A Christmas Carol: Ranking - 199

 A Christmas Carol

(Christmas Special, Dr 11 with Amy and Rory, 25/12/2010, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, directed by: Toby Haynes) 

'Well well my boy, I'm the ghost of Doctors past. So, feeling a bit crotchety this yuletide, hmm? So you think you've got a broken heart, eh? Well, what about me - I had to leave behind an Aztec bride who made me some cocoa! You'll get over it though, it only takes a few thousand years. Oh and incidentally, a merry Christmas to those of you at home!' 

'Well, blimey! What am I doing here then eh? Apparently I'm the ghost of Doctors future - brilliant! One minute I was pushing Ryan off a bike and talking to space frogs and savouring the delights of Sheffield and now suddenly I'm here. Of course I've been there and everywhere, me. And I remember this one. You need to open up your heart to your Fam, you old Scrooge or everyone will have a terrible Christmas. Not that I've ever has a terrible Christmas, not with this face. Odd that, I used to have so many but now everything always seems to happen on New Year's. Anyway, here's my special surprise celebrity guest from history to tell you why you're wrong. Charles Dickens! Yes of course its me again. And yes I am a woman now, cheeky! Oi, what do you mean you're suing for copyright? You nicked the Gelth from me for your ghosts you know...'    

Ranking: 199

In an emoji: 🦈

One of the great things about this show is how it’s always surprising me, always. I’ve learnt the hard way down the years to ignore whatever you read about a Dr Who story during production or in the TV write-up before it’s on, because I’ve been burned so many many times before - the stories I’m most looking forward to from the description often end up being disappointing and the ones that don’t sound very good often end up my favourites. Even so, I admit I was particularly worried about this one. I’ve never been the biggest fan of the Christmas specials, which can be a tad schmaltzy (bah humbug!), and when I read that this one was just Charles Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’ – perhaps the most obvious festive plot of them all - with warbler Kathleen Jenkins (the Spice Girls of the classical world) as the latest unlikely miscast celebrity guest, well, I didn’t see how this one could possibly work. I mean, it’s not like the plot’s going to surprise you in any way is it? And if new showrunner Steven Moffat, writing his first Christmas special, had already fallen into the trap of stealing from the most obvious source material possible (thanks to the ghosts of Christmases past, present and future ‘A Christmas Carol’ has a claim to be the first scifi work of fiction, albeit with spectres who have special powers rather than time-travellers per se) then heaven help what the Christmas special were going to be by the end. 

 And yet the Dr Who version of ‘A Christmas Carol’ ends up being one of my very favourite of the festive specials in the end, because of how well everything is done. Dickens himself would surely have approved of a future where capitalism means people in debt sticking their loved ones in a cryogenic chamber until their fees are all paid up – if any of the villains of his Victorian London had the opportunity to do it that’s exactly what they’d do (‘Please sir I want some more’ ‘More? You’re not even getting the same gruel again for another ten years!’) The theme of time travel is as well handled by the master of the concept as you’d expect (no writer uses time as a ‘character’ as well as Moffat and few stories weave that theme in as well as this one does) Yes the plot, of the Doctor desperately trying to exploit the good he sees in Kazran, the only person who can save Amy, Rory and hundreds of other people from their crashing spaceship by going back in time to make him happier, goes exactly where you expect it to (well, aside from the space-fish, unless I somehow missed that in Dickens’ novel) but it does so with some class. Yes you know the ending, but there’s a lot of joy to be had from working out how we get there (not least with the extra frisson that Katherine Jenkins as Abigail is poorly and only has a limited amount of days to live, just when Kazran is falling for her). Yes Katherine Jenkins in her first acting role is no Billie Piper as far as singer-actors go, but she’s watchable and far from being the music-fest I feared it’s kept to a bare minimum and used as an actual part of the plot. And most of all, this story has bags of imagination galore (did I mention alien fish?!) 

