How could the BBC get Scrooge so wrong?

A publicly funded broadcaster is hard to love when it gives us offerings as unpalatable as this

You know what’s been really good this Christmas? Immersive telly. But not Gavin and Stacey plus Call the Midwife. Mostly, I’ve been gravitating to a station that, as far as I can make out, is a father and son outfit run from the equivalent of the family spare bedroom. It’s Talking Pictures, which is available on Sky and Virgin, and seems to fund itself from advertisements from a mattress company, and screens films from the twentieth century which include any amount of the things you actually want to watch. On Christmas Day, it had A Christmas Carol, with Alastair Sim as Scrooge; the perfect version, better than the one with Kermit the Frog.

Which brings me to the immediate reason why I can’t feel much goodwill towards the BBC. It’s now three days since the screening of its new version of A Christmas Carol, written by Stephen Knight, who gave us Peaky Blinders, and I’m still furious about it. It’s the actual antithesis of Dickens’s Christmas Carol: the story that helped shape the Victorian Christmas as a domestic as well as religious festivity.

As GK Chesterton observed, “Scrooge is not really inhuman ... There is a heartiness in his inhospitable sentiments that is akin to humour and therefore to humanity; he is only a crusty old bachelor, and had (I strongly suspect) given away turkeys secretly all his life. The beauty of the story does not lie in the repentance of Scrooge ... it lies in the great furnace of real happiness that glows through Scrooge and everything around him… Whether the Christmas visions would or would not convert Scrooge, they convert us.”

But in the BBC version of Scrooge we get a man who is humourless as well as inhumane. The story of a miser is reduced to a sordid tale of sexual exploitation, which says everything about our preoccupations, not his. But it was the twisted theology of the thing that was most infuriating, more than the swearing, more than the opening scene where a youth urinates on Marley’s grave. Marley, you see, is in purgatory and is forced to earn his passage out of it by making Scrooge repent of his sins.

It’s hard to imagine anything that a middlebrow Victorian Anglican like Dickens would have found more offensive than a parable about purgatory. As for Catholics, the idea that a soul can earn his own way out of purgatory is just bizarre. But that’s the crux of this grim, joyless piece.

It sums up why I can’t bring myself to get worked up about the condition of the BBC. For all its occasional good contemporary productions and Radio 3, a publicly funded corporation that seems to go out of its way to alienate us is hard to love.

My mother died in September. Returning home as a grown-up orphan for Christmas is a strange business. But your family home can envelop you regardless. If you’re in the rooms you lived in with your parents, surrounded by the books you read as a child, the absence can seem like a temporary aberration. It’s like that perfect chapter of The Wind in the Willows, Dulce Domum, where Mole returns home just in time for Christmas:

“He did not at all want to abandon the new life and its splendid spaces …

But it was good to think he had this to come back to; this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.”

I was quite literally brought down to earth on Monday when I fell heavily on my back from a wall in the back yard. The hospital found nothing broken, but I’m under instructions to delegate the labour of Christmas to everyone else. It’s weird. I’m cooking, but can’t lift a turkey, and spending most of the time in an armchair in front of a fire I didn’t make. It’s a pain in every sense, but what I’ve come to realise is that there’s something liberating about enforced idleness.

Damian Aspinall is right; zoos don’t serve any useful conservation purpose and should be closed within a generation. He’s chairman of the foundation that runs Howlett’s Wild Animal Park. And in an age where we can see beasts close up in the wild with a voiceover by David Attenborough, we don’t need to see them in captivity. Mind you, there’s nothing quite like the frisson you get from seeing big cats in a circus with the possibility they may eat the trainer.