A Christmas Carol, review: Guy Pearce’s Scrooge is the best thing about this macabre retelling

The tale of a grouchy old businessman, haunted by past misdeeds and anxious about the future. But enough about Succession. To get everyone into the Yuletide spirit, Tom Hardy and Ridley Scott have produced a brooding muscular version of A Christmas Carol (BBC1), written by Steven Knight, the creator of Peaky Blinders. Despite the novella’s satisfying screen-ready structure, it is a deceptively tricky to adapt. Not only must you set your efforts against Dickens, you must do so in the knowledge that your version will labour forever in the shadow of one that stars Kermit the Frog.

Not that this would be easily mistaken for anything Muppety. This is a rough, dark, macabre retelling, set in 1843, which like Peaky Blinders is shot in a kind of perpetual chiaroscuro. Characters peer out of the gloom to say gruff things to each other, heels clunking on wooden floorboards. It is made by FX, “in association with” the BBC, and there’s an American sheen to it. As the first episode opens, a crow flies from a tombstone in a snowy graveyard, with a wind howling between the stones. It’s nice to see corvids still getting work now that Game of Thrones has finished, but it must be a buyer’s market. A young man pisses on a tombstone. Whose tombstone is he pissing on? Jacob Marley, that’s who. Sonorous bass rumbles in the background.

The characters are all more or less miserable, but the cast look like they’re having a good time.

Andy Serkis is the Ghost of Christmas Past, a turn seemingly inspired by the Emperor in Star Wars and vaguely Irish. Stephen Graham is wide-eyed Marley, clanking in his chains while he comes to terms with the supernatural events engulfing him. Best of all is Guy Pearce as Scrooge. Pearce plays him like a kind of Victorian Joker, voice scraping in his throat while he delivers monologues about the state of the world. Joe Alwyn’s Bob Cratchit is a sardonic clerk, sassing his tyrannical boss as he does his bidding.

The script is enjoyably mannered, with bursts of ostentatiously modern dialogue and swearing. Via flashback, we learn how Scrooge got to be this way, as the old plot starts to turn. Suffice to say we can understand why he is a bit cranky. “What’s tomorrow?” he asks on Christmas Eve, before going on a kind of pub-bore rant about whether Jesus Christ was actually born in December.

It ought to be too hammy to hang together, and it would probably have worked as a one-off film rather than the full three-hour mini-series, but I found myself watching, mainly due to the central performances.

There are slim pickings from the BBC’s festive schedule this year, which, between the Gavin & Stacey reunion and the Mrs Brown’s Boys special, looks more like reheated leftovers than Christmas feast. The other big festive drama is Dracula. The choices are clear: gloomy Victoriana or flimsy Noughties comedy. Unlike Scrooge, viewers have been left with mainly bad choices to make, so we should grab what we can.