Picture from Wikipedia

Okay so now it is okay to mention Christmas as it is the first of December, just don't mention it to me and we'll be fine. 

Continuing with my obsession I watched another adaptation of A Christmas Carol today, one which I actually bought on DVD early this year and have had to wait until now to watch. I bought it for two pounds in Fopp in January and I simply can't watch Christmassy things during the year, one of the worst things in the world is sitting down to an episode of The Simpsons during the summer and finding out that it's a Christmas show. 

Ebenezer is a 1998 TV movie in which the story has been moved from Victorian London to the Wild West and stars Jack Palance as Scrooge. This Scrooge is a saloon owner with a sideline as a cheating card player who fleeces money out of people without a care in the world. He beats someone on Christmas Eve and gives him a day to clear out and leave his farm which is now his and is challenged to a shoot out on Christmas morning. There's a plot device in which the farmhand's eyesight lets him down and people keep telling him to get glasses, which comes in handy as Ebenezer (after the customary visit in the night from the three ghosts) deliberately loses allowing himself to be shot at knowing he will miss. 

It isn't particularly Christmassy apart from the mentions of Christmas Eve as if to remind the viewer that they're watching a Christmas movie, but as an adaptation it is interesting to watch as the writers have had to effectively start again. There aren't a lot of truly alternative versions of the story, there's a few modern day adaptations (Scrooged being the best of the bunch closely followed by Ross Kemp's version in 2000) that I can think of and it got me to wondering what other directions it could go in. There is a book in which the story is intertwined with a zombie invasion and I have seen a TV film on one of those Christmas movie channels in which a female publishing boss is the main character called It's Christmas, Carol (see what they did there?) but these are few and far between. 

Please read the December newsletter.

The Sunday Alternative Podcast #66 is available from here.

This week's edition of The Random Saturday Sessions with Gerry Trimble is available from here.

There is a danger that I could get used to doing nothing creative all day, although I doubt it as I have been itching to start writing again or recording the two remaining audio books I need to do before the end of the year. I am looking forward to being able to make good on my New Year’s resolution to do at least one thing useful a day, even while I’m watching a film with Mandi I am planning something. Today I came up with the idea of setting up another blog devoted to reviews of films in my collection of adaptations of A Christmas Carol, but then I decided against it as I am putting out quite a lot of free content and although the PayPal button brings in a good amount for the fund to help me continue to provide free entertainment, I could put this idea into Kindle form to bring in some money that way. I’m not Santa Claus after all so I shouldn’t have to rely entirely on donations. It is nice that people drop a virtual coin in my upturned hat of course so I will still be putting out the freebies to be enjoyed. Talking of which, my Bandcamp profile has plenty to choose from.

We were both in a better mood today despite the boiler still being knackered, so we went to my dad’s house for showers before we headed for town. Mandi wanted once again to buy Christmas decorations so after a nice cappuccino stop we headed for John Lewis (I’ll be writing about this year’s Christmas adverts once I have seen them all, I have seen the John Lewis advert and it is a work of art, a huge improvement on last year’s cartoon). Once that was out of the way (I still can’t get excited about Christmas, what with it being November and everything) we went DVD shopping. To add to my collection of adaptations of A Christmas Carol, I bought Ebenezer, a western version of the story with Jack Palance in the role of Scrooge. It’s a bit of an obscurity hence the cheap price in That’s Entertainment, but I have never shied away from a crap (in a brilliant way) film, in fact I once built a video series around it. I haven’t watched it yet as Mandi doesn’t fancy it, so it will be one of my cold afternoons on the sofa with a mug of Oxo films. I have swung back to the idea of doing a blog rather than a book of reviews of the adaptations of the story; it will of course carry the PayPal button so that donations can be made in appreciation. In order to bring some extra cash in for my filming projects next year I may think about carrying adverts on some of the blog pages, it doesn’t bring in a fortune but it all helps. Oddly enough, a version of A Christmas Carol is one of the things I hope to be doing next year.

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