Birth of a Christmas Fairy Tale - 19 December 2003

"Instant relief", it says here on the label of a small bottle.

You'll guess immediately that it's a quack medicine.

You'll also guess that the bottle I'm holding is advertised for "treatment" of the common cold.

They'd love to say "cure" but since nobody ever discovered one, if you claim cure you'll be prosecuted by the Food and Drug Administration for fraudulent advertising.

I note a small asterisk beside the glowing promise of instant relief, and at the bