What the Dickens? A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong kills a classic with comic zest: review

Having already enjoyed one A Christmas Carol that could have gone wrong but didn’t (the one delivered with gusto at my children’s primary school a couple of weeks ago), I started  to watch A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong (BBC One) thinking I could probably see the jokes coming. 

This was the second TV outing for the Mischief Theatre Company, whose series of plays that “go wrong” in the manner of Noises Off have flourished in theatreland and won several awards. The premise here was that after last year’s disastrous Peter Pan, the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society (the Mischief Theatre Company’s fictional alter-ego) had been banned by the BBC from ever setting foot in their hallowed studios again.

Undeterred, the CPDS decided to storm a BBC production of A Christmas Carol and take over. Derek Jacobi was only a few Humbugs in to his stride when masked raiders kidnapped him and dumped him in a coffin. From there, the CPDS proceeded to dismantle the Dickens classic with a mixture of massive incompetence and total farce. 

The question once again was whether what works in the theatre would translate to the screen – the TV camera is much closer than the theatre audience and subtler comedy can yield greater rewards. Then again, people falling over is still very funny. A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong tried every kind of joke under the sun and most of them landed – stagehands wandered into shot, the sets fell apart and a running gag about Bob Cratchit not knowing his lines and so writing them on props got better and better as they flogged it to death. If you like good bad jokes (I do), then this was very heaven. 

The problem with this type of calamity humour is one of escalation – if the basic joke is things going wrong, then just how wrong can they go? A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong went as far as to take the bickering company out of the studios altogether and into a local Tesco’s, by which point it felt as if things were not merely wrong, but fully meta. 

A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong was genuinely funny; funnier than 2016’s Peter Pan Goes Wrong – but they might want to think about whether it’s a trick that bears repeating every year.