11 Reasons Why BBC One's Version of 'A Christmas Carol' is AMAZING

Marley's grave was being pissed on, to begin with.  There is no doubt whatever about that.  When I say that BBC One's 2019 miniseries adaptation of Charles Dickens's 1843 classic book is 'amazing,' I mean to say that it amazes me.  I stand all amazed at this adaptation's pendulous, gray-haired nuts dripping with dew from the toxic London fog.  If you haven't seen it, you must, you simply must.  A Christmas Carol is one of the most frequently adapted works of fiction around, and the story beats and many of the famous quotes are so familiar that many times it has been used as a plug-and-play template to insert brand-name characters like Mr. Magoo in place of Dickens's characters.  Miserly Ebeneezer Scrooge always says "Bah, humbug" and "If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart," Marley always says "Mankind was my business," and Scrooge always gets visited by the three spirits, comes around by the end of the third one and becomes weirdly good friends with his employee's crippled son, living happily ever after.  Adapted by Steven Knight, creator of Peaky Blinders, BBC One's version realizes that the old Christmas Carol is for pussies and people are sick of it. 

 

1. The Opening Gives Marley a Golden Shower

In the very opening scene, a classically Dickensian, filthy-faced young lad, deriding the deceased for being a "skinflint old bastard," clears the snow dusting the grave marker of Jacob Marley with his own micturition.  We're then granted a view of ol' Marley himself, as played by Stephen Graham, lying in the grave as the piss drips down from above onto his face, particularly in his eyes.  The pissy-eyed corpse then cries out, asking why he's not allowed to 'rest in peace,' followed by the title card.  It's a hell of an opening, and I've personally always wondered why there weren't more golden showers issued out in other adaptations, let alone the source material that is still taught in our schools despite the distinct absence of piss-filled eyes.  As far as I'm concerned, this is the only way to open a Christmas story of any sort, and I'll have words with anyone who disagrees.

 

2. Scrooge is (Arguably) at His Most Fuckable

It isn't that Alastair Sim, Michael Caine, George C. Scott, Scrooge McDuck or Reginald Owen aren't perfectly fuckable in their own particular ways (okay, well, maybe not Reginald Owen), but you have to admit that, Guy Pearce is more fuckable, broadly speaking.  He has a full head of hair, not fully grayed yet, a trim figure and he cuts a Victorian era suit well.  I'm not saying any Scrooge should be at the top of anyone's "to do" list; I'm just saying, if you have to fuck a Scrooge, this one is a better candidate than most.  He wouldn't be a tender lover, but it would be rough, dirty and satisfying.

 

3.  Marley's Gaping Maw

Remember in Robert Zemeckis's Disney version when the ghost of Marley appears to Scrooge and, through the magic of performance capture computer animation, his cheeks rips rip apart and his jaw flops about in a gross-out comical segment as Dickens would have intended?  Well, here they do one better by ripping Marley's jaw clean off!  As has been depicted many times before, Scrooge encounters Marley's ghost first in the form of his doorknocker, but this time, Scrooge accidentally breaks off the lower part of the Marley-knocker.  Later, he notices something meaty on the floor, and picks it up to realize it's a fully-fleshed mandible with a slightly wiggly tongue as Marley's ghost emerges dramatically from the shadows with a massive, pulsating hole like a severely traumatized post-birth vagina in his face.  It's at once utterly unnecessary and oh so utterly necessary.

 

4.  Andy Serkis is the Ghost of Christmas Present

It's interesting that Andy Serkis's big break was the gangly childlike character Gollum with a closed throat, high pitched voice, because he's gone on to do a lot more deep, full-throated, growling voices.  He brings one of those to the Ghost of Christmas Past, portrayed as something like a very dirty, evil Santa or the Bridgekeeper in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, who spends his spare time burning people's childhood toys on a bonfire in the middle of the woods.  Despite Dickens' attempts to make clear that the scariest of the spirits in the story is the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, the movies invariably make the Ghost of Christmas Past the scariest one while trying to interpret the book's ambiguous description, though not intentionally.  This version wisely just goes for it and creates the dirtiest, most growly, most heavy metal rock album art version of the Ghost of Christmas Past they could come up with, and it's better for it.

 

5.  Scrooge is a Sex Abuse Survivor

Ok, I'm not saying this is a good thing, but holy shit, Scrooge is sexually abused!  No, Scrooge wasn't just born to an emotionally distant and resentful father who left him to spend every Christmas at a boarding school.  He was born to a psychotically angry father who cuts off Ebeneezer's pet rat's head with a knife and sets up an arrangement with the school's headmaster to waive the school's fees in exchange for letting the headmaster sexually exploit him every Christmas.  It's, uh, jeez, it's wild.  But just wait.

