A Christmas Carol

[AlecOrAlonzo]

They're mumbling.

Ffs.

They can hear it three houses away. The telly is up at 11. Still can't hear a damn thing.

Is this what pay my tv licence fee for?!

I really loved it. One of the most engaging Christmas carol adaptations I’ve seen

I loved it. It felt fresh and new and was superbly acted. I could feel Scrooge's empathy kick in and deepen as it went along. The scene with him looking up to see Tim falling through the ice, desperate but unable to help was superb. The angle with Mrs Cratchit being the one to summon the spirits after what he did to her was really interesting. And indeed, he can try to make up for his bad deeds by doing good, but forgiveness won't be his.
I want to watch it again next year.

So good! Much more depth tackled here in this version. Very well done

I enjoyed it. The first episode dragged a bit but the others were very good.
A moral story well acted and Mary's look to camera at the end was telling! She knew about the spirits!

I thought this was fantastic! Really enjoyed it, I thought it was believable I terms of human emorions rather than in more twee versions where all is forgiven for scrooge because he turns up with food gifts and money. I think people would be more likely to react like the crachitts did here rather than the "grateful poor" being patronised and saying "gawd bless you sir" ...

I really enjoyed it.
I thought the acting was really good particularly Stephen Graham and Jonny Harris.
I only wish that it had been on tonight for Christmas night.

I have a bit of a crush on Stephen Graham! Such an interesting face and a good actor.

I really liked it!

I am a huge Dickens fan and I normally hate reinterpretations of classics, so I was quite surprised to find that this worked really well.

I thought it was really well done, well acted and I think that Dickens would have approved of the way it was tweaked to cover various social issues that have happened in the intervening years since he wrote it.

I also loved some of the effects, the scene when he sees Tim as if from below the ice was stunning and very clever.

Just finished watching this. Very good indeed and I think Dickens would approve. Now looking forward to Dracula.

Tim in the water was very well done.
It had a lot of thought put into it.

@Piggywaspushed Fair enough .

Yes . I kept thinking "Who is Lottie?" at first .

I loved this. Really dark. Some powerful ideas around Scrooge as a victim/ perpetrator of abuse.

I have now watched the final episode after telling myself it really did not matter if the writer had not even sniffed the book.

I still don't like the arrogance of a writer just shredding a wonderful, already moral, classic like this but do agree that the final episode was more true and better in spirit. I do like the actors in it (I saw Mrs C as Emilia in Othello once and she was great). The one change I definitely did like was makingLottie Fan one of the spirits. I thought that was clever. And the idea that is all about children is certainly at the heart of the novella. I quite liked the Martha gag at the end (and, my , didn't those two actresses look alike?!)

And I really liked the music.

Dreary and mumbling - I lasted 10 minutes

I enjoyed it. Also loved the snail and the whale and the Tiger that came to tea!

I really didn't get this at all. But then I think Peaky Blinders is a load of male adolescent dross. Thinking it is grown up, but actuallly just have understood cliches about life.

anyhow, if someone who understood it, or got the intent, why were the last two spirits given so little time? Was it to help create the understanding of just how awful Scrooge was as a person.

I am not against re workings of classics, and in fact liked Dickensian which I think was quite clever in its enterweaving of story lines. This seemed to be more about someone who had failed to learn empathy as a young person and lived live by rules. Not evil but with a complete lack of social interaction.

Would have been more convincing to have had a sort of Bill Gates character, clever but out of the loop, and failing to understand the consequences of his actions.

And no, being offered the sop of it being a woman's curse on his wrong doing that bought him to his senses, didn't work for me

In the book the final spirit is a much shorter section but, yes, the middle one should be the longest. The first ghost (past) actually looked disconcertingly like Dickens' description of the second ghost which got me in rather a muddle!!

They really had to mess with Tiny Tim's demise because they had written in an earlier operation so he couldn't die again through illness.

Whilst the concepts were sometimes interesting, I missed the counterpoints of other people's joy at Christmas. And Fred was sadly underwritten.

Again, Dickensian (which I actually gave up on) got away with what it did because it did not claim to be one of the books.

Having read Bleak House recently I can now see how much was messed about with for the famous adaptation - but not to the extent of this.

Just spotted this on FWR Christmas Carol Criticised for Cratchit's Interracial Marriage www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3777330-Christmas-Carol-Criticised-for-Cratchits-Interracial-Marriage

How depressingly predictable for that to be a criticism

Yes, Twitter was ablaze with white men of a certain age harrumphing about this. Usually attesting that black people more or less didn't exist before Windrush.

Really great. Watched all three eps in one go. First ep I found a little slow, and I did have an issue with the mumbling, but I was gripped by the end.

I didn't have an issue with mrs crachit being black but why weren't her children mixed race?

The two girls were. The little boy was cast because of his condition.

To me, it's just genuinely colour blind casting. Meh. Who cares?

There were other things to be more bothered about than who played Mrs Cratchit!

Like Fan Lottie with a gun.

It was rubbish,sweary,dark ,gloomy PC nonsense and had crap sound. The George C Scott version is the best one.

Belinda Cratchit certainly looked like she had mixed heritage - the actress who played Mary is mixed race so the children would have one black grandparent.

Have I imagined this or did they change Martha from being the eldest Cratchit daughter to being Mary’s sister?