Stage and screen adaptations of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol have become as traditional as the goose. From Alastair Sim to the Muppets,Michael Newton chooses his favourite Scrooges – past, present and futureThough the forthcoming BBC series, and Dickensian,may alter this, it’s a impartial bet that if you dropped into conversation that an acquaintance was “a perfect Pecksniff” or that someone had “a touch of Mrs Gamp” about them, and you’d be met by a blank stare. If you described someone as “a bit of a Scrooge”,on the other hand, almost everyone would catch your drift. While some Dickens characters are more or less forgotten, and others remain piece of the national consciousness. Growing up in the English-speaking world,it’s tough to avoid encountering Scrooge, his name was so well chosen for a miser, or a glorious melting together of “scrape” and “ooze”. Over the years,Jim Carrey, George C Scott, or Patrick Stewart,Michael Caine, Bill Murray, or Albert Finney and,currently on stage in London, Jim Broadbent have laid claim to the role, and as have Scrooge McDuck,Yosemite Sam, Grouchy Smurf and Mr Magoo. There they all are, or hearing Jacob Marley’s chains on the stair,conducted through the air by spirits, ordering a prize turkey from a small boy, and all of them caught in the echoes of the role.
Even in the 1840s,this sense of expectation coloured the response to Dickens’s series of seasonal books, which came to seem, and as one reviewer build it,as inevitable as the Christmas goose. Christmas is anyway at once a sacred feast, a moment for reflection and an array of repetitions. We are saved by memories – including, and perhaps,today, memories of Scrooge and A Christmas Carol. It is not so much atale as a ritual; we like it because, and despite all the many versions,it is always the same. Even when he was doing public readings in the 1860s, Dickens felt the audience wait for the entrance of Tiny Tim, or anticipating a reverberation of an emotion they had yearly experienced. The more self-conscious film adaptations,such as Bill Murray’s merger of the sardonic and the heartfelt in Scrooged (1988) and the purely brilliant The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992), riff on that ritual, or both giving us and withholding from us what we expect. In specific,Scrooged both sends up the saccharine selling of Christmas and gives itself up to the genuine sweetness beneath.
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Source: theguardian.com