Christmas Carole

I thought I'd give this a try after seeing the trailer on nearly every Sky ad break throughout December.

It's a well shot, well acted, well-paced little TV mini movie. Suranne Jones is excellent, Rosie Cavaliero is hilarious & the whole show has a modern, funny yet warm feel throughout. Plus it's not too long either.

This seems to be another mixed-genre piece from Sky, it's colourful and funny on the surface, but it doesn't seem to do it justice treating it as a kids' movie as there are a lot of gown-up themes underneath.

Overall, Christmas Carole is a decent watch this Christmas, and a pleasant surprise!

Suranne Jones strains to carry the dead weight of this poorly developed production.

Flaccid direction forces this compilation of cutting room takes into a limp adaptation where proven talent is given no opportunity to draw in the audience.

Nish Kumar successfully reinterprets a clichéd character to show the frustration it must feel, especially when it tries to be wordlessly enigmatic.

Jo Brand seems poorly rehearsed and largely jokeless.

The Morecambe and Wise duo has real spark and charm even where the jokes failed.

This show is a good example of the risk of writing jokes for comics who do exactly that for a living. They should be trusted to amend the script.

The clunky explanation at the end revealing motives undermined a nice twist.

It appears the script was put in the hands of the wrong producers.

Well no Christmas would be complete, without at least one version of Charles Dickens classic Christmas yarn a Christmas Carol, in this case the carol being played by Suranne Jones, a very successful business woman Who takes on the part of Ebeneezer Scrooge, she hates Christmas and everything it stands for as is told in the classic tale.

The ghosts of past present and future are played by stars of light entertainment. The past is represented brilliantly by Morecambe and Wise. Played by Jonty Stevens and Ian Aspinall, and if you only watch the show for one reason watch it for their performance because if your as old as me and remember Morecambe and Wise then you will realise how good these performances are. It goes a little bit downhill after that and we all know the story and how it ends, but the performances particularly by Jones and the ever reliable Mark Benton make this a good family watch at Christmas. 7/10.

Jo brand makes jokes about throwing battery acid over people, Nish is unfunny, cant act & has a chip on his shoulder.

Throw in a lecture on sustainability and you have a terrible show.

I did laugh once at a joke by Eric Morcombe, confirming new comedy is dead.

Nothing made these days is any good. Too much lecturing and people thinking they are better than others.

They missed the whole irony of that with this story And it was so obvious from point 1 what was going to happen. If they removed jo brand and nish then id have bumped up the score.

How dare we all want plastic reindeer antlers, right?

Carole is a tough, merciless businesswoman, taking everyone for granted, driven only by one thing, money, on Christmas Eve she gets a chilling awakening.

Scrooge retold for 2022, now I'm not always sold on the modern retellings of classic stories, sometimes things can get a little lost, but this actually worked. Quite funny in parts, with a few nice surprises in store.

I loved The Morecambe and Wise sequences, very funny, wonderfully realistic, Jonty Stephens and Ian Ashpitel were excellent.

Suranne Jones is a class act, I'm a real fan of hers, no way would she have taken this on if it had been a Christmas turkey, I thought she did a great job here.

Ok, so the special effects were a bit dodgy it's fair to say, but nobody is here for those, it's all about the story.

Surprised me how good it actually was, 8/10.