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?!

Oops, senior moment, sorry!

But " everything's gonna be alright..."!

Did no one else think Guy Peace was channelling Alan Davies then? Once I'd heard it I couldn't unhear it.

Yes the jaw scene was creepy! Similar to Scrooged (my favourite adaptation).

Really enjoyed it !!

I liked it and will be watching the next episodes. I wonder what the story is with Mrs Crachit, I couldn’t catch if they received money from the cousin or could she be a sex worker to earn money, it would be like Nancy in Oliver Twist.

I kept getting Richard E Grant vibes.

I liked it I think, something different for a change. Wonder what the story with Bobs wife and the cousin is?

To be fair, the last thing the world needs is yet another faithfully re-enacted and traditional/twee A Christmas Carol so thank Christ someone is doing something different with it.

Another one who wondered if I missed important dialogue with Mrs Cratchitt and the cousin thing.
I think - she borrowed/ earned money and lied and pretended it was from a cousin???
But why? Suggests it was earned illegally or borrowed from someone unsavoury... Scrooge ?

Good God this was diabolical. At 9.30 my eldest (22) said " Is anyone else Sat here thinking thìs is shit".... cue the other 6 people in the room saying yes in unison.

We were all sat there grinning and bearing it for everyone else's sake. The relief was palpable when we switched it off!

I liked it. Guy Pearce sounded like Mark Fowler to me.

It was so dark and difficult to make out the images, like Taboo. 50% of the time I was looking at a reflection of myself with my hand in the Quality Street tin.

I liked Guy Pearce in it, and I liked the big cityscape, but I thought Stephen Graham struggled with the accent which distracted me. There was too much grit and piss for my liking, and an awful lot of unnecessary padding to get the required 3 parts. Who needs a raison d'etre for a bloody ghost?

Watching it now on iPlayer and it's taking me ages because I keep having to rewind it to work out what's going on. Some of the CGI's distractingly bad. Mind you, I know how Bob Marley feels getting his jaw back on straight - I can never get my Invisalign braces in properly first time either.

Bob Marley again

I really wish the work of the late, great Bob Marley had been included in this.
It would have made it more bearable for me. 😉

Personally didn’t mind it however, I don’t know why it needed all that swearing, nor the crude opening. I understand that they wanted to make it “dark” but it came across as them trying to be shocking and edgy. if they wanted to go down that route, they should of set it in Morden day but wouldn’t in fear of being accused of being anti-Tory
I will be watching tomorrow, so liked it to some extent.

Why must everything be dumbed-down to be made 'accessible'?

I think this was the reverse of dumbed down. Most Christmas Carol versions are really quite sanitised, and DH and I felt this was getting back to Dickens' original intentions in terms of trying to make his contemporaries aware of the effects of the massive inequalities of that age.

But in so doing they have changed :

Scrooge and Marley's business
Fred and Bob's personalities
98% of Dickens' words! (even someone who hasn't read it would know this)
The number of children the Cratchits have, despite wanting to highlight poverty

I can cope with time frames being muddled and things being made grittier but the playing fast and loose with some of the greatest words is too much. The only bit they left in was 'are there no prisons' and that was not particularly well delivered.

He didn't say humbug for the first 40 minutes and then developed some desire to say it constantly!

I might stick around for today's episode just to see how the ghosts are handled but it took way too long to get to them and the little preview we got of the first one annoyed me because he looked distinctly like the Ghost of Christmas Past! I don't think , somehow, we are going to see the jollity at the Fezziwigs!

If they were going to change it this much then the title needs slight altering to reflect that this is a reworking , not an adaptation.

It's like they have no faith in the power of the original - and yet my year 10 class gave the book a round of applause last week when we finished it!

They have obviously given more story to Mrs C because otherwise people might accuse the production of being too male. But Mrs C is quite feisty in the original source and more could have been made of this. Completely fabricated plots do annoy me. I am less bothered with the Agatha Christies on the whole as they are not great works of literature but when I read ABC Murders , I did wonder what was so wrong with it that they felt the need to change that so much, too.

I think the fact that Sanditon flopped does rather reveal the importance of actual source material.

On a separate note, having this year read War and Peace , I was actually quite impressed by how close to the source material that was, at least in characterisation.

I loved it but thought Marley could have been more tormented, the chains heavier, and Guy Pearce less like Dirty Den.

On appoint of order, the jaw bit was one of the few things they have kept in from the book.

I'm a huge Dickens fan and I think he would have approved of this. Not perfect, but an interesting interpretation.
I'm guessing guy Pearce is in it for the American market. Cant help feeling another actor would have been more suited.

I remember Guy Pearce as the outrageous drag artiste in Priscilla Queen of the Desert. Sang opera on top of the bus as it sped across the desert. Fab film, great frocks and better than Ru Paul.
Re Scrooge, I had to have sub titles on and turn off lights to try and see better, too dark to see action.

I enjoyed it - loved the darkness and ghostliness. But can't help thinking as it's a Steven Knight drama that Tom Hardy is missing!

janaih as a fellow Dickens lover, I find it hard to accept that Dickens would be OK with all of the words he wrote being removed!

The reviews in the papers are really positive. As I wondered with Jamaica Inn, I always wonder if reviewers get a preview version which does not have the sound problems. They seem not to have noticed.

I also always feel reviewers are not in tune with how the general viewing public feel. The consensus on Twitter, for example, is not positive.