I’ve been listening to a few radio dramatizations of A Christmas Carol, not only for my own pleasure as a collector of versions but also for research into possibly doing a version of my own at some point. I noticed in my old blogs from late last year that I mention a filming project to do with the story but for some reason I made no note of this and as a result I have no idea what I was planning. As it is one of my favourite stories, if not my absolute favourite story, then I am proud to have a small part in the canon with my audio book but would like to keep my hand in with various different variations. My short story Bowie Day tips its hat to A Christmas Carol without being a Christmas story but I haven’t given up hope of either making a film version or a radio performance.

Radio drama is something you might imagine being easy, but listening to these recordings has made me realise that there is more to it than reading a script. An actor has to express everything with their voice and help the listener to picture the story in their heads, which you can’t simply do by reading words off a page. As a lover of radio as a medium I am tempted to try my hand at a proper old style radio version.

It occurs to me from watching different versions, particularly movie adaptations, is that you have a certain amount of licence to do what you like with the script. Obviously the story is a long way out of copyright so it isn’t as if Charles Dickens himself is going to slam a lawsuit on you for using his work, which is part of the beauty. Ross Kemp played a debt collector called Eddie Scrooge in a version set in the modern day, which I have probably written before is exactly what Dickens would have written if he was around now. The scope for doing whatever you like with the basic premise is a blank canvas apart from the bullet points of a mean person being visited by his dead business colleague and three ghosts before eventually learning the error of his ways and turning over a new leaf and becoming the nicest most generous man in town. We saw the Christmas future in which Tiny Tim died and nobody cared that Scrooge had met his lonely end, and he knew that he could change his destiny by honouring Christmas, but what if he’d woken up on Christmas Day and said to himself, “fuck it”?

In the musical version starring Kelsey Grammer, we see a glimpse of a back story involving Scrooge’s father being sent to prison for debt which prompted his obsession with saving money and never getting into debt. In Scrooge’s visit to the past we also see Jacob Marley dropping dead on the Christmas Eve seven years prior to the story and another Christmas past in which his old boss Fezziwigg is turned down for a loan therefore finishing his business (which in this version is a bank although it is never clear what he was supposed to be doing). Albert Finney’s Scrooge dons a Santa Claus suit to deliver the gifts on Christmas Day, although I’m not 100% sure that Santa was around (in the red-suited, white bearded ‘ho ho ho’ sense that we know of now), and The Muppets had two Marley brothers.

The other characters have never really been fully explored outside of the book so we don’t know about the life of Jacob Marley for example who we are told was just as mean and nasty as Ebenezer, or Bob Cratchit who ended up somehow working for a rich but mean money lender while still living in poverty. As Tiny Tim didn’t die what happened to him? What about the ghosts too? How did they end up with the job of changing a person’s attitude therefore saving their lives?

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