. Although this does indicate, as a sad sign of the times back then, that no women were involved in this aspect of the production.

Doctor Who fans will recognise the name of Tristram Cary, who had worked with Williams before, as the man behind the music for the production.

Underdone Potato:
Perhaps unusually given that this version starts with a narrated introduction, it doesn’t begin with the “Marley was dead…” line which opens the book, which seems rather remiss of it.

It’s a condensed version of the tale, of course, perhaps most obviously demonstrated when Scrooge tells the two charity gentlemen that “You’re going to tell me…” about many people preferring to die rather than go to the workhouses and the prisons, rather than the men telling him that themselves. But for all that, there are lots of nice little touches on display, such as Scrooge’s eye-rolling at what he perceives to be the idiocy of all around him.

When Scrooge gets back to his house, there’s a very striking sequence that you could at first almost mistake for being a draft version left in the finished edit by mistake, where as Scrooge carries his candle upstairs the whole thing reduces to a monochrome-looking pencil affair. This isn’t intended as a criticism – as I say, it’s very striking and memorable, and certainly distinctive. It also effectively conveys in animated form the unfriendly and sparse nature of Scrooge’s set of rooms as described in the original book.

Marley retains his religious line about the star which led the “wise men to a poor abode,” which often falls by the wayside in other more expansive adaptations, so much so that on viewing another version I had forgotten it was in the book and thought it was added in by the adaptation. The helpless spirits trying to help those in need outside of Scrooge’s window are also present.

An example of the striking pencil-like animation work present at times

Past:
The Spirit here is androgynous, as in the text, something achieved by using an intriguing but also slightly settling technique of it being almost literally two-faced, with most male and female aspects. It’s voiced by Diana Quick, another name that will strike a chord with certain Doctor Who fans for her later animation voiceover in the would-be-Who revival Scream of the Shalka in 2003.

The flashback to the past is achieved with an effect that might need a warning to the epileptic on it these days. In what’s something of a recurring theme, despite being a short version of the story Williams again includes something often omitted from longer versions – in this case, the young Scrooge’s love of fantastical literature, which isn’t explicitly talked about but shown almost in “thought bubble” form as he sits alone in the school.

When Scrooge becomes a little melancholy at the sight of Fezziwig’s party, there’s a nice visual flashback to his own poor clerk, Bob Cratchit. And in another nice animated touch, at the scene of his parting with Belle we get the same irritated rolling of the eyes we saw earlier in the older Scrooge, showing that he is now set on that path and not the man she fell in love with.

A two-faced Spirit!

Present:
The Spirit here is much as usually described and seen. He tips his Christmas spirit onto passers-by to improve their mood, again something not necessarily always included, and we are also treated to some of the rarer visitations he and Scrooge make during the course of the book. We see the miners marking Christmas, and also in a lighthouse and on a ship at sea in a storm.

These sea-going sequences, with the Spirit and Scrooge flying over them, put me a little in mind of the flying sequence from the famed 1982 animation of Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman. Although I can’t say for sure, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they were at least partly an inspiration for the animators of that production, whether consciously or otherwise.

You’d think that, given this is an animated version and thus likely to appeal to children, Ignorance and Want might be omitted here, but Williams pleasingly makes no effort to pull the tale’s teeth, and they are in place at the end of the sequence.

Yet to Come:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come slides up in an almost liquid manner, and is suitably unsettling. Although it’s a brief encounter, Williams again manages to squeeze quite a lot into it, and there are some very effective scene changes which might almost be attempts at Scrooge’s subjective point of view as we melt between one vision and the next.

It’s intriguing that the spirit’s hand – here a sort of cross between thinly-skinned and actually skeletal, and again looking almost like monochrome pencil work – falters a little in its pointing at the grave as Scrooge beseeches and pleads with it.

What’s To-Day:
Unusually, the boy outside the window isn’t sent to the poulterer’s to go and fetch a turkey for the Cratchit family. When Scrooge encounters the two charitable gentlemen again, he actually doesn’t – there is only one of them present as he happens to walk by in the street, which I suppose is a bit more realistic an encounter.

