Title:
A Christmas
Carol
Format:
Three-part
television drama serial, shot single-camera in high definition video
Country:
UK / USA
Production
company:
FX Productions /
Hardy, Son & Baker / Scott Free Productions, for BBC Television and the FX Network
Year:
2019 (first shown
in the US on the FX Network there all in one go on the 19
th of
December that year, and on BBC One in the UK across three nights on the 22
nd,
23
rd and 24
th of December)
Length:
3 episodes – 1 x
58 mins, 1 x 53 mins, 1 x 57 mins
Setting:
Victorian
Background:
In the 2010s,
writer
Steven Knight’s Birmingham-set period drama series
Peaky Blinders,
about a violent gang of criminal thugs, had become a cult hit in the UK and
elsewhere, its popularity even earning a promotion to the mainstream BBC One
channel in Britain. A deeply grim series, its success enabled showrunner Knight
to have his pick of projects, and in November 2017
it was announced that he had
been commissioned by the BBC for a run of adaptations of Dickens novels –
starting with
A Christmas Carol. This was the first proper BBC
television adaptation of the novel
in over forty years, and with the
Corporation’s stellar reputation both for costume drama in general – and Dickens
dramatisations in particular – much was expected.
Subsequent to the
original announcement of its commissioning, the FX cable network in the United
States came aboard as a co-production partner and indeed ended up giving the serial
its debut screening a few days ahead of the BBC transmission. I’ve therefore
included it in both the British and American categories here, although the
cast, crew and production were very much UK-based.
Cast and crew:
The production
companies involved – Hardy, Son & Baker and Scott Free – have some
considerable star power behind them, being the personal fiefdoms of actor
TomHardy and esteemed director
Ridley Scott respectively, both of whom served as
executive producers on the serial. Hardy was rumoured to be making a cameo
appearance on-screen in the production, although it seems this was just online
chatter and he does not, in fact, poke his head around the door anywhere.
Knight scripted
all three episodes, with director
Nick Murphy also handling the entire serial.
Murphy began his career in news and current affairs, before moving into
documentary-making in the late 1990s and then in the late 2000s beginning to
work on directing television drama series. He’d handled episodes of the ITV
fantasy series
Primeval and BBC Two / Netflix Bernard Cornwell
adaptation
The Last Kingdom and two feature films of his own, but
A
Christmas Carol was probably his highest-profile assignment to date.
The starring role
as Scrooge was given to
Guy Pearce, who has an esteemed body of work behind him
but in the UK was probably still at this point best-remembered as a star of the
Australian soap opera
Neighbours when it absolutely dominated British
viewing habits in the late 1980s. I was surprised to learn that Pearce was not
actually born an Australian, only moving there when he was three years old,
because I found his attempts at an English accent in this to be thoroughly
unconvincing. Perhaps part of it is psychological, because I knew – or
thought
– he was Australian, but for me he’s very much in the
Ron Haddrick line of
Australian actors who can’t master the accent when doing Scrooge.
There was some
talk about Pearce being perhaps too young for the part, but I think that’s
rather unfair. In the book, Scrooge can’t be
too terribly ancient –
even if he was a few years older than Belle, she is still young enough to have
young children the night Marley died, which can’t put Scrooge much above 60 at
the most. Pearce was 52 at the time this went out, so hardly a million miles
away – although he does admittedly look rather younger than Scrooge is
traditionally depicted, which given the nature of the rest of the production
was certainly intentional. Not necessarily to go younger, perhaps, but to go different.
Other than Pearce, probably the most familiar performer in the cast to
the casual viewer might be
Andy Serkis as the Ghost of Christmas Past.
Best-known as the actor behind many high-profile motion capture performances,
Serkis is perhaps best remembered for his first of that type of role, Gollum in
Peter Jackson’s
Lord of the Rings trilogy in the
2000s. Unusually he gets the chance to do actual real-world acting here,
although still buried under a get-up and indeed an accent which might make it
difficult to recognise him.
 |
The Ghost of Christmas Past? Or Bad Jesus...?
|
Vinette Robinson in a greatly-expanded version of the Mrs Cratchit role
is probably the most prominent performer after Pearce. Robinson had appeared in
a supporting role in the blockbuster Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss
Sherlock series, so had
form with radical reinterpretations of established classics, and had also
rightfully gained much acclaim the previous year for her guest starring role as
American civil rights activist Rosa Parkes in
a justly-lauded episode of Doctor
Who.
