Christmas Clue Cuts

Christmas Day 2003: I'm Sorry I Haven't a Christmas Carol makes its premiere on BBC Radio 4. It is quite a remarkable accomplishment by writers Graeme Garden and Iain Pattinson - using a comedy panel show as the template for an adaptation of A Christmas Carol, with chairman Humphrey Lyttelton cast as Ebenezer Scrumph, regular panellists Garden, Barry Cryer and Tim Brooke-Taylor as (amongst many other roles) the Ghosts of Christmas Pissed, Present and Queen Boadicea (The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come having been delayed due to unforeseen circumstances), and regular pianist Colin Sell as Colin Crotchit, with Stephen Fry as the narrator and other members of the show's extended family of semi-regular panellists making up the rest of the cast.

October 2004: I'm Sorry I Haven't a Christmas Carol is released on CD and audio cassette, as a specially extended edition boasting "over 20 minutes of never-before-heard material".

December 2019: Some idiot with an arbitrary target of keeping his blog updated once a week for as long as possible decides to write something on that extended edit.

I had considered detailing all the additional material for the CD's edit, but that proved impractical for a number of reasons, chiefly being that the extra scenes can run anything up to 6 minutes, and often become very difficult to transcribe (if not impossible, in the case of Cheddar Gorge). So here's a slightly different approach.

There are two centrepiece additions to the extended cut on the CD: at the Toksiwigs' party, before Scrumph and the Ghost leave (after Mrs Toksiwig meets Charles Dickens), there is a game of Victorian Sound Charades, which is very funny and must have been a real wrench to lose in the edit. It is also perhaps where the special's line becomes most blurred between being a panel game and a work of fiction, and is interesting from that point of view.

The second is at the end of Queen Boadicea's visitation, where all the Ghosts play a game of Cheddar Gorge (the self-explanatory game where panellists form a sentence by saying one word at a time). This is also very funny, but it is even more of a shame that it was cut, because it actually does some damage to the narrative - the scene ends very abruptly in the broadcast cut, and lacks Scrumph actually learning his lesson.

The most major edit after that is to re-insert a scene seemingly going into where the interval went at the original recording, which appears to have been re-instated so the episode could be split across two tapes for the cassette release (although the CD and cassette are both identical). It is interesting to note that ISIHAC releases were apparently still coming out on cassette as late as 2007, especially when you consider other BBC ranges ended that practice as early as 1999!

Other than that, the CD release is peppered with small amounts of extra dialogue cut from the original broadcast. Notable additions include an extension to the opening of the Mornington Crescent scene, Charles Dickens meeting another admirer immediately after Mrs Toksiwig (with a call-back to the 'itch' joke), and Marley's appearance in the final scene, which is a shame to lose chiefly because of the line "Well, hello, Marley! It's so nice to have you back where you belong!"

Another thing of interest is a moment that is in the original broadcast, but not on the CD! It's during the Historical Headlines round, and it's a suggestion from Jeremy Hardy: "Daily Mail: Poison Zulu spears can be launched within 45 minutes." A mistake in editing, I would've thought - or perhaps the original broadcast got complaints and they were ordered to remove it? It's a real curiosity, in any case.

There is also a second disc featuring two compilations of material from previous Christmas specials - one culled from the 1979, 1980, 1986, 1992, 1993, 1995 and 1996 specials with Willie Rushton, and one made up from the 1999 special with Stephen Fry as the guest and the 2001 special with Jeremy Hardy. The latter also appears to have some previously unbroadcast material, but it's hard to be sure (not helped by the fact that both specials appear to have had revised repeats trimmed by 3 or 4 minutes at some point).

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There was also a 2007 special in a similar vein, Humph in Wonderland. (I love both of these specials to pieces, and it is a real shame we never got I'm Sorry I Haven't a Chronicle of Narnia, or I'm Sorry I Haven't Any Room at the Inn.) This also got an extended CD release, which also breaks it into two parts despite the fact the cassette releases had been done away with at this point. The round of One Song to the Tune of Another (or, as it was for this special, One Poem to the Tune of a Song) was cut from the original broadcast, which is really a shame (any world where fewer people have heard Rob Brydon and Andy Hamilton dueting "You Are Old, Father William" to the tune of "I Know Him So Well" is a poorer one), as were the Sound Charades and Singing Relay - the CD release reinstates a lot of material to the second half, which can make the original broadcast feel a little unbalanced compared to the extended edit, and whilst certainly the extended cut of Carol helps things to breathe a little easier, the extended Wonderland does feel a lot more important. (Despite his starring role as the White Rabbit, it is a little odd that the broadcast version has so little piano work from Colin Sell.)

Humph in Wonderland also proved to be the final ISIHAC recording featuring Humphrey Lyttelton, who passed away four months after broadcast - and it does seem to me there is something enormously poignant about the fact that the last listeners ever heard of him was him dozing off during a game of Mornington Crescent...

With thanks to Ben Newsam's ISIHAC Archive