How typical of the BBC to put four-letter words into Scrooge’s mouth
THE BBC plans to rewrite Charles Dickens tonight, complete with the f-word and a scene showing a character urinating on a grave. It has no right to do so. It is typical of this increasingly cynical, ignorant organisation that it should put four-letter words into the mouth of Ebenezer Scrooge, and invent gross and disturbing scenes in a drama that is bound to be seen by the young and impressionable.
Does anyone really think the ‘watershed’ matters any more? Far better to abolish it and ask if the programme concerned deserves to be shown at all, if its makers cannot create proper drama without resorting to pornography, obscenity and violence.
It may even be that some people will actually switch on A Christmas Carol thinking that they will get – from the modern BBC of all people – a faithful version of this great and powerful drama. We know, of course, that this can be done, thanks to Alastair Sim’s marvellous performance in the 1951 film Scrooge. This cleverly adapted Dickens’s story without in any way vandalising its central message or its genius.
But most of us have been clobbered into submission by the Corporation’s revolutionaries by now. Either we take what we are given, or we know better than to watch in the first place. It is as if the Church of England turned St Paul’s Cathedral into a shopping mall, or the National Gallery got some Turner Prize winner to cut up its masterpieces and scrawl slogans over them. When we inherit treasures, they are not ours to do with as we wish. We have a duty to preserve them for those who will come after us.
CHARLES Dickens invented Christmas, as it is celebrated in the entire English-speaking world. The festival we all hope for, and seldom achieve, is the one which eventually happens in A Christmas Carol. We want the clear frosty morning that follows the black and freezing night. We want that transformation of mean-spirited greed into generosity. We want, in short, an earthly British miracle.
No doubt it is sentimental. Which of us is not ever sentimental? It is the other side of cruelty, and more of us are cruel than like to admit it. Dickens lived a hard and often cruel life. When he wrote A Christmas Carol, he was at a bleak moment in his career.
He was, beyond doubt, on the receiving end of many filthy curses and saw plenty of squalor and obscenity in the seething, debauched Britain of the time. Much of his childhood was hellish. He knew, if anybody did, the maggoty underside of life. Yet he managed to describe its miseries and terrors without ever resorting to the cheap and easy trick of lavatory-wall language.
We know in detail the grim taste of the thin gruel in Oliver Twist’s workhouse. We know the weary despair of the child set to work in the blacking factory and the shame of the debtors’ prison. With Dickens we go into the minds of thieves and graverobbers, of cowards and frauds, seducers and their victims, convicts and crooked lawyers. He was, I think, the first author to describe that very modern type – the person who is noisily concerned about the problems of the Third World while forgetting those closer to home.
Those who decide to read him, even now, generally find it easy to do so because of the wonderful flow of language, not academic or grand, just ordinary English rolling like a river. He was a genius, of the sort which appears only once in a few centuries. He could make us shout with laughter, or cry, or shock us into astonishment, by reaching into our imaginations with his own.
As the playwright Alan Bennett once wisely said about great writing, it is as if a hand, belonging to a kind friend, has reached out from the far past and gently clasped our own.
DICKENS did not need to describe every foul detail of squalor to conjure it up. We all know what it is like. He needed only to hint at it. But the cultural commissars of our age think it is progress to uncover what our ancestors hid. They are like fools who raise some ancient evil spirit, thinking it is only a game, and then run in terror from the thing they have summoned. Victorians such as Dickens understood that civilisation is built on restraint, on the things we do not do or say, and on the hiding of ugliness. The society they created was so strong, so peaceful and so rich that we still rely on it, though I don’t think it can or will last for ever.
But the great illusion of 50 years ago, that by removing the restraints on the grubby, the coarse and the violent, we would have a more healthy, open-minded society have turned out to be utterly wrong. Don’t watch this poison. Get down the old dusty book and read it instead. Its warnings and its hopes are as good as they ever were, and it will revive, in the most leathery heart, the ancient, redeeming promise of Christmas.