A Christmas Carol was the first Doctor Who Christmas special produced and written by Steven Moffat and starring Matt Smith. It has Amy and Rory trapped on a doomed spaceship, which for handwavium reasons only the Scrooge-like Kazan Sardick (Michael Gambon) can save. The Doctor goes into Sardick’s past to make him into a nicer person through the love of the beautiful Abigail (Katherine Jenkins). Unfortunately for more handwavium reasons this means that Sardick no longer has the power to save the doomed spaceship, but luckily Abigail’s voice resonates at just the right frequency, so she saves the day (it is implied that she then dies of some fatal but not very debilitating illness). The music is good.
I ranked it fourth out of five votes in that year’s Hugo Awards, noting:
Don’t get me wrong – this was a lovely episode of Doctor Who and just right for Christmas evening. But as a work of SF, I think the other nominees are better.
Rewatching it, I felt the same; it’s a remake of Dickens in Doctor Who terms with light comedic relief from Rory and Amy, the story line is a little too clever and also a little too simple (often the case with Steven Moffat), and it’s perfect fare for a day when you’re not expecting anything too demanding on the brain cells. It did inspire one of the more remarkable cosplays that I saw at Gallifrey One in 2013:
Jaime Beckwith and Leslie Grace McMurtry have taken the interesting tack of looking at the TV episode in the context of Charles Dickens, asserting firmly that it “remains the only explicit adaptation of another text in the Doctor Who back catalogue.” I disagree with that – I think that The Androids of Tara is even more closely aligned with The Prisoner of Zenda – but I can see their point.
A short introduction looks at Christmas specials in Davies and Moffat era Doctor Who.
The first chapter, “A Traditional English Christmas With Sharks”, considers the history of Christmas in Britain, the previous adaptations of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and its importance in British popular culture.
The second chapter, “A Blot of Mustard, a Crumb of Cheese”, looks at Steven Moffat’s gift for transforming apparently normal situations into fairy tales.
The third chapter, “Time and Relative Child-centrism”, looks at children as focal narrative figures in Moffat’s Doctor Who. Its second paragraph is:
Had it always been thus? Could British audiences expect throughout the 20th and 21st centuries to encounter Dickens (and ACC [A Christmas Carol]) in late December? Certainly, on British television December was seen as a good time to air adaptations of Dickens’ works. On the BBC, adaptations of ACC aired on Christmas Day 1950, Christmas Eve 1977 and a few days before Christmas in 2019. The 1999 TV series of David Copperfield debuted on Christmas Day, and the 1976 episode of A Ghost Story for Christmas was an adaptation of the short story ‘The Signalman’ (1866). The Pickwick Papers (1952), David Copperfield (1974) and Great Expectations (2011) all first aired in December. In 2007, Dickens was central to the battle for the Christmas season ratings, with the BBC broadcasting a five-part adaptation of Oliver Twist in the week leading up to Christmas, and ITV airing a feature-length adaptation of The Old Curiosity Shop on Boxing Day (with production design by Michael Pickwoad, of whom more in Chapter 4).
The fourth and longest chapter, “The Pickwoad Papers”, looks in great and pleasing detail at the superb design of the story.
The fifth chapter, “What Right Have You To Be Merry?”, looks at the Doctor’s habit of interference in human timelines.
A brief conclusion, “Everything’s Got To End Some Time”, summarises the above.
I still feel that the actual story is not particularly memorable, but Beckwith and McMurtry gave me some pause for thought about where it came from. You can get their Black Archive here.
I only recently watched The Muppet Christmas Carol for the first time, which sticks surprisingly closely to the original text, but as a result of that experience combined with reading the Black Archive monograph, I was inspired to go back and read Dickens once again, probably for the first time since I was a child. The second paragraph of the third ‘Stave’ of the short book is:
Gentlemen of the free-and-easy sort, who plume themselves on being acquainted with a move or two, and being usually equal to the time of day, express the wide range of their capacity for adventure by observing that they are good for anything from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter; between which opposite extremes, no doubt, there lies a tolerably wide and comprehensive range of subjects. Without venturing for Scrooge quite as hardily as this, I don’t mind calling on you to believe that he was ready for a good broad field of strange appearances, and that nothing between a baby and a rhinoceros would have astonished him very much.
It’s tremendous, even when you know what is going to happen; Dickens sometimes succumbed to mawkish sentimentality, but here he largely keeps himself restrained and lets the story tell itself. I found I had something in my eye as I got to the end, and you will too. God bless Us, Every One!