Most of the rest of the featured cast were faces which regular TV drama
viewers in the UK would know from major series, without perhaps knowing their
names.
Lenny Rush as Tim is perhaps the best thing in the piece, and one of the
few genuine rays of light Knight allows into the story with his cheerful but
never too saccharine demeanour. Rush had starred in the children’s series
Apple
Tree House on the BBC’s CBeebies channel for younger children, but also had
experience portraying Tim – he’d played him previously in a stage version from
another well-known British television drama writer, Jack Thorne.
Underdone Potato:
Whatever you
think of this version of the story, you cannot deny that it at least sets out
its stall straight away and lets you know exactly the sort of adaptation it is
going to be. The very first thing that happens is a young man pissing on Jacob
Marley’s gravestone and calling him a bastard. If that doesn’t let you know
that this is not your average adaptation of
A Christmas Carol, then
nothing will.
 |
Marley takes the piss!
|
The problem is
that it feels like such a departure from the norm that it almost at once
seems less like a brave experiment and more like a ridiculous parody. It’s as
if The Fast Show or That Michell and Webb Look had done a sketch
spoofing what a gritty reimagining of A Christmas Carol might look like.
About a quarter of an hour later we get a ‘fucking’ from Scrooge, too. We’re
long past the point when strong language on television has much shock value,
but it feels perhaps as if they put it in a story where it doesn’t usually
feature to try and give it some of that value – again, to show off what a
different adaptation this is. But once more it feels as if it’s into the
realms of self-parody.
It’s some
thirty-one minutes before the book starts in this version, which must surely be
a record that will never be beaten. There are entire adaptations of the whole
story, several of them, which clock in shorter than that. The preceding
half-hour is mostly taken up with two original elements; a depiction of
Marley’s struggles in the afterlife, and the simmering resentment, or perhaps
even hatred, between Scrooge and Cratchit.
The Marley
element is probably the most interesting of the production, and one that has
captured the imagination of other writers in the past. Indeed, as I write this
there is a whole Hollywood movie in the works which will apparently show how
Jacob procured this chance and hope for Scrooge. The problem with this version,
however, is that it discards that element entirely. Here, it’s not
Marley who arranged for this final chance for Scrooge. Instead, Marley is at
best at the mercy of events, and at worst entirely selfish – he is a part of
what’s happening purely because he wants to be able to get out of purgatory. It’s
another sign of the more cynical and nihilistic nature of this production,
perhaps, where the worst of everyone is seen in the worst possible terms, in a
world of unrelenting misery and pain.
The notion of
each link in Marley’s chain representing a death caused by his and Scrooge’s
business is an interesting one, and demonstrates something else about the
production. Scrooge & Marley is a much bigger and wider-ranging business
here than it’s ever hinted at being in the book, with Scrooge seemingly at the
head of some vast, multi-national investment empire. You can at least see what
Knight is doing here, changing the nature of the story to reflect criticisms he
wants to make about the age in which he was living; attacking corporations and
big business, etc.
The material
between Scrooge and Cratchit is more difficult to understand, as there seems
absolutely no reason why Scrooge wouldn’t have fired Bob for the levels of
insubordination he shows towards his employer. There’s a lot of ‘tell rather
than show’ here as well; I know such supposed ‘rules’ of writing are often
complete nonsense, but when they discuss their feelings about one another it
does feel very expository. Bob is shown to be good at his job, which is perhaps
meant to show us why Scrooge keeps him, although later events in the serial
perhaps give the idea it’s one of his strange psychological experiments.
Speaking of
Scrooge’s psychology, in this version Knight gives him a form of
obsessive-compulsive disorder; perhaps this is meant to try and help to explain
his behaviour in some way, but in this episode it almost feels as if it’s
purely there to give a reason for why he remembers the exact years of the
pennies which were placed on Marley’s eyes for his burial.
