Tis the Season for Griselda Heppel to get into a tiz... again.
Photo by Jean Balzan from Pexels |
This being the
Season To Be Jolly, it seems only fair that I should have upset a number of
people on Twitter over Christmas. One person even blocked me, which made me
laugh, as he didn’t even give me the chance to deserve it. Rather, having
dashed off a biting tweet in my direction, he bravely shut off all replies (as if)
from me, like a small child biffing another in the playground before running to
teacher to stop his victim biffing him back.
So what did I do
to inspire such fear and loathing? Er, well, I expressed an opinion. Like, you
know, the other 330 million Twitter users. What about? Oh, just a TV programme.
A mini-series. Well, a Classical Serialisation in fa – look, it’s not my fault that
the A Christmas Carol Question raises its snowy head every year, is it? Competition
among theatre, film and TV companies, from the humblest to the loftiest in the
land, on who can make the biggest mess of Charles Dickens’s great 1843 novel
has become a national sport. This time last year I cavilled at the liberties taken by the RSC in their production; I can now say these fade into the tiniest
speck of candied fruit in Tiny Tim’s plum pudding compared with the monster
served up by BBC 1 over three (three!) evenings in Christmas week.
Ebenezer Scrooge: grumpy, yes. But sweary? |
In other words, narrative drive is what matters if you want your audience
to stay with you, and this was exactly what Stephen Knight’s ‘adaptation’ (‘rewriting’,
I’d call it) lacked. Tectonic plates move faster than Knight’s scene setting,
and when the first 15 minutes established nothing more than a grumpy, sweary (oh
yes, the F word. A lot. Why?) man chuntering around a bare office in Gloomy
Victorian London, sniping at his clerk, I gave up. Where Dickens writes with crispness,
a quick wit and a sense of mystery, this production steamrollered its way
along, ponderous and boring beyond words.
Anglican church: no room for Purgatory |
Worse, Knight felt
the need (like David Edgar) to add backstory and plot alterations to the
original… only his additions were much sillier. It’s not enough, for instance,
for Marley to haunt Scrooge as a warning: he has to be properly motivated.
Enter the Roman Catholic doctrine of the afterlife: Marley’s motive for saving
Scrooge is to spare his own soul years in Purgatory. Dickens, a traditional
Anglican living in highly Protestant Victorian England, would have been
appalled at this solecism, and the fact that Knight could cheerfully shoehorn it into Dickens’s literary and religious world shows how little he cares about the original
work.
Why shouldn't a Green Frog play Bob Cratchit? Photo by Глеб from Pexels |
Back to Twitter.
Well, The Sunday Times journalist India Knight (no relation I hope…. Gulp)
happened to ask the Twitterati what they thought of the production and I –
among many others – gave my view, adding that for a truly splendid adaptation, people
should look no further than The Muppet Christmas Carol. While I’ve never
received so many Likes for a tweet before, a few readers, as mentioned, took it
badly. What baffled them – to the point where they could barely spit out their
sarcasms – was that I should rate a film starring a bunch of puppets, headed by
a Green Frog, that faithfully told Dickens’s marvellous story over a slow, turgid,
foul-mouthed 21st century steampunk version, that didn’t.
Personally I’d call
that muppetist.
Happy New Year
all!
Comments
Thanks for these comments, both. As for my qualifying as a replacement for the marvellous Miss Piggy.... what, moi? Tis an honour I dare not hope for. 😂
We didn't make it even to the middle of the first episode. As my brother said, "Spare me people who think they can write Dickens better than Dickens!"