A Christmas Carol: A deep-frozen Ebenezer Scrooge casts his chill over Dickens’s festive fable

Comfort and joy is lacking from Steven Knight's new adaptation of Dickens' classic
Chilly: Guy Pearce plays Ebeneezer Scrooge
BBC/Scott Free/FX Networks
Alastair McKay20 December 2019

B****y hell. Or, more accurately, flaming purgatory. In this Peaky Blinders update of the Dickens classic, Steven Knight has jammed the thermostat.

The story is both hotter, as in hellfire, and colder, as in the seasonally affected disorder which seems to have frozen the conscience of the anti-hero, Scrooge (the bad neighbour, Guy Pearce). What there isn’t, at least in this stark opening episode, is comfort, an idea which confronts Dickens’s original intentions for the story.

In 1843, when Dickens introduced his “ghostly little book” he wrote that he intended “to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly.”

In 2019, Knight talked about respecting Dickens, while reaching deeper into the character of Scrooge. The question which haunts the drama, not entirely pleasantly, seems to be: why isn’t Ebenezer good? The answer seems to be that there is good in him, but it is deep-frozen.

Ice-hearted: Pearce lends existential impatience to Scrooge
BBC/Scott Free/FX Networks

Classicists may quibble with the casting of Guy Pearce, but he’s a fine actor, and just the man to lend existential impatience to the ice-hearted businessman. His cries of humbug sometimes have the merit of logic on their side, as when he argues about the real date of Christ’s birth. There is no snow in Palestine, he says, “Indeed, camels riding in the snow…”

Psychoanalysts may detect a note of that terrible thing, relevance in this updated Scrooge, and there is the necessary talk about exploitation, poverty, and even globalisation, but it is not overcooked.

Scrooge’s psychedelic discomfiture is more prominent, as he tries to wish away his appalling visions as the result of insomnia, or mental indigestion, prompted by a lump of undigested beef or an uncooked potato. There has been talk about Pearce being too handsome to play Scrooge, but he’s more skeletal than pretty and his sneer is baked in. Toto, we’re not in Ramsay Street anymore.

Ghostly: Stephen Graham plays Jacob Marley
BBC/Scott Free/FX Networks

What of Jacob Marley and his infernal chain? The reliably great Stephen Graham plays the troubled spirit and he’s just the man to inhabit the horror while evincing a faint note of comedy. The first scene, splashing all over the watershed, has someone p*****g on Marley’s grave, setting the tone for his long night of the soul. Then the camera drops underground to watch the progress of the urine, through the earth and onto the face, leaking into the eyes of the mortified skinflint.

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Soon enough Marley, who’d rather be dead, is in Purgatory, where the bell is tolling for him. The Ghost of Christmas Past (Andy Serkis) is suitably horrific, displaying horror movie manners and a ferociously grim countenance, though in design he’s close to the original Dickens illustration.

Everything else is as you’d expect, but colder, because the blue light throws a chill over Christmas card scenes punctuated by the comforting sounds of carollers and skaters and ’orses’ ’ooves. “Reality’s a decision,” says Marley. “I’ve learned that.”

A Christmas Carol is on December 22 on BBC One, 9pm

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