I mentioned that
it’s thirty-one minutes before we get to anything from the book, and it comes
in the form of Fred’s arrival. However, don’t expect the friendly nephew you
may be familiar with from other versions, and indeed from the book itself. This
scene is, I think, important as it indicates why Knight either has no
understanding of or no interest in the sentiment or meaning of the original
story. Instead of being a cheerful invitation, Fred’s desire for his uncle to
come round for Christmas is instead a grim ultimatum; Fred makes it clear they
will never see one another again if he does not come this year. That’s then it
for him in this version – he’s been jettisoned from the rest of the story,
never to be seen again.
 |
"We really should get someone to clean this bloody window..."
|
Also jettisoned,
presumably because it wouldn’t fit the pessimistic tone of this version, is all
of Fred’s dialogue. Indeed, even scenes which are versions of those in the book
– and there aren’t all that many of them across the three hours – have lost
almost all of Dickens’s dialogue. I appreciate it often needs changing or
updating to better suit a performed work or the understanding of a contemporary
audience, but Knight clearly wants his characters speaking in a non-Dickensian
style. Which seems odd when you’re doing a costume drama Dickens adaptation set
in its original period, but there you go.
By my reckoning
we don’t get a full-on bit of Dickens until about forty minutes in, when
Scrooge meets a man soliciting charitable donations – out on the street, rather
than in his office. We then have a few lines of the whole ‘surplus population’
exchange, but there’s not much more from the original in the first episode, all
of about half a dozen lines or so across the hour. And there isn’t a great deal
more which you could say are versions of the original lines, either – even
Marley’s arrival results in nothing much that is directly taken from what
Dickens wrote.
Past:
Andy Serkis had
already appeared in the first episode as the Ghost of Christmas Past, meeting
Marley in the afterlife and informing him of how his fate and Scrooge’s are
interlinked, but this is where his Spirit comes into its usual section. As in
some other versions he’s depicted as an aged and bearded spirit, but unlike
those other instances there’s no danger of mistaking this version for the Ghost
of Christmas Present, or Father Christmas himself. No, this version is more of an
old and decrepit Jesus.
Like Pearce,
there’s something not quite right about Serkis’s accent here – he’s definitely
putting some sort of voice on, and it feels as though he’s aiming for Irish and
not really quite getting there. If it
is Irish he’s going for that’s
interesting, as it’s the same accent Jim Carrey tried with his version of the
same spirit in the 2009 version. Serkis’s, though, is a much deeper and less ‘theme
pub’ version, even if it still doesn’t really convince.
One innovation in
this version is that the Spirit appears in different forms relating to
different memories of Scrooge’s at various points. So when the haunting begins
Scrooge sees his former pet mouse, complete with Christmas bow – which, evoking memories of
Blackadder’s Christmas Carol and its
nailing-a-puppy-to-the-wall line, Scrooge promptly throws out of the window in
a moment which is almost impossible to take seriously.
It’s not just
animals, however – when we get the visit back to Scrooge’s school days, there
is a cue taken from the book with the Spirit transforming for most of this
section into Ali Baba. Baba rarely gets a mention, much less an appearance, in
most versions – the only other one I can think of where you actually see him
being with another Aussie-accented Scrooge in
the 1982 animation. Here he takes
on a full-blown role, with
Kayvan Novak as the Spirit as Baba taking up the
majority of the school section.
And what a bleak
section it is, in keeping with the rest of the adaptation. Knight decides for
his script that Scrooge was deliberately kept at school for the Christmas
holiday in a done thing between his father and the headmaster, so that the
headmaster could sexually abuse him. Yes, we really are going that far down
into a deep, dark pit of despair. Things then swing from the depressing to the
ridiculous, as Scrooge’s sister arrives in a gun-toting rescue scene. Yes, she
actually pulls a gun on the abusive headmaster! Said sister is not called Fan
in this version but Lottie, in a piece of random renaming which seems to have neither
rhyme nor reason to it.
It’s not the only
female name which Knight doesn’t feel is right for his version, however.