 By his own admission Moffat was struck by writer’s block for this story, seemingly worse than he had at any other time as show-runner. Unlike Chris Chibnall, who didn’t like the festive slot, he liked it only too much and as a big fan of both Christmas and Who totally believed that Russell T Davies’ tradition of keeping the two together was worth pursuing. But how to do it? Russell had done all the obvious Christmas angles Steven could think of. Besides, the quirk of the Dr Who schedules meant that he was writing this story in April, when Spring was just starting to happen and the sun was coming out – Christmas seemed very far away (even if, from a production point of view, it was already a tight squeeze). Part of the problem was that Moffat was stranded by the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull (which sounds like a Dr Who monster from the New Adventures Who novels) which grounded all planes for a while in 2010. Moffat was meant to be writing this story at home but instead was stuck in a hotel room following an appearances at yet another Dr Who convention in super-sunny Los Angeles (this being the year when Who finally took off in the States some 45 years after Terry Nation first tried to crack the most lucrative market in the Western world) and it didn’t help both that the fans kept asking what wonderful ideas he was working on next when his head was so empty and that his Who friends, with sudden time on their hands, kept inviting him out for drinks. It was while drinking with Karen Gillan and a joke that maybe he should be drinking mulled wine instead to get in the mood that she came up with the idea: what she would do is turn the heating down in the hotel room, stick up some Christmas decorations, watch a Christmas film or two and download a playlist of Christmas carols and songs. And it worked: we don’t know which film version of ‘A Christmas Carol’ the showrunner watched (maybe a few: there are so very many, all different and all of which take liberties with the original text the most ‘accurate’ of which is technically the Muppets version which actually features Charles Dickens as a narrator but that’s by the by. Heck, even I was in this at school – and yes I did play Scrooge thanks for asking, typecast as a curmudgeon as I was even at the age of seven) but it started him thinking that rather than create his own idea maybe he could just borrow the most obvious story of them all? After all, incorporating existing works is a long-standing Who tradition, particularly in the 4th Doctor years (when so many stories were riffs on Frankenstein, Dracula, Fu Manchu, you name it, never mind every other story having some ode to Quatermass in there somewhere). 

 Either by chance or genius (I’m still not sure which) Who-ifying this work makes it one of the stories that’s most central to one of the longest-running themes that’s been in the series since the beginning: the idea that all of us have impact on the people around us and that our actions today are both informed by the actions of the past and inform the actions of the future (something that’s not actually there in the original ‘A Christmas Carol’, which is just three different ways of shocking Scrooge). The original Who historicals, particularly, had been part of this great thread that’s weaves its way across the series for sixty years now : that to understand the present you need to understand both the past and the fears of where we might be going in the future. Like Scrooge, Kazran is not a bad person, he’s just led a bad life. In the original he blew it with his girlfriend Bella by spending too much time trying to make money, before she dies (like many a Dickens heroine). Having lost the only person dear to him Scrooge becomes twisted and bitter, making it out on everyone around him and hoarding yet more money as a shortcut to happiness that was never going to work, because money is a one-way street: it can’t love you back the way that you love it. The ghosts remind Scrooge of who he used to be, show him the impacts of the way he treats other people and threatens him with the comments people make about him when he’s dead and buried, his money no use to him then, until Scrooge discovers the wonders of being given a second chance and becomes the kind, generous, benevolent person he was always meant to be before he took a wrong path. Moffat’s version changes a few things around as he goes. The Scrooge-like Kazran is bad because his dad didn’t treat him properly and he’s tries too hard to emulate a figure who still looms so large in his life that Kazran can’t bring himself to take his father’s portrait down from the living room where it glowers at him. It’s part of a generational curse: because Kazran had no fatherly role-model he doesn’t know how to be kind to other people; he thinks his upbringing is ‘normal’. Until he meets the Doctor, who puts the fun back into his life and encourages him to be around people. While still awkward shy and occasionally grumpy he sees what he always knew was there deep down: a kind man. 

