British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC),
Rowan Atkinson, Tony Robinson, Miranda Richardson, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Robbie Coltrane, Miriam Margolyes, Jim Broadbent, Denis Lill, Pauline Melville
Ebenezer Backadder, aka. Edmund Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson) is a Victorian shopkeeper, visited by several ghosts on Christmas Eve who showed him his past ancestors as well as his future heirs, and in the process turned the gentle Mr. Blackadder into a miserable old miser after teaching him the evils of being kind and generous. But he soon learns that being mean has it’s own problems.
Many of us remember Rowan Atkinson’s “Mr. Bean” series of TV shows and movies, but Blackadder or Black Adder is his “other” series. This TV special is a twist on the Dickens “A Christmas Carol” with the ghosts changing a kind and gentle shopkeeper into a mean old miser. This is given the Atkinson treatment. Although I don’t think this is anywhere near as funny as Mr. Bean was, it’s hard to develop another character as special as Mr. Bean. Blackadder is perhaps an effort to do too much, spanning too much history, and not nearly as funny as hilarious as the other series. However, this is a cute twist on the story. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a reverse Christmas Carol, and perhaps it has its place in history for that simple fact alone. It’s definitely vintage Rowan Atkinson, and it is, after all, a TV movie, not a feature release. Fans of Mr. Bean may find this pretty funny, as Blackadder fans certainly will. For me, I expected it to be a lot funnier, and I was fairly disappointed in this version of the Scrooge story. I always said I never saw “A Christmas Carol” that I didn’t like, but perhaps this is the first!
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