Despite keeping all the male names he also decides to rename one of the other
female characters from the story – and there are few enough of them originally
– by discarding Belle’s name and changing her to Elizabeth. It’s not just her
name which is got rid of, however; her entire character is almost entirely
excised from the story. Scrooge is given a brief silent movie show of the life
he could have had with her, complete with children, and that’s it. Oddly, I
suppose it’s more of a version of the second Belle scene rather than the first,
when most adaptations tend to do the first and not the second.
Many adaptations
also put Belle at the Fezziwigs’ Christmas party, of course, but that’s not
possible here as there
is no Fezziwig scene. Nor indeed any other scene
you’d recognise from the book – the rest of the Christmas past section aside
from the school has been jettisoned. Instead, the majority of the material is
made up of entirely new material from Knight, showing Scrooge and Marley
building their business empire by destroying others, and the lives they ended
or ruined along the way.
There is perhaps
one part of this which it’s possible to say was inspired by the book, although
by the Christmas present section from Dickens rather than the past. In the
book, Scrooge is shown by the Ghost of Christmas Present some mineworkers
celebrating the festivities. Here, Christmas Past takes Scrooge down into a
mine, although it’s to show him a disaster caused by his penny-pinching.
The episode then
takes another grim turn – as if it could possibly get any darker – when we are
shown a more recent Christmas, with Cratchit in Scrooge’s employ, Marley dead,
and Tim already born. Mrs Cratchit – given not only an expanded role but a
first name here, Mary – comes to see Scrooge at his office early one morning,
before Bob has arrived. She begs for a loan to be able to pay for an operation
which Tim needs, and to be able to pay it back over the course of several years
with stoppages from Bob’s wages. There’s an odd bit here where she assures him
that Bob will be in for work as usual, even though it’s Christmas Eve and she
claims working on that day isn’t normal. It seems strange to suggest that
Christmas Eve wouldn’t have been a normal working day for the vast majority of
people at the time. Especially in a version which is going out of its way to
avoid any trace of festive sentiment most of the rest of the time.
Anyway Scrooge,
as you might imagine, isn’t particularly receptive to this idea but instead
suggests she comes around to his place on Christmas Day and he’ll give her the
money in return for… something. Yes, it’s clearly hinted and suggested that
Scrooge wants to force Mary to have sex with him in return for the money, which
seems to come rather out of the blue and be somewhat an out-of-character turn –
although to give Knight his credit, things aren’t quite as they appear.
By this point,
the drama is two of its three hours in, and they haven’t even finished with
their visions of the past yet, leaving you think they’re at least going to have
to pick up the pace and start going some to fit all of the remaining story into
the final episode. Indeed, the past then spills over into the first section of
said remaining episode, when we see what actually transpired the Christmas when
Mary went to see Scrooge.
It turns out that
he’s actually basically psychologically torturing her, making her think she has
to have sex with him for the money when he actually just wants to see if she’d
actually be prepared to go through with it. He doesn’t tell her this until
she’s started stripping of, of course, in a thoroughly nasty and sadistic
scene, which usually you’d say felt entirely out of place in any version of A
Christmas Carol, but if you’ve stuck with this version into the final
episode you’re pretty much resigned to it by now.
Mary takes the
money, of course, because she wants to save Tim, but she is utterly disgusted
with Scrooge. As she leaves, she issues an interesting threat which perhaps
takes this version’s ‘real’ characters rather further into the supernatural
than has hitherto been the case – she tells Scrooge that she can set spirits on
him, again ignoring the original’s claim it was Marley who set this up, and
making everything that happens more of a punishment than an opportunity of redemption.
Present:
The traditional
idea of the Ghost of Christmas Present from the book and the vast majority of
other versions is completely abandoned here, and instead the Spirit is someone
known to Scrooge – it’s his gun-toting sister, Lottie. Given that she is his
otherworldy guide in this section, it’s perhaps surprising that there’s no
visit to Fred’s – or rather, it might be surprising, if this version hadn’t
already demonstrated it has very little interest in doing anything other than
borrowing the basic structure of the book and throwing out almost everything
else, be it scene or sentiment.