It all ends as with the book, with Scrooge surprising Cratchit in the office the next day, rather than going to the Cratchit household as in many other versions.

Michael Redgrave provides the closing narration, which as usual is sourced from the book’s final paragraph. In an odd choice of performance and direction, however, he rather throws away the “who did not die,” aside about Tiny Tim. I know it’s an odd line anyway, as of course Tim, like everyone, will have died eventually, but there is usually at least some emphasis given to the “not” bit, almost like a sort of pantomime delivery for the reassurance of the audience.

"We're walking in the air..."

Review:
I was pleasantly surprised when I watched this again, having seen it once before many years ago on television when I was a child. I didn’t retain any strong memories of it from that viewing – which was unusual, as the other versions of the Carol I saw when I was young all made very strong impressions upon me indeed.

I say I was pleasantly surprised because this is an excellent adaptation of the tale. Despite its short length, Williams manages to balance the story quite well, and it never feels too rushed, unlike the longer BBC live-action version from a few years later. The animation is also excellent, much more accomplished and distinctive than some of the cheap-and-cheerful rubbish of some of the feature-length animated efforts that were to follow. It is also notable for making a conscious effort to try and evoke the original John Leech illustrations for the story in places, perhaps most notably in the depiction of Bob Cratchit.

Whisper is quietly, but from a personal perspective I’d also say this is the best version of the Carol to star Alastair Sim in the lead role…

In a nutshell:
A very good effort, and certainly the best animated version of the story. Its short length and general adherence to the book would make it a very good adaptation for teachers to use in the classroom if they wanted to introduce children to the tale and still have time in a lesson to discuss it with them afterwards.

Links:
Wikipedia 
IMDb

A Christmas Carol - 1938, film

 Title:
A Christmas Carol

Format:
Black-and-white feature film

Country:
USA

Production company:
MGM

Year:
1938

Length:
69 minutes

Setting:
London, but oddly, earlier than the book – the opening caption declares that the events take place “More than a century ago,” which given that it was released in 1938 and the book came out in 1843 places it prior to when Dickens wrote it. “More than a century” could still (just about) make it Victorian, technically, so I’m placing it in the “Victorian” category on the blog rather than create a new category for Georgian or whatever William’s reign counts as!

It would help, of course, if the Ghost of Christmas Present’s line about his brothers was as specific as it is in some adaptations, but similarly to the book he just gives a general “some 1800” when numbering them.

Background:
This is, as far as I can tell, the first American production of the Carol to be made with sound, and following three years after the 1935 British version is the second major ‘talkie’ adaptation of the tale. As I understand it, it continued for some years through the middle of the 20th century to be the most familiar adaptation of the story, certainly to American viewers at least, with something of an afterlife on television in that country as an annual tradition on some local stations.

MGM were, and remained for decades afterwards, one of the biggest film companies in the English-speaking world. Although they had at this point in the late 1930s begun setting up a production arm in the UK, this film was made in the United States. A colourised version was created in the late 1980s, but as with many of these versions now appears to be much harder to find than the original black and white version, which is probably no bad thing.

It's not as obvious in a screen grab, but Leo G. Carroll really does look very like John Le Mesurier, also a Marley nearly 40 years later, at times.

Cast and crew:
Reginald Owen as Scrooge was a British actor who had been living in the States for almost twenty years by this point; he has a decent enough stab at the part, although you do get the sense at times that his accent has undergone a fair amount of Americanisation. He was not the first choice for the role; the film was supposed to star American actor Lionel Barrymore, who had become associated with the character in an annual radio adaptation in the States. Arthritis meant that Barrymore had to back out of the project; he would later get the opportunity to appear in a rather better-remembered Christmas film when he played Mr Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life.

Speaking of the accents, they do on the whole stay British, but there are a few exceptions where they are out-and-out American, such as the character of Bess, while John O’Day as Peter Cratchit goes what we would now regard as full-on Dick Van Dyke. Oddly, a singing choir in a street scene early on sounds very distinctively American, too.

