I say bah humbug to the new Scrooge!
I AM a former executive of BBC Drama and now work as an English teacher in a state school, teaching Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol to 11-year-olds. We were looking forward to the BBC adaptation, but I hope to goodness that none of my Year 7s saw it. It is not that it was badly done — in fact, it was very well done — but what annoys me is that it was called a version of this well-loved story. In my previous job, I adapted books, including Dickens’s Hard Times, for the BBC. But there is a version and there is a perversion. The new version of A Christmas Carol is not a perversion in the moral sense, though some might argue that the abuse of Scrooge as a child by his headmaster and his coercive control of Bob Cratchit’s wife could be. It is a perversion in the sense of labelling it Dickens. There seems a fashion in modern adaptations to ignore the spirit of the writer’s intentions, disregard historical context, trample across what the writer was intending and portray the characters in a degrading or spurious way in order to push the boundaries and be contentious. It’s incredibly easy to do — you simply invert everything. Male characters are changed to female, motives misinterpreted, plot corrupted and, wow, isn’t it revolutionary! I recently saw an RSC production of The
Taming Of The Shrew in which every female character was played by a male and vice versa. It did nothing to illustrate gender inequality and only made a complicated play more complex. In the end it was just ridiculous. This isn’t an age thing: a class of 17-year-olds thought so, too. So, can we stop this practice and respect writers? It is the dramatic equivalent of Sixties architects sticking up a concrete tower block in the middle of a Georgian terrace. Now they are seen as a mistake and are being knocked down across the country. But the terraces are long gone. By all means broadcast an edgy drama, but don’t label it Dickens. RICHARD LANGRIDGE,
Bradenham, Bucks. SCROOGE says to his nephew: ‘Every idiot who goes about with Merry Christmas on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.’ This should be the fate of everyone at the BBC who produced A Christmas Carol, a foul-mouthed, dark, dire, depressing travesty of a much-loved story. From the opening scene of a man urinating on Marley’s gravestone, it went rapidly downhill with suggestions of child abuse and prostitution. We know this did happen in Victorian England, but it was not mentioned in the Dickens original. I wonder if scriptwriter Steven Knight mislaid one of his scripts for an episode of Peaky Blinders, for which his interpretation of this story would have been more suitable.
MICHAEL BROOKS, Kendal, Cumbria.