We do,
admittedly, get the customary scene of the Cratchits’ Christmas festivities,
although it isn’t the usual happy Christmas scene most adaptations would
typically serve up. For one thing it’s a much sparser version of the Cratchit
family here – just the two children, Tim and Belinda, with Martha present but
changed to being a family friend in this version.
 |
Not-so-cheery Bob Cratchit
|
In the past
section we’d seen that Scrooge as a child could see the spirit when he was in
his Ali Baba form, and a similar thing happens in this section – not with the
spirit of Lottie, but with the apparition of Scrooge himself. Mary Cratchit can
sense that he’s there and is decidedly unhappy about it, bellowing at him to get
out of her house. She’s also not particularly happy because her husband has
revealed that he’s leaving Scrooge’s employ for a better job – and Scrooge had
told her during their secret encounter that if this ever happened, he’d tell
Bob all that had passed between them.
From this
less-than-cheery Christmas scene, Lottie takes her brother to see a memorial
service for those who died in the mining disaster we saw earlier. We learn here
that the boy who was pissing on Marley’s gravestone at the start – a gravestone
which, incidentally, shows that Jacob died only one year prior to this version
of the story taking place, rather than the usual seven – is a survivor of the
disaster who lost his father and two brothers in it. Thus he’s decided to take
a train to London every Christmas Eve to piss on Marley’s gravestone.
The location for
this, Trechloddfa, seems to be a product of Knight’s imagination, and a rather
confused one – it sounds Welsh, but the accent of the pissing boy is very much
English, possibly north-east England somewhere, so it’s almost as if it’s a
strange fictional merging and mish-mash of working class mining areas. Possibly
Knight didn’t want to be too specific as Lottie claims the boy gets a train to
London every Christmas Eve for his ritual with Marley’s gravestone – difficult,
for it to be a tradition as she suggests given it was only one year earlier,
but still – and he didn’t want to be tied down about where you could actually
have caught a train to London from in 1843.
After a final
heart-to-heart with Lottie outside the church, she leaves him to the tender
mercies of the final spirit, warning her brother that this will be the one who
makes the final decision about his redemption.
Yet to Come:
This is by far
the shortest section of the three visitations – which I suppose it is in most
versions – but it does feel it here, especially compared to the opening
and ‘Christmas Past’ segments. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is the
closest to one of the traditional depictions of the three spirits, but instead
of being hooded the face of actor Jason Flemyng is visible, looking bleached
and with stitched lips to emphasise his silence and make him seem very much a
walking corpse.
Flemyng was
actually a late replacement in the role. When the cast was originally
announced, the esteemed Dutch actor Rutger Hauer was going to play the part.
However, it transpired that Hauer was actually too ill to take up the role, and
he died in July 2019 at the age of 75.
Scrooge himself,
we learn here, is due to die in eight years’ time, in 1851, shown to us via the
medium of another pissy gravestone, with the angry young survivor of the mining
disaster helpfully washing the snow away so we can see the date. Before this,
however, we get the main vision the Spirit presents, and it’s only from the
very next day as far as Scrooge is concerned, which is usually what Christmas
Present is concerned with.
He learns that in
his eagerness to take part in the festive skating, Tim Cratchit will borrow his
sister’s skates, fall through a crack in the ice and be killed. This does seem
to upset Scrooge, but he still isn’t ‘cured’, as it were – he merely thinks
that he deserves all that’s coming to him and doesn’t want a chance of
redemption. As he mopes by his gravestone, Marley turns up for a second
appearance – in a similar place to where he does in some other versions – to
have a final crack at trying to persuade Scrooge to give life another go.
Although admittedly we know full-well that even Marley doing this is for his
own purely selfish reasons, so that he can finally be allowed to rest in peace
himself – something which he does finally get to do, settling back into his
coffin, unchained, with the coins back on his eyes.
What’s To-Day:
This is where
Knight really runs into a problem with his version of the story. For a start,
he faces the same issue which Tony Jordan did with
Dickensian; his
version of Ebenezer Scrooge is simply
so utterly unpleasant that not
only is it difficult to believe that he would actually successfully undergo any
sort of redemption, but it’s also tricky to bring the audience along with you
and make them
want him to.
