“A Christmas Carol” is one of the quintessential stories about the Yuletide season. First published shortly before Christmas of 1843, this Charles Dickens novella is credited with popularizing the secular celebration of Christmas festivities in Victorian England.
Dickens’s story has been told and retold countless times onstage, on the airwaves, on screen, and in print. Unfortunately, the classic tale has been replaced by more frivolous holiday entertainment. Perhaps a new take on the holiday ghost story is needed today.
“The Christmas Carol” has a rich history with radio. Lionel Barrymore, dramatic actor of the stage and screen, performed it on the radio every Christmas Eve from 1934 through 1953 (except during a hiatus for his wife’s death in 1936 and his own illness in 1938).
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Award-winning Welsh actor John Rhys-Davies provided his magnificently resonant voice as the narrator. Sean Astin, perhaps best known for appearing alongside Rhys-Davies in Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy as Samwise Gamgee, voiced the irascible title character. The supporting voice actors include Juliet Mills, Ben Barnes, Bethany Joy Lenz, Ryan O’Quin, Clive Standen, Lucy Punch, and Maxwell Caulfield. It was produced by Mark Ramsey and Jim Young.
After “Scrooge” debuted last year, it was downloaded and played over 480,000 times. It became No. 1 on the Apple Podcast Chart in the Fiction category. It also was nominated for the 2023 Ambie for Best Performance in Audio Fiction and won the 2023 Christian Music Broadcast Podcast of the Year award.
“Inside two Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) facilities, inmate DJs will air ‘SCROOGE: A Christmas Carol’ on prison radio stations on Christmas Eve. Additionally, the podcast will be uploaded to all TDCJ inmate tablets across the state. This will allow inmates to listen to the podcast while their family simultaneously listens to it on radio stations in their communities. Many will share the experience by talking with their spouses and children on the phone during the podcast.”
The Original Tale
“A Christmas Carol” is a story about generosity, charity toward the poor, and what it means to have the spirit of Christmas in your heart all year long. Most adaptations of “A Christmas Carol” take liberties with certain plot details. Some changes are even better-known than their original counterparts.
But this “Scrooge” doesn’t include common deviations from Dickens’s original tale, such as the dismissal of Bob Cratchit for being late the day after Christmas in the foretold future or the reformed Scrooge’s visit to the Cratchit home on Christmas Day. Instead, it created some very tasteful additions to explore the central character’s relationships.
The book tells us that Scrooge spent his formative years in a cold boarding school, where he remained the only person in the school every Christmas, year after year, as the other boys went home to their families. All we know of his father is that he was a stern man who eventually softens and happily allows his son to return home, at his younger daughter’s request.
“Scrooge” delves deeper into the miser’s family story to reveal a troubling encounter with a bitter, debt-ridden convict father, which robbed him of his innocence and convinced him to value worldly gain above family life. As Ebenezer the boy grows into a man, he convinces himself that his father taught him a valuable lesson about survival; despite this, he fosters increasing bitterness and anger toward his father.
Once Scrooge is a young businessman, the older miser Jacob Marley becomes a father figure to him, as well as a business mentor and eventually business partner. In this podcast, Marley has a more important role in Scrooge’s development.
Often, current retellings of classic tales create such a tragic backstory for a despicable villain that he ends up becoming a pitiable antihero. Thankfully, “Scrooge” avoids this. Through this expansion of what Scrooge’s childhood could have been, we see a boy who was deprived of a caring father’s loving guidance.
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The script is well-crafted and entertaining. Except for a few uses of the word “okay,” which rang as modern to my ears, it was a convincing recreation of Victorian England. The audio quality is crisp. All the voices and sound effects were loud and immersive even on my woefully inadequate laptop speakers.The acting was very engaging, as each voice created a character I could vividly picture. At the center of it all, of course, is the dynamic Sean Astin, whose emotional, expressive voice will be instantly recognized by his fans (even if his British accent hasn’t improved since “Fellowship of the Ring”).
I recommend that you add “Scrooge” to your holiday entertainment. As we celebrate all that Christmas Day means and carry the glad tidings into the new year, this fresh take on the Dickens classic is a powerful reminder that no one is beyond hope.
As Joe Paulo, the president and CEO of Hope Media, said, “At its heart, ‘Scrooge: A Christmas Carol Podcast’ is more than just an audio drama—It’s a movement for redemption and reconciliation. By highlighting themes of forgiveness, transformation, and hope, the podcast connects families and fosters an environment of growth and purpose regardless of our circumstances. We are extremely pleased to see how the inmates are engaging with the SCROOGE podcast and how it is bringing families together both inside and out of the correctional facilities.”