Canadian actor Gene Lockhart makes for a rather rotund-looking Cratchit, appearing alongside his real-life wife, Kathleen, and daughter June as fellow members of the Cratchit family. Ann Rutherford as the Ghost of Christmas Past later appeared as Scarlett O’Hara’s sister in Gone With the Wind, and one of the Bennett sisters in the 1940 MGM version of Pride and Prejudice.

Two faces probably stand out the most to the more casual fan of vintage film and television. Leo G. Carroll, who plays Marley – looking uncannily like John Le Mesurier, who takes the same role in the 1977 BBC version – played Mr Waverley in The Man from UNCLE in the 1960s, and Tiny Tim actor Terry Kilburn is probably most recognisable from another juvenile role in a much bigger MGM success the year after A Christmas Carol – he played young Colley in Goodbye, Mr Chips. He is, at time of writing on December 1st 2016, also still alive and last month celebrated his 90th birthday. Happy birthday, Mr Kilburn!

Thanks to the joys of the internet, I can pass on the pleasingly random fact that Cliff Severn, in the minor role of the boy Scrooge sends to the poulterer at the end, later went on to play for the US national cricket team.

Edwin L. Marin, who directed the film, seems to have had quite a long and prolific career behind the camera, but without ever helming anything really of the first rank. Hugo Butler, a Canadian, provided the screenplay, and is probably most notable for having fallen victim to the infamous Hollywood blacklist of the 1950s. Producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz went on to have a higher-profile career as a director, including winning the Oscar for best director twice, in 1949 and 1950, and in 1964 helming a US television adaptation of the Carol written by Rod Serling, called Carol for Another Christmas.

Underdone Potato:
For its first few minutes, this seems like a completely different take on the Carol – telling the story through Fred’s eyes. He’s the main character in the opening scenes, as he makes his way to Scrooge’s office, bumping into Peter and Tim Cratchit, and it’s he rather than Bob who has a go at sliding on the ice in the street.

This might be an interesting – although difficult to pull off, given he’s not party to any of the main action! – take on the story, but once Fred has got to the office and passed some booze on to Bob, the story falls back onto more traditional lines for a while. We get the familiar arguments between Scrooge and Fred, as well as the two charitable gentlemen – given names in this version, Trill and Rummidge – and Scrooge and Bob’s conversation at the end of the day.

Things then go rather off the rails, as Bob celebrates leaving the office for Christmas by joining a group of boys throwing snowballs at people. He ends up knocking Scrooge’s hat off, and is immediately dismissed. Seemingly thinking “to hell with it!” Bob goes on a festive splurge, buying various Christmas goodies, including a goose for the family dinner that seems a pretty reasonable size, and rather undermines one of the most famous moments of the story later on.

As for Scrooge, his evening is much as usual except that he interrupts Marley’s visit to call the watch, who come into his house only to find, of course, nothing there. Jacob resumes his lecture, and sends Ebenezer to bed with his usual warning.

Past:
No androgynous spirit for this version – Past is very definitely female here, and saddled with a rather ridiculous-looking hat with a star on the top as well, as if she’s some sort of walking Christmas tree decoration.

There’s an interesting little touch of Dick Wilkins being a schoolboy friend of Scrooge’s before they are apprenticed together at Fezziwig’s. There’s also a nice invented scene of Scrooge claiming to another schoolfriend, Jack, that he’s glad to be staying at school for the festive season, and that the extra “swotting” (not sure that’s of the era!) will be good for him, when he’s clearly putting on a front and doesn’t really believe that.

When we’re onto Fezziwig’s, it’s a bit of skimping on the scale. There’s no party, just old Fezziwig giving Ebenezer and Dick a gold sovereign each, and telling them to join him and his family for Christmas Dinner tomorrow.

The Spirit then brings things to a close with a sort of precis of things we’re not shown – saying she hasn’t yet shown him his “black years” and his “gradual enslavement to greed.” But that’s all we get that hints at the Belle scene – there is no sign of her, and Scrooge extinguishes the Spirit before she can expand on these edited highlights.

