What the Dickens? Killing a classic with comic zest
Having already enjoyed one A Christmas Carol that could have gone wrong but didn’t (the one delivered with gusto at my children’s primary school a couple of weeks ago), I started to watch A Christmas Carol Goes (Saturday, BBC One) thinking I could probably see the jokes coming.
This was the second TV outing for the Mischief Theatre Company, whose series of plays that “go wrong” in the manner of Noises Off have flourished in theatreland and won several awards. The premise here was that after last year’s disastrous Peter Pan, the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society (the Mischief Theatre Company’s fictional alter-ego) had been banned by the BBC from ever setting foot in their hallowed studios again. Undeterred, the CPDS decided to storm a BBC production of A Christmas Carol and take over. Derek Jacobi was only a few Humbugs in to his stride when masked raiders kidnapped him and dumped him in a coffin. From there, the CPDS proceeded to dismantle the Dickens classic with a mixture of massive incompetence and total farce.
The question once again was whether what works in the theatre would translate to the screen – the TV camera is much closer than the theatre audience and subtler comedy can yield greater rewards. Then again, people falling over is still very funny. A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong tried every kind of joke under the sun and most of them landed – stagehands wandered into shot, the sets fell apart and a running gag about Bob Cratchit not knowing his lines and so writing them on props got better and better as they flogged it to death. If you like good bad jokes (I do), then this was very heaven.
The problem with this type of calamity humour is one of escalation – if the basic joke is things going wrong, then just how wrong can they go? A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong went as far as to take the bickering company out of the studios altogether and into a local Tesco’s, by which point it felt as if things were not merely wrong, but fully meta.
A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong was genuinely funny; funnier than 2016’s Peter Pan Goes Wrong – but they might want to think about whether it’s a trick that bears repeating every year.
The fifth and sixth episodes of
Feud (Saturday, BBC Two) were shown contiguously, and the fifth was such a screamer that whatever came next was bound to disappoint. In the first of the double bill, the simple opening caption “1963” will have had Old Hollywood aficionados purring, for this was the year in which the Joan Crawford and Bette Davis feud of the series’ title reached its apogee at the Oscars. The real-life story is so wickedly delicious that all writer and director Ryan Murphy needed to do was to tell it straight.
What happened was that Davis was nominated for Best Actress for Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, while Crawford, her co-star, wasn’t. Anyone who’s been watching Feud will know that up to now Crawford has, largely, been the punchbag both for Hollywood misogyny as well as Davis’s well-aimed jabs. This time, though, she outflanked both by wheedling her way in to the Academy Award ceremony as a presenter and then “offering” to collect the award for the actual Best Actress winner, Anne Bancroft, on her behalf as she was absent. Thus, Joanie got the Oscar without actually having won it, while Bette Davis stood in the wings beyond speech with rage.
I said the story was delicious, but even so, six episodes in, Feud would be getting monotonous if it was just a protracted catfight. Luckily, in Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange as the leads, you get something worth watching in even the dullest scene. In episode six, there were quite a few of them, as studio boss Jack Warner coined the appalling new genre of “Hagsploitation” horror flicks in which ageing female stars were demeaned on screen for the audience’s amusement.
Compared to 1963 Oscar night it was bound to pale, and yet Lange in particular is so magnificent at those pained expressions of just clinging on for dear life, the street fighter in the ball gown, that no five minutes of Feud has been without something to cherish. Credit goes to Murphy for giving screen time to others than just his leads, in particular to the wonderful Jackie Hoffman as Crawford’s stony-faced vassal Mamacita. You’d call Mamacita comic relief, except that there’s no relief on the horizon for Joanie as her tragic swandive continues.