If it’s the Friday after Thanksgiving, then regular readers of Balladeer’s Blog know it’s the day when I kick off my annual Christmas Carol-A-Thon in which I review several versions of A Christmas Carol. I look at movies, television shows, radio shows and books which adapt the Dickens classic. Every year I present new reviews with a few old classics mixed in since newer readers will have missed them.
A CHRISTMAS CAROL (2000) – Christmas Carol-A-Thon 2025 begins with a new review. This ITV production from British television which presented the Scrooge figure as a loan shark coincidentally came out the same year as the Brazilian version which featured Scrooge as a drug dealer.
Neither one was a comedy, but this UK adaptation adds lighter moments here and there. A Christmas Carol runs just under 75 minutes and was made by a creative team that genuinely understands the Carol. You can tell not just from their insertion of some of the more obscure lines from the Dickens novel but by the way that even their necessary departures from Dickens to stay true to their loan shark gimmick still perfectly reflect the novel’s themes.
That is especially true of the way they almost seamlessly incorporate “repeating day” elements like in Groundhog Day and Happy Death Day.
To start this review, let’s look at how the production handles the major characters: Continue reading
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