Not exactly the most androgynous Ghost of Christmas Past ever seen on film...

Present:
Very much the traditional Spirit here, and quite well-played by Lionel Braham. This sequence touches on some aspect of the book not always carried over to adaptations – the Spirit’s spreading of Christmas cheer to those he and Scrooge pass by, and the fact that the Cratchits and those like them would have taken their Christmas meat to be cooked at the local bakery rather than having an oven in which to cook it themselves.

We then shift to a new scene, which if you’re being charitable you can say is hinted at in the original, of a church service. I say hinted at as Bob mentions being at one, it’s where he’s been with Tim, and we see them in church – at the very same service at Nephew Fred and his fiancée. That’s right, fiancée; he’s not married in this version, being too poor to afford to get married, which becomes relevant later.

It’s almost as if the filmmakers have given up here, lazily sitting around while the congregation gets deep into verses of O Come all Ye Faithful that your average person in the street wouldn’t recognise. Bess, Fred’s fiancée, doesn’t even attempt an English accent, and there’s a bit of ‘comedy’ business with an ice-sliding vicar which you’ll see coming a mile off.

We then spend a lot of time with the Cratchits and their frankly perfectly good Christmas goose, before Mrs Cratchit, and not Bob, proposes the toast to Scrooge, and Ghost of Christmas Present (or rather, scriptwriter Butler) manages to mess up the “surplus population” line by omitting the surplus.

Scrooge seems fully done by this point, declaring that he loves Christmas, and even though the film is not even an hour old they still feel the need to stick in a sort of recap of Scrooge’s visions so far, just to hammer home the point.

No Ignorance and Want, of course.

Yet to Come:
A traditional depiction of the third Spirit, on the whole, although he comes marching in like a monk on a mission, rather than sort of drifting with his stride invisible under his robe as he does in many other versions. His hand and arm, when raising to point or gesture, are also visibly human here, rather than either kept hidden by the arm of his robe or given a more skeletal appearance, as is often the case.

We see the vision of Scrooge’s death being discussed by his fellow businessmen, but none of the Old Joe section.

What’s To-Day:
When Scrooge sends for the goose, which he then takes to the Cratchits’ house in person, the bird is oddly no bigger than the one Bob had already purchased for the family the day before, which rather undermines the whole thing. As does the fact that it’s been established in the film they can’t cook the thing at their own home anyway.

As seems to be a depressingly common theme in many adaptations of the tale, they decide here to have Scrooge solve all of Fred’s problems with money, in this case making him a partner in Scrooge & Marley so that he can now afford to marry his fiancée. Once again, I can’t help but feel as if they’re rather missing the point.

An interesting note for fans of the 1970 musical version starring Albert Finney is that the present Scrooge gives to Tim here is a toy carousel. The same gift is given in the musical; possibly a coincidence, but perhaps a deliberate nod to this version, or maybe even an unconscious influence.

Review:
This is, in some ways, an odd version of the story. Given its compact length of 69 minutes, quite a bit is cut – which is perhaps understandable. But what’s less understandable is why, having done that, they then choose to squander so much time on scenes of their own creation, particularly all the business with Fred at the beginning, or on sections such as the Cratchits’ Christmas, which while important seem to unduly dominate the running time.

It must be said, however, that the production standards are very good for the era, with several large and detailed sets – Scrooge’s chambers being particularly good in this regard, if perhaps a touch overlit – and even a rare luxury for Carol adaptations up to this point, actual outdoor scenes. They may only be on backlots, but they do add an extra, expanded quality sometimes lacking in the smaller sets of previous versions.

The modelwork and effects are also good, with Marley’s ghost being excellently-executed, and the sweeping vistas flown over by Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Past also very effective, if somewhat unintentionally evocative of Superman carrying Lois Lane as he flies for a modern viewer!

"Is it a bird? Is it a plane...?"

In a nutshell:
This is sadly another example of taking a great story and somehow managing to suck most of the charm from it. Well-produced, but poorly-written and with uneven performances. Missable.