 

6.  Scrooge's Sister Pulls a Fucking Gun

That's not just wanton profanity.  As Scrooge remarks to his Ghost of Christmas Past escort, "she pulled a fucking gun?!" upon seeing how she gets young Ebeneezer out of the boarding school just in time to stop the rapey headmaster from raping yet another Christmas Eve.  None of that rote "oh dear brother, I've come to take you home," here, no sir.  Oh, and for reasons unclear, except maybe that the sister's name in the book was "Fanny," which means "butt," her name here is changed to Lottie.

 

7.  Scrooge is an Asexual Psychopath and Mary Cratchit Shows Her Butt

In a particularly pivotal and original part of this story, taking place in the Ghost of Christmas Past section, Bob Cratchit's wife Mary comes to secretly beg Ebeneezer Scrooge for a loan to pay for a surgery for Tiny Tim (a delightful Christmas movie trope being that children and/or puppies always require expensive surgeries).  Scrooge, being not merely a miser who only reluctantly gives people the day off for Christmas, offers to give Mrs. Cratchit the money in exchange for her coming to his house on Christmas Day to be his sex slave!  That's right.  Scrooge, after telling Mrs. Cratchit that Tiny Tim's condition is probably due to eating overly rich foods during pregnancy (a nice touch, I think), offers to pay for his life-saving surgery if she will come to his house on Christmas Day and defile herself in whatever way he requests.  To be entirely fair, he never explicitly says what she is to do when she comes to his house on Christmas Day and do whatever it takes for the money, but he lets her assume that's the case and sits on his couch monologuing about what people are willing to do for money.  Finally, in what would be a horrifying and stomach-turning scene in many stories but becomes truly bizarre within Dickens' heartwarming classic A Christmas Carol, once Mary is undressed down to her bodice and her bare buttocks exposed to the screen, Scrooge declares himself to be asexual, just curious to see what she would do.  In some ways, this twist on the story ends up undercutting Dickens's point about not being an apathetic, money-obsessed, uncharitable asshole, which is an issue that nearly all of us have been guilty of at one time or another, and turns Scrooge into a Harvey Weinstein sex criminal which is edgy to put into A Christmas Carol, but considerably safer as a social critique.  As for the butt, it's in a disturbing context, but I mean, wow, they finally figured out how to put a bare butt into A Christmas Carol.  Even Dickens couldn't figure out how to justify that.

 

8. Mary Cratchit Is Basically a Witch

Though never confirmed, there is some strong implication that after the very dirty trick Scrooge played on her, Mary summoned the spirits to be his reckoning.  As she puts it, she's a woman and she can do such things (apparently vaginas are vectors for ethereal power).  While Scrooge is watching the Cratchits' awkward Christmas dinner with the Ghost of Christmas Present (represented by Scrooge's sister, which doesn't make a lot of sense but is a nice emotional touch), Mary seems to catch on and yells at these figures existing on the spiritual plane to "GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!"  Then, at the end, when Scrooge has changed, she says something about the "Spirits" and gives a knowing look at the camera like, "Yeah, no shit I did it. Merry frickin' Christmas."

 

9. Scrooge Doesn't Wipe the Snow From His Headstone

We've seen, many a time, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come take Scrooge, already suspecting the worst, to the graveyard and point to a headstone, which Scrooge gingerly approaches and wipes the snow away from to reveal his name in an emotionally climactic moment.  We have not often seen Scrooge taken to the graveyard, where a young lad is taking a piss on Scrooge's headstone in an anticlimactic moment, at which point, Scrooge figures that's fair.

 

10.  Scrooge Doesn't Give Bob a Raise

Everyone hates it in the old story when Bob Cratchit comes into work late the day after Christmas and Scrooge teases him and gives him a pay raise (or in The Muppet Christmas Carol where, in some sort of passive aggressive move, Scrooge corrals all of Muppet London via musical number into the Cratchit family's tiny house to share Christmas dinner), so thank God they found a way to deal with that by having Scrooge shut down the whole business.  Having seen Bob's intention to leave Scrooge & Marley's for a new job while with the Ghost of Christmas Present, Scrooge crashes the Cratchit place on Christmas Day to tell Bob to take the job because Scrooge & Marley's evil investment firm (actually, I think it's an investment firm, but it's not fully clear; mostly they show him buy and sell a textile plant at an insane profit and cut corners on a coal mine that results in an accident killing 27 people and a bunch of horses).  Scrooge then offers the Cratchits his life savings, and Tiny Tim asks if that's what happens when someone drinks laudanum.

 

11.  Scrooge is Not Forgiven

Redemption doesn't mean what it used to.  Maybe it shouldn't.  Either way, it's a true marker of the Trump era that its version of A Christmas Carol turns Scrooge into a sex criminal, and he's not forgiven.  The point is that Scrooge doesn't do it for the forgiveness.  The point in this telling of the story is that Scrooge comes to realize that charting a new course and being good for one's own sake is its own reward.  It's more of a modern therapy solution.