 That thread, though, isn’t necessarily original either. Moffat kind of plagiarises himself alongside Dickens for this story in that one of the first official Dr Who things he ever had published was the 7th Doctor short story ‘Consequences’ in the anthology ‘Declaog 3’. The running theme in that book was that something one Doctor did ended up echoing back and forwards through time to affect his other selves. In Moffat’s case it was Sylvester McCoy trying to research something one of the other regenerations needed, only to be kicked out of the Library of Alexandria by a grumpy librarian. Desperately needing the book, he keeps going back further and further into her past, attempting to charm her, befriend her, seduce her and shame her. It keeps going wrong, as the Librarian guesses the Doctor has been manipulating her and she doesn’t like it, until the Doctor visits the friends and has them give a lecture on the importance of beng friendly to aliens (including the lending of restricting library books!) Similarly, in this adventure, it keeps going wrong too. Like the book Kazran has a girlfriend who is sick and only has eight days to live (even if, unlike the book, we see their slow meandering courtship, one Christmas Eve at a time) and the Doctor makes a ginormous miscalculation: he doesn’t know that Abigail is dying, her body frozen as she gets gradually worse. That’s so typical of Moffat in his stories, as the writer has a real hang-up about death: he can’t even bring himself to kill off the character whose dying when we first meet her (the Dickens original is surrounded by death: Tiny Tim is the one everyone remembers but there are more). Rather than watch her final day Kazran would rather leave her and the Doctor behind, turning hard all over again. Only by showing young Kazran the man he turns into one day and shaming him can things finally be put right eventually anyway. 

 Throwing in the ‘A Christmas Carol’ story that everyone knows makes the unwieldy use of time travel more palatable and less confusing than usual for a Moffat story (the Doctor even shows current Kazran his younger self on TV and nips forward to catch him giving out the password his younger self doesn’t know at one point) and simple is good, especially when it comes to a more general audience who only tune in on Christmas Day. Notably, though, there are far less trimmings in this story than in Russell’s Christmas specials: there are some carols, the Doctor and Kazran join Abigail’s family for Christmas Dinner and saving the un-named spaceship Amy and Rory are honeymooning on (rather sweetly she’s in her policewoman kissagram costume seen in ‘The Eleventh Hour’ and he’s a Roman Centurion from ‘The Pandorica Opens’) creates a fall of snow. While Kazran makes a reference to Christmas, really Moffat’s written himself into a corner setting this one on an alien planet (all of Russell’s Christmas specials were on Earth): why would a non-Earth planet even have Christmas? Far more accurate is to say that this is a ‘Winter Solstice’ special: Moffat’s scripts make great use of the parallel between the old pagan customs of Christmas (when it was a celebration that we were halfway between Winter and Spring, ‘halfway out of the dark’) and how this equates to Kazran himself. It’s an idea that equates to Dr Who too as a series that (nearly) always has a happy ending and (practically) always remains optimistic about humanity but is often quite dark in the way ir presents the present and past on screen. 

