The BBC plans to rewrite Charles Dickens tonight, complete with the f-word and a scene showing a character urinating on a grave. It has no right to do so.
It is typical of this increasingly cynical, ignorant organisation that it should put four-letter words into the mouth of Ebenezer Scrooge, and invent gross and disturbing scenes in a drama that is bound to be seen by the young and impressionable.
Does anyone really think the ‘watershed’ matters any more? Far better to abolish it and ask if the programme concerned deserves to be shown at all, if its makers cannot create proper drama without resorting to pornography, obscenity and violence.
It may even be that some people will actually switch on A Christmas Carol thinking that they will get – from the modern BBC of all people – a faithful version of this great and powerful drama.
We know, of course, that this can be done, thanks to Alastair Sim’s marvellous performance in the 1951 film Scrooge. This cleverly adapted Dickens’s story without in any way vandalising its central message or its genius.
But most of us have been clobbered into submission by the Corporation’s revolutionaries by now. Either we take what we are given, or we know better than to watch in the first place.
It is as if the Church of England turned St Paul’s Cathedral into a shopping mall, or the National Gallery got some Turner Prize winner to cut up its masterpieces and scrawl slogans over them.
When we inherit treasures, they are not ours to do with as we wish. We have a duty to preserve them for those who will come after us.
Charles Dickens invented Christmas, as it is celebrated in the entire English-speaking world. The festival we all hope for, and seldom achieve, is the one which eventually happens in A Christmas Carol.
We want the clear frosty morning that follows the black and freezing night. We want that transformation of mean-spirited greed into generosity. We want, in short, an earthly British miracle.
No doubt it is sentimental. Which of us is not ever sentimental? It is the other side of cruelty, and more of us are cruel than like to admit it. Dickens lived a hard and often cruel life. When he wrote A Christmas Carol, he was at a bleak moment in his career.
He was, beyond doubt, on the receiving end of many filthy curses and saw plenty of squalor and obscenity in the seething, debauched England of the time. Much of his childhood was hellish.
He knew, if anybody did, the maggoty underside of life. Yet he managed to describe its miseries and terrors without ever resorting to the cheap and easy trick of lavatory-wall language.
We know in detail the grim taste of the thin gruel in Oliver Twist’s workhouse. We know the weary despair of the child set to work in the blacking factory and the shame of the debtor’s prison.
The post Ignorant BBC Plans To Rewrite Charles Dickens and Put the F-Word Into the Mouth of Ebenezer Scrooge appeared first on LewRockwell.
The daily news and opinion site LewRockwell.com was founded in 1999 by anarcho-capitalists Lew Rockwell and Burt Blumert to help carry on the anti-war, anti-state, pro-market work of Murray N. Rothbard. Visit https://www.lewrockwell.com