Links:
Wikipedia
IMDb

Dickensian

I won’t be adding a full-blown review of Dickensian here, because it doesn’t really count as an adaptation of A Christmas Carol – it merely uses some of the characters from the Carol in a story of its own. I also didn’t see the whole thing – I watched the first five of its 20 episodes when they were broadcast over the Christmas and New Year period, but I am afraid I rather lost track of it after that, and lacked the time or the will to catch up with it on the iPlayer.

That’s a shame, as what I saw was by no means awful, and it is quite a fun idea. For anyone who’s not aware of what Tony Jordan and company have done, they’ve taken a large group of some of Charles Dickens’s best known characters from his most famous works, set them all down in the same part of London at the same time, and fashioned a story which weaves them in and out of one another’s lives.

As the final episode was broadcast on BBC One yesterday – for which I did dip back into the programme, out of curiosity – I thought it was worth recording at least a few thoughts on the drama, especially as it was the first time we’d seen Scrooge, Marley and Bob Cratchit on screen in a brand new original BBC drama for the first time in nearly forty years.

In common with the vast majority of the stories Jordan has taken elements from for Dickensian, the series acts as a sort of prequel to A Christmas Carol, with Marley alive and well and Scrooge’s partner at the outset of proceedings. Not for long, however – Marley is soon killed off, instigating a murder-mystery plot investigated by Bleak House’s Inspector Bucket which is the driving engine for much of the plot of the series.

Peter Firth as Jacob Marley, in life... for a little while!

While it’s true to say that it’s never explicitly stated how Marley died in the Carol, it’s also never mentioned that he was murdered, and Belle’s husband’s statement that he’s heard Marley “…lies on the point of death” only gives the tiniest amount of wiggle room if you’re very charitable and assume that he was speaking of another occasion, from which Marley subsequently recovered before his eventual death. You do have to be in a very generous mood to allow this, however, and it’s clearly not what Dickens intended.

Also, Dickensian explicitly takes place under the reign of a queen – Victoria, obviously – whereas if you assume that A Christmas Carol is set in its year of release, 1843, then Marley’s death seven years beforehand would have occurred under William IV, just before Victoria came to the throne. Tiny Tim also appears as a character in Dickensian, at about the age he should be in the Carol, so the timeline has clearly been squeezed up a bit – and it’s hard to imagine the cheerful Bob Cratchit seen here standing another seven years of employment under the deeply unpleasant Scrooge.

For make no mistake, Ned Dennehy is a hugely unlikeable Scrooge, played as such a realistically mean, miserable and unfriendly character that it’s actually quite hard to imagine him ever undergoing the redemption for which the character is destined. He’s almost too hard for Scrooge, somehow, as paradoxical as that sounds. Peter Firth as Marley is a similarly unsympathetic character, and to be honest as good as Dennehy and Firth are, it’s only Robert Wilfort as Cratchit who I can really picture slipping seamlessly into a genuine adaptation of the Carol.

Ned Dennehy as Scrooge - extremely unpleasant!

I did like the moments in the final episode where Scrooge, alone in his rooms, sees his candle flicker out and hears Marley’s voice ominously whispering his name, a little foreshadowing of what’s to come. But overall, the whole thing only made me wish that the BBC would perhaps one year have a go at doing a proper, faithful stab at the Carol. British television has never really had one – the 1977 BBC version simply isn’t up to it – and surely for one of the greatest pieces of literature ever written in this country, our greatest broadcaster ought to have given it at least one prestige outing on the small screen…?

There is evidently some talk of a second series for Dickensian, from Tony Jordan at least, which surprised me as it seemed to be set-up very much as a self-contained, one-off serial. I’m also not sure there’d necessarily be the will there, given how its viewing figures have decreased during the run, and it’s suffered being shunted hither and thither about the schedules. The final episode went out at 6.25pm on a Sunday evening, for goodness sake – hardly a prime slot.

But if it was a failure in ratings terms, it was at least an interesting one, and a worthy attempt to do something a little different with a costume drama and a literary adaptation. But for the purposes of this blog, at least, it goes down as an interesting curio rather than anything to ever threaten the best of the Carol adaptations.