 As adaptations of ‘A Christmas Carol’ go this is one of the best, very much loyal to the spirit of the book if not the plot details. There are parts that are pure Who though too, particularly the cryogenic chambers in the snow, an idea from ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’ (although on screen it looks more like ‘Attack Of the Cybermen’. No Cryons though, which is a cryon shame). No other series, too, would have a finale that depends on a singer crooning to a flying shark. It’s refreshing to have a story in which there are no real baddies (especially given that we had the whole bang lot of them together in the previous season finale) and where, for lack of a better word, Victorian upbringing is the real villain of the tale, the generational trauma that we all carry from the past that affects what we think of as ‘normal’. In that sense it’s a very 2010s kind of a story (when this sort of thing was first being talked about openly as part of the mainstream for everyone, rather than just in therapy sessions) even though it feels like a natural extension of one written in the 1840s that Dickens would have approved of (possibly even more than his own appearance in ‘The Unquiet Dead’). There are some great great lines, my favourite being the sonic paper exploding when the Doctor tries to use it as his reference as a ‘responsible’ babysitter (‘I guess I finally found a lie too big for it’ he muses, although I’m sad they cut what would have been my other favourite line, as Amy yells at the Doctor not to get distracted as the spaceship crashes, much to his indignation. ‘You’d tie your shoelaces in the middle of a supernova’ she yells at him to which he sulks ‘That only happened once’). Matt Smith is on top form, the secret Santa to this Scrooge, popping down Kazran’s chimney and using all his charm and wit plus that special mixture of authoritarianism and hopelessness that’s unique to the 11th Doctor’s boychild-wizenedhero hybrid (the scenes where the Doctor admits to being just as confused as Kazran if not more when Abigail is coming on to him – and despite technically the huge age gap it has to be said - is priceless. Matt was particularly eager to make a Christmas special as the first story that had gone out after getting the role was ‘The Next Doctor’ from two yuletides earlier andand he sat there watching ‘boy, I really hope that can be me!’ Getting this part felt like a Christmas miracle and some of that luck and magic rubs off on his performance, which is good even for him). The chase of the flying shark around Kazran’s bedroom and the Doctor desperately trying to keep the young lad safe, accidentally telling him its colour is ‘big!’ is the sort of magical scene they could only try and get away with at Christmas, even though technically it has nothing much to do with Christmas itself (talking of generational trauma it comes from Moffat’s memory of watching jaws on TV one Boxing Day and being scared silly, like many people his age, especially when his fevered imagination made them start growing legs and walking). The quick cut scenes to the Doctor and Kazran, re-appearing every year, in different costumes (one of them apparently nicked from the 4th Doctor) as Kazran is replaced by different, older, taller actors while Kathleen Jenkins remains the same is another very clever and very Moffat way of showing us time changing without having to sit us down and tell us what’s going on directly. If ever there was a Dr Who feel-good Christmas special it’s this one, which still has all the emotion and turmoil of Davies’ Christmas specials but is a little less gut-wrenching and a little more sweet. 

 The sets too make this come over well on screen and make good use of little budget, being based –sensibly for a land that’s sometimes invaded by flying fish – like a submarine, complete with round windows. Much of Sardicktown was filmed in Mir Steel in Newport, a factory that closed in 2007 but was left pretty much as it was until beong reveloped in 2011 – Dr Who had already filmed there for ‘Stolen Earth’ ‘Planet Of The Dead’ and ‘The End Of Time’, with this the last time it was seen on screen but this story uses the location better than the others. The strange metallic rusting feel of the buildings make this feel not just like a believable alien planet but a decaying alien planet that’s seen better days and has a strong community but more money than love to actually go around. In that regard it’s a pretty neat extension of Kazran Sardick himself and helps make this adaptation a little bit different to all the usual ‘Victoriana fog’ versions of ‘A Christmas Carol’ out there (so much so that it’s a shame when they finally give in and make it foggy). 

 It is, though, arguably all a little too neat and you can tell at times that this is someone adopting another work and trying to shove it into their own box, complete with bits that don’t fit, rather than coming up with an idea that works perfectly for the formula. As influential as we know the Doctor to be, it seems unlikely that calling on Kazran one day a year would turn him from a miser who would rather spend lives than money, refusing to throw open a cloud barrier in case it disrupts his supplies, especially given that he spends the rest of the year (however long or short that might be: this planet doesn’t look very big but it’s hard to tell from the shots of it in space with no other planets to go by) with his cruel father. 

There are some real plot holes here too: surely the Doctor would be better going off and changing Kazran senior and therefore making life better for the pair of Kazrans? Abigail too really should have let on about her ailment earlier (you think she’d make a comment along the lines of ‘isn’t it great – I only had a few days to live and they’re all Christmas Eves!’) technically, too, she’s ‘cheating’ the system (Kazran really wouldn’t have agreed to have someone for a set number of dates who was going to die anyway; presumably the family don’t ever have to pay the money back if they don’t want to – as it turns out they’re nice enough to give the Doctor Christmas lunch, but not everyone is that nice and it seems an odd loophole for a smart and greedy businessman to leave, you think there’d be a medical at least) and it would have been in character to make him comment on that, but they ignore it. By now the Doctor has become Kazran’s best friend (perhaps still his only friend) – surely he’d be more likely to confide about Abigail’s illness to the Doctor than throw away his only friend along with his girlfriend; given what he knows about the Doctor’s powers it seems odd too that he doesn’t at least ask if he can fix her (I mean, he probably can’t, given what we learn about interfering in personal timelines in other stories, but Kazran doesn’t know that). And talking of changing timelines, this is Kazran, the head of a planet and apparently its main if not only employer: surely changing his timeline this radically would have huge implications on lots of people’s lives? While putting Amy and Rory in danger makes this story personal, it also means removing them from most of the action so that we only see them at the very beginning and very end. The story might have been better still if we’d been reminded of the jeopardy instead of expecting a sizzled Christmas audience to remember something from a pre-credits sequence. And, indeed, running around after a shark aside, that’s the only action sequence the whole story in what’s a very talkative story even for the Moffat era of Who. 