Of course, being
a prequel, this was an issue which
Dickensian never really had to face
up to. Knight
does have to try and sell it to us – and it isn’t the only
problem present here. It also feels pretty clear that Knight doesn’t
particularly think Scrooge deserves a redemption either, and such is the grim
and miserable nature of this adaptation that you get the impression he didn’t
really want to have any sort of happy ending, and has only been reluctantly
forced to by the nature of the original story.
So it’s perhaps
no surprise that we have as unhappy a happy ending as can possibly be managed,
after Scrooge has very reluctantly accepted his second chance. It probably goes
without saying that we don’t get any of the traditional post-awakening scenes
of calling down to a boy or buying a turkey, etc. Instead, Scrooge falls on his
arse, steals a bag of gravel and there’s then a rather weak scene of him
scattering it over the frozen lake so that nobody can skate there today, and
thus Tim won’t fall through it and die. It doesn’t
look particularly
covered in gravel from what we see.
He then rushes
off to the Cratchits’ house, where he is extremely unwelcome and remains so.
There’s a bit of a smile raised by Tim – who wonders if Scrooge has been at the
laudanum – but on the whole the adult Cratchits remain shocked and unhappy
Scrooge tells them he’s going to close down the business, give them five
hundred pounds, and let Bob go to his new job. He also tells Tim not to skate
on the ice today, just in case his trick with the gravel didn’t work or had
been cleared away by someone with a brush and a couple of minutes to spare.
Just to really hammer
home the point in case you didn’t get it, as he leaves Mary Cratchit tells him
that while his five hundred pounds will be welcome, there is no forgiveness for
him; he in turn tells her that he isn’t seeking any. There’s no visit to
Fred’s, no cheerful closing narration, nothing but the same sense of bleakness
and misery which has been present throughout.
Review:
There is nothing
at all wrong with trying to make a version of
A Christmas Carol which is
different. Indeed, if this blog does nothing else it hopefully at least
demonstrates just how many very varied adaptations there have been down the
decades. So it’s a laudable aim to try and take the old classic story and
attempt to tell it in a fresh way, with some imaginative interpretation which
has not been seen before.
And there are
plenty which do that. There’s the light-hearted, almost pantomime fun of
A Diva’s Christmas Carol. Peter Bowker’s contemporary take in
the 2000version starring Ross Kemp. And if you want a more down-to-earth, grittier take,
the Depression-era-set
An American Christmas Carol from 1979 shows how
to do it with a rather more skilful hand than was displayed here.
What all of these
versions had which this one lacks – indeed, what pretty much
every other
version has, even
the dreadful 2006 CGI disaster – is at least
some
basic understanding of why
A Christmas Carol is such an enduring story.
Yes, Dickens had a message – that is undoubtable. But his writing in the
Carol
also has a light and life and a joy and a humour which is totally absent here.
Every single ounce of those things has been removed. Watching this version is a
soulless, unhappy experience; a production more to be endured than enjoyed.
Even the very worst versions normally realise that this is a story of hope and
optimism; two qualities with Knight seems stubbornly determined to keep well
away from his scripts for the three episodes.
There are also
the structural problems of its length and format.
A Christmas Carol,
unlike much of Dickens’s other work and indeed much of Victorian literature as
a whole, is a short book which whips along at a fair old pace. You can read it
in a single sitting. On screen you could probably do pretty much everything in
the book in about two hours, and most versions down the years have come in at
around ninety minutes or so.
So three hours
really overdoes it – it takes all that zip and pace of Dickens’s writing and
reduces it to a sluggish crawl. I also don’t think it’s really the sort of
story you want to see split up; there’s probably a good reason why it’s hardly
ever, if at all, been done as a multi-part serial on television before. It’s a
story you want the satisfaction of seeing all in one go, although of course
that might be debateable in this version given that there isn’t a great deal of
satisfaction to be had from surviving to the end here.
In a nutshell:
This is, of
course, purely my own personal, individual, subjective opinion. But I feel very
strongly that this is the very worst adaptation of
A Christmas Carol that
has ever been made. (
Although having said that...)
Links:
BBCWikipediaIMDb
