Ah, Christmas! A time of festive merriment, seasonal goodwill and the hope that there’ll be a bit more on the telly than The Great Escape, that nice royal lady gassing on, and “hilarious!” TV blooper-shows last updated in 1983. The BBC can always be relied upon to put effort into Yuletide scheduling, though anyone expecting warm fuzzies from the three-part adaptation of A Christmas Carol from Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders, Taboo) would probably have ended up choking on a mince pie. With Nick Murphy directing, and Tom Hardy executive-producing, this telling of Charles Dickens’s yuletide Victorian ghost story was part traditional (flickering candles, icy window panes), part brutish and radical.
Starring Guy Pearce as Ebenezer Scrooge and Stephen Graham as Jacob Marley, it was full-blast austere from the off. As the camera panned on to a snowy, gloomy graveyard, an embittered youth urinated all over Marley’s headstone, snarling: “Ya skinflint old bastard!” Marley, stumbling around purgatory, clanking with chains, was tasked with persuading Scrooge to seek redemption: “The only way anyone can ever soften Scrooge’s heart would be with a mincing knife and a cup of warm gravy to make some kind of unpleasant pudding.”
In a stellar cast, Pearce delivered a reptilian Scrooge to Graham’s penitent Marley – while Joe Alwyn brought a spikiness to underdog clerk Bob Cratchit, as Vinette Robinson’s Mary Cratchit shivered with desperate secrets. Among the spirits, Andy Serkis proved a lyrical Ghost of Christmas Past and Johnny Harris gave a terrifying spittle-flecked cameo as Scrooge’s corrupt father.
Some liberties were taken with the plot – from child sexual abuse to Scrooge tricking Mary into sexually humiliating herself to get money for an operation for Tiny Tim (Lenny Rush). In a burst of last-minute silliness, it emerged that Mary was a witch who had used sorcery to conjure the spirits. (Erm, if Mary had such powers – why didn’t she use them to cure her son, or to stop being poor?) Still, this was a refreshing take on an oft-spun yarn. Knight plans to dramatise more of Dickens’s oeuvre – count me in.
Judith Kerr, who died in May, approved of the new Lupus Films animation of her children’s book, The Tiger Who Came to Tea, and it’s easy to see why. David Oyelowo was a wonderful, treacly voiced Tiger, Benedict Cumberbatch and Tamsin Greig played the parents, and Clara Ross was an innocent, adorable Sophie. With a screenplay by Joanna Harrison, directed by Robin Shaw, it stuck to the spirit of Kerr’s original work – phew! There’s always a danger with these things that Sophie could have been “updated” with telekinetic powers or a crack habit.
Kerr denied that the tiger was a metaphor for her traumatic childhood fleeing from the Nazis. Still, in this animation, there was a frisson of stripy, clawed menace – a sense of: was this a visit or an invasion? As he ate and drank everything in sight, Tiger was greedy, selfish, and naughty, a born troublemaker – which is why kids have always loved him. The featured Robbie Williams song (“Hey there, Tiger, glad you called, come on in / There’s lots of biscuits in the biscuit tin”) was more “Meh!” than Walking in the Air, but jaunty enough. The elegant simplicity and retro hues of this instant classic served as a heartfelt homage to Kerr, while the characters hung in blank space as if still on the page. Magical.
Move over, Jon Pertwee, there’s a new Worzel Gummidge in town. Mackenzie Crook wrote, directed and starred in this festive two-parter, reviving the scarecrow of Scatterbrook Farm. Prosthetics resulted in a macabre reimagining of Worzel, with a beard like white worms, sprouting roots for fingers, and eerie blankness when his military coat flapped open. (My first thought was: “Did I once meet you at Glastonbury?”)
Crook’s Gummidge was also environmentally aware, with Michael Palin appearing as his creator, the Green Man. Gummidge’s foster “chillen” friends, Susan (India Brown) and John (Thierry Wickens), staying with Mr and Mrs Braithwaite (Steve Pemberton and Rosie Cavaliero), lent a wry modern feel (when John’s phone is lost, Susan says: “We’ll survive, it will be like the olden days, like the 90s or something”). Elsewhere, there was joyous daftness to be had from a biker gang of scarecrows (who just ran around holding handlebars in mid-air), and the best of Gummidge’s scornful scarecrow put-downs. “He couldn’t scare a meadow pipit!”
Gavin & Stacey returned, 10 years since the last sighting of the two merged families from Barry in Wales and Billericay in Essex, created by James Corden and Ruth Jones. Gavin (Mathew Horne) and Stacey (Joanna Page), our cash-and-carry Romeo and Juliet, were fighting to keep their flame alive, while Uncle Bryn (Rob Brydon) hyperventilated about Christmas dinner timings, and Pam (Alison Steadman) fretted about staying in Wales: “I’m not using Gwen’s towels – it’s like drying yourself with Ryvita.”
Perhaps mindful of his overbearing international fame, Corden kept his character, Smithy, embedded in the cast, juggling a hypercritical new girlfriend and a marriage proposal from Nessa (Jones). When the plot edged into saccharine, Nessa was on hand to punch us back to earth, at one point musing on the sexual chemistry between her and Smithy: “On paper, it doesn’t add up. But put us between the sheets and it’s electric. We’re like Hall and Oates, Morecambe and Wise, Mel and Sue…” At which point, I think that mince pie started coming back up.
Mystify, the documentary on Michael Hutchence, written and directed by Richard Lowenstein, attempted to unravel the mysteries surrounding the INXS frontman’s life and death. An impressive selection of interviewees, from fellow INXS members, via Bono, to old flames such as Helena Christensen and Kylie Minogue, gave insights into this mercurial character. Gentle, a big reader, but also an inveterate showman, these days, Hutchence would probably be filed somewhere between Jim Morrison and Harry Styles.
It says something that no former girlfriends in this documentary seemed able to muster a bad word about Hutchence. While his relationship with Paula Yates, with whom he had a daughter, evolved into dark druggy chaos (Yates fatally overdosed a few years after Hutchence’s death), the scenes of him and Minogue travelling together on the Orient Express were all about fresh young love.
As for Hutchence’s death by hanging in a Sydney hotel room in 1997 at the age of 37, the murk continues – was it a sex game gone wrong, a cry of despair, or the result of a horrific brain injury he kept secret? Bono observed: “He kind of lost his way and forgot who he was.” At least he’s still remembered. RIP, Mr Hutchence.