 These are small niggling things rather than deal-breakers perhaps. What’s more of a struggle is the acting. Matt Smith is never better and Laurence Belcher as Kazran junior gives him a run for his money, acting everyone else up to the Doctor off the screen (the story really goes downhill after Kazran gets ‘big’). Katherine Jenkins is, well, a singer trying to act – she’s not as bad as by rights anyone in their first appearance ought to be but she can’t fill the screen the way we need when Amy and Rory aren’t here. There’s not enough depth to her or emotion: this is a girl whose doesn’t know what world she’s going to wake up in or how long she’s been in the cryogenic chamber who finds love in her dying days: it’s literally a smorgasbord of emotions but Jenkins only has a sort of blank stare (to be fair to her she was hired initially to do just the music before someone asked if she could act – it was the production team who pushed Jenkins into acting as well, it didn’t come from her and by all accounts she was still doubting her abilities come the end of filming). The biggest disappointment though is Michael Gambon. There needs to be whole galaxies going on in Kazran’s portrayal – he needs to be soft but tough, sweet but hard, kind but dismissive, we ought to be seeing all sides to his personality play out on screen, he needs to be, well, played by William Hartnell with the sort of crotchety fusspot with charm way. But Gambon plays Kazran as all-bad then with a vacant stare, then all good. And he plays Kazran’s dad in the exact same way, so that it’s muddling whose what in some scenes. The scenes of him watching his past back as they’re re-arranged by the Doctor who gives him new memories, ought to be playing out line by line across his face – instead he just sits there gawping as if he’s watching TV. The scene near the end, when Kazran finally cracks and turns nice, only for (spoilers) his own computer not to recognise him when the Doctor’s changes him so much (a clever twist, even if I’m not quite sure isomorphic controls work that way) ought to be one of the most harrowing, gripping scenes in all Who. Instead it falls flatter than Beep The Meep after being sat on by a Judoon . I wouldn’t say it’s the worst performance in Dr Who by any means (at least he can act, which is more than a lot of the stunt guest cast parts John Nathan-Turner came up with in the 1980s) but given his reputation, how much of the screen-time he has, what a coup it was for this series to get him at all and how fitting the part should be for him, it is a colossal disappointment. 

 The result then is another of those ‘nearly’ Christmas stories, one that gets most of the details right and with some truly excellent individual scenes but which messes up a lot of the basics. As clever as the details are there’s no getting round the humbug in the room which is that this is a great tree by someone else which has been decorated with pretty great tinsel but is still ultimately a co-authored story. A lot of it looks cheap, at least for this era of the show, perhaps because of all the money that went into the one big set (Kazran’s room) and the fish, which are well done indeed but aren’t really the heart of what this story’s about. We’ve already covered the acting but, truly, this story relies a lot on Matt Smith to get it out of trouble. If I sound like Scrooge in that summary though (like I say, typecast) then that’s only because I can see how great this story could have been. I mean it’s 2010, the first Christmas under the Coalition, when David Cameron’s response to an economic crash was to undo the safety measures predecessor Gordon Brown had put in place and make things worse with austerity measures that profited only him and his chums. A lot of people had to put Christmas on ice that year, while the people in authority got richer fatter and warmer, so it felt right Dr Who was doing that too and melting hearts into the brgain. This is exactly the time to give us a story about the dangers of hoarding when there are those around you going without and the importance of family and friends over money. I love the angle that family are more important than commerce, with the lonely Kazran more miserable in his posh mansion than Abigail’s penniless family. I do think secretly that a lot of the Christmas specials would work better without the festive trinkets and in a more normal timeslot (like I say, curmudgeonly). But this one is perfect for Christmas: it’s heartwarming without being treacly, delivers a strong message that’s timeless, tells an age-old story in a way that only this series can and is full of such joy without ever losing touch with the fact that Christmas is so often a melancholy time, a fleeting chance for peace and harmony and family reunions before Winter disperses everything all over again. For one fleeting moment Kazran gets to experience all the joy and magic not just Christmas but Dr Who can bring. I just with the stocking full of presents hadn’t been filled with quite so much coal along the way. In the end the story probably deserved to be the 4th highest watched ‘comeback’ story of all (and the most seen of al the Moffat stories at 12.1 million viewers) – but equally on balance it probably deserves to have fallen behind the previous three festive specials (well, maybe not the monstrosity that was ‘Voyage Of the Damned’. Bah! Humbug!) a mixed story if ever there was one. 

