The 2019 ‘A Christmas Carol’ is an incredibly strange and interesting adaption. Elaborating upon, or perhaps rebuking, Charles Dickens’ original novella to an absurdly dark extent, the three-hour miniseries focuses on very modern concerns in a Christmas classic. The marvellous and striking imagery, Guy Pearce’s intensely committed lead performance, and Steven Knight’s canny tweaking of the material made for an adaption well worth watching, and certainly well worth talking about.
The 1843 Dickens classic ‘A Christmas Carol’ seeing the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future guide miserly Ebenezer Scrooge to a kinder state of being, well it’s reverberated through countless stagings and adaptions. So for this version to stand out so much, well it’s quite a feat. It really is a unique iteration on ‘A Christmas Carol’. Three of us (who’ve all been musing over the series since it first aired in 2019 December) discuss the series over the course of an hour.
CREDITS:
Neo
Tomtit
Ingiga
Edited by Neo
SOURCES:
Music track ‘Scrooge’ from Dustin O’Halloran’s score for the series.
Sulcas, Roslyn. “A New ‘Christmas Carol’ Explores the Roots of Scrooge’s Scorn.” The New York Times, 13 Dec. 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/arts/a-christmas-carol-scrooge-fx.html
Chitwood, Adam. “Exclusive: Steven Knight Talks ‘A Christmas Carol’ with Tom Hardy & Teases Ambitious Dickens Plans.” Collider, 21 Jan. 2019, https://collider.com/a-christmas-carol-tom-hardy-update-steven-knight/
Hughes, Sarah. “‘It’s not for 10-year-olds’: Guy Pearce on Steven Knight’s adaptation of A Christmas Carol.” inews, 19 Dec. 2019, https://inews.co.uk/culture/television/steven-knight-guy-pearce-stephen-graham-on-adaptation-of-a-christmas-carol-377090
Singh, Anita. “Peaky Blinders writer Steven Knight to adapt a Dickens ‘boxset’ for BBC One.” The Telegraph, 28 Nov. 2017, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/28/peaky-blinders-writer-steven-knight-adapt-dickens-boxset-bbc/
Jeffries, Stuart. “Russell T Davies: ‘You never stop coming out of the closet'”. The Guardian, 19 Jan. 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/jan/19/russell-t-davies-interview-midsummer-nights-dream-queer-as-folk-doctor-who
