The BBC's "A Christmas Carol" starts with a scene of a young man pissing on a grave. This is entirely appropriate, as it then spends three hours pissing all over a classic.
The second most infuriating thing about this abomination is that it is genuinely well made - the cast are excellent and play their parts well, the staging is very good, and the effects are well done. They've actually done what they set out to do very well.
And the most infuriating thing about it is that the concept is actually sound. This was sold to me as a spooky retelling of "A Christmas Carol", which is entirely appropriate - "A Christmas Carol" was the culmination of an old tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas, and it was only as a result of that story that the new tradition of the Christmas story (and later the Christmas movie) came about. So doing a retelling focussing on the terror invoked by the ghosts is a really good idea.
But the problem is that this isn't a retelling of "A Christmas Carol", or even an adaptation of the novella, any more than was the "Doctor Who" episode of the same name - yes, there are characters in all the same places, and the archetypes are more or less present, but none of those characters are the ones taken from the novella, the plot is mangled beyond recognition, and the theme is utterly different.
Digging into some specifics, the heart of the story, and the heart of the problems of this mini-series, is Scrooge. The problem here is that they've ramped up his evil enormously, which I'm sure seemed a good idea at the time. But the material isn't actually served by making Scrooge a monster. Dickens made him a skinflint, but not much different from the businessmen and moneylenders of his day, and for good reason - the more recognisable he is to being one of us, the more powerful he is. Make him a monster, and he's not one of us, and then there's nothing we can learn from his story; make him one of us, and the lesson for him becomes a lesson for us.
Worse, not only is Scrooge a monster, he's also an imbecile. In the worst section of the mini-series, he decides to strip Mrs Cratchitt of her dignity and her agency, humiliating her in return for money for a life-saving operation for her son. He talks, at tedious length, about seeking to find some sort of "moral exchange rate" - how much money is her dignity worth? But the stupidity here is that she told him why she was doing what she was doing, and it was that that set the rate - her price was £30 because that was the cost of the operation; if the operation had been £50 the price would have been higher, or for £20 it would have been lower. So we have a deeply offensive scene built on the assumption that Scrooge is an idiot.
(And, worse, the show had already established that Scrooge understood circumstantial motivations very well, in the scene where he and Marely engaged in a bit of disaster capitalism with the mill owner. So it's not even consistent in its idiocy.)
Mentioning that scene of course brings up another big problem with the mini-series - its handling of women. There are already precious few female characters of note in "A Christmas Carol". Therefore, the mini-series of course decided to drop one. This then leaves us two: one who is dead to begin with, and Mrs Cratchitt. Yay!
Actually, I have no real objection to the handling of Scrooge's sister, either as his rescuer or as the Ghost of Christmas Present. Yes, the bit with the gun was utter nonsense, but it was a tiny flaw on an otherwise disastrous work, so I'll let it slide.
But the handling of Mrs Cratchitt was a disgrace. Not only for the stripping of her dignity and agency that I've already mentioned, but then her declaration that as a woman she could summon spirits for revenge. Because, of course, all women are witches.
Then, finally, we come to the end. "A Christmas Carol" is, of course, hugely sentimental - Scrooge is redeemed through grace, and is immediately and obviously restored back into right company.
But this is a story crafted by secularists for a post-Christian age. Which means there can be no grace, and since there was nothing done to earn it there can be no redemption. And that in turn means there can be no hope - Scrooge remains a pariah to all, with his promises to make things right being treated with nothing but scorn.
(And it's worse than that. Scrooge promises to close down his business, but what isn't mentioned is that large numbers of people depend on that business for their homes and their employment. In the best case things will be sold on as going concerns, to other businessmen who are marginally better. In the worst case, he's just made hundreds of people unemployed and/or homeless. Merry Christmas! What he should have done was keep the business going but actually made the investments he'd avoided - making his apartments safe and comfortable and charging fair rents; making his businesses safe as well as profitable, and paying fair wages. As it stands, the moral of this story is that making money is evil, and we should all live in hovels, cold and starving. Ho ho ho!)
So that's that. For the second time this year, the BBC have been roundly outclassed by a silly musical, this time by a literal bunch of Muppets. (The other was "Les Mis".) And with this they bring to an end a truly awful year in the history of the Corporation. For the first time, I'm really finding it hard to justify the license fee - "Still Game" is finished, "Doctor Who" has been poor at best for two years now, and their adaptations of classic works have fallen flat. Yes, they produce some good dramas, but this is the golden age of TV, so there are plenty of others who do that. Worse than that, their news is not to be trusted, they've had a truly disastrous election, and their political editor is awful (although, damningly, a marked improvement over her predecessor). And so I find myself hard pressed to answer the question: why am I forced to pay for the BBC as a condition for watching any TV?
#60: "The Bourne Identity", by Robert Ludlum (a book from The List)
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