 POSITIVES + Flying alien space fish! The scenes of Matt Smith trying to capture a flying space alien shark are superb in terms of writing, character, acting and CGI (especially the CGI: they look more real than most things in this era), exploiting Matt’s amazing inability to walk in a straight line without seeming alien, and I’m amazed there wasn’t a clockwork toy of the shark because I’d be first in the queue to buy one. They should also get their own ‘Big Fin-Ish’ spin-off series surely. Big fin? Big Finish? No? Not even as a Christmas cracker joke?! Alright, please yourselves… 

NEGATIVES - Well, I’ve already picked on Kathleen Jenkins’ acting. But what about her singing?! Never have I stuck a Brussel Sprout in each ear so fast! To be fair to her again though, it’s not her fault: she’s not too bad with the carols, all of which are good choices (‘Silent Night’, ‘Ding! Dong! Merrily On High’, and the very fitting ‘In The Bleak Midwinter’ – the proper Holst arrangement of it no less; throw ‘I Wonder As I wander’ in there and you’d have my four favourite carols, itself a nice change after Russell T’s insistence on using 20th century pop songs every year to set the mood. At the time I applauded simply at having a whole special without having to listen to that Slade song again). But then they give her a ‘new’ song to sing and good gracious, anyone would struggle with t Rather than recycle an old Christmas hymn Murray Gold comes up with one of his own and it’s awful, more likely to rot your teeth than downing six variety boxes of chocolate at once.. If I was in this story I’d have put Abigail in a stasis chamber and never opened the door again after that. 

 BEST QUOTE: ‘“Nobody important”. Blimey, that’s amazing. Do you know, in 900 years of time and space, I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t important before’. 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Possibly the most obscure ‘extra’ from the modern series is a three minutes sketch from the National television Awards broadcast the week after ‘A Christmas Carol’ officially titled ‘The Doctor Saves The Day’. Dermot O’Leary is meant to be hosting but has slept in and the Doctor goes to take him there because if he doesn’t time and space will be changed irreparably. Only he keeps over-shooting and ends up seeing visions of the future for other TV celebrities along the way including a handcuffed Ant and Dec and Dot Cotton from Eastenders before travelling a hundred years in the future (when Bruce Forsyth is still hosting Strictly Come Dancing). Good news: Dermot gets to be prime minister one day! Best gag is the risqué one at the end: ‘No we’re heading to some vast and terrible arena filled with shrieking banshees out for blood and conquest’ ‘That’s it, that’s the National Television Awards!’ Understandably this one-off sketch has yet to appear on DVD or blu-ray and is now lost in the mists of space and time and youtube. That’s mostly a good thing. 

There’s additionally a Big Finish audio ‘Living History’ (2016), part of ‘The Churchill Years’ box set, that sees the Doctor travelling with two very unlikely companions: Winston himself and the younger version of Kazran he’s taken with him during a trip in the Tardis in the middle of ‘A Christmas Carol’, with Kazran pressing the former prime minister on how to woo Abigail on his return! The main story features the unlikely trio battling Romans and ends with Churchill telling Kazran that ‘at least you’ll have a good story’ to tell Abigail that Christmas.

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