A Christmas Carol
His Dark Materials
Rating: 
That clanking sound you hear is not the rattle of Jacob Marley’s chains but Charles Dickens spinning in his grave like a turkey on a spit.
Peaky Blinders creator Stephen Knight opened his adaptation of A Christmas Carol (BBC1) with a passing urchin unbuttoning his flies and relieving himself on Marley’s headstone.
Six feet under in his coffin, the miser’s corpse awoke to find a stream of drips pattering over the pennies on his eyes.
Traditionalists will hate it, while modern audiences will regard this three-parter, which continues tonight, as too dated. It is also so dimly lit and slow that you sometimes wonder whether the TV has switched itself off
Before you could scratch your head and mutter: ‘I don’t remember the Inimitable Boz including that in the book,’ the scene had switched to the snowy streets of Victorian London, where bands of rosy-cheeked choristers with candles in lanterns were trilling Hark The Herald Angels Sing. . . and Scrooge was complaining about ‘all this f***ing noise’.
A Christmas Carol is not a sacred text. Plenty of writers have given it a twist and made it better yet.
My favourite is the Muppets version, in which a bunch of shivering, goggle-eyed puppets plead with Michael Caine as Scrooge to put another lump of coal on the fire — and he bellows back: ‘How would you like to be . . . suddenly unemployed?’
Tiny Tim was the best reason to keep watching. Ten-year-old Lenny Rush, who has a rare type of dwarfism, was excellent, with a cheeky smile and wielding his crutch with a swagger
But it’s hard to see who Knight’s foul-mouthed, scabrous rewrite is supposed to please.
Traditionalists will hate it, while modern audiences will regard this three-parter, which continues tonight, as too dated.
It is also so dimly lit and slow that you sometimes wonder whether the TV has switched itself off.
Dickens, without doubt the greatest storyteller in the English language, sketched the characters of flint-hearted businessman Ebenezer Scrooge and his overworked clerk Bob Cratchit in a couple of deft pages, but Knight spent an hour on the set-up and we’re still waiting for the first Christmas Ghost to come calling.
In one unnecessary segment, Marley (Stephen Graham) wanders through a desolation of Christmas trees, dragging weights that bounce along like blocks of polystyrene. In another, Scrooge (Guy Pearce) tolerates a barrage of sniping and sarcasm from Cratchit (Joe Alwyn), ignoring his insolence before sending him home early for Christmas Eve.
That makes no sense. Nor was there any reason for the Cratchits to have just two children: Dickens counted six — Martha, Peter, Belinda, a pair of raucous twins who didn’t merit names, and of course Tiny Tim.
The whole point of the original is that Bob is rich with the love of his family, and Scrooge has nothing.
Tiny Tim was the best reason to keep watching.
Nor was there any reason for the Cratchits to have just two children: Dickens counted six — Martha, Peter, Belinda, a pair of raucous twins who didn’t merit names, and of course Tiny Tim. The whole point of the original is that Bob (above) is rich with the love of his family, and Scrooge has nothing
Ten-year-old Lenny Rush, who has a rare type of dwarfism, was excellent, with a cheeky smile and wielding his crutch with a swagger. He captured the essence of A Christmas Carol — though I’m worried that, in this sweary travesty, his famous cry of ‘God bless us, every one!’ will become: ‘B*gger me, stay f***ing lucky, bruv!’
The child actors have easily outshone the adults, the special effects and everything else in His Dark Materials (BBC1).
The grown-ups, especially the ones playing evil religious maniacs, seemed to think that speaking softly and slowly made the dialogue more meaningful — but instead, it highlighted how pretentious the anti-Christian overtones really are.
Dafne Keen as Lyra and Lewin Lloyd as her pal Roger dominated every scene they featured in, because they acted as though they believed the story.
James McAvoy and Ruth Wilson, as Lyra’s mad parents, were pretending this was every bit as good as Shakespeare, and not an overblown Narnia rip-off.
At least with Narnia, you can understand the plot without having to read the books first.
The child actors have easily outshone the adults, the special effects and everything else in His Dark Materials (BBC1). The grown-ups, especially the ones playing evil religious maniacs, seemed to think that speaking softly and slowly made the dialogue more meaningful
Superstar of the weekend:
Robbie Williams joined a bunch of karaoke enthusiasts to belt out a few of his hits on Michael McIntyre’s Big Show (BBC1).
The audience went wild at every line, screaming and punching the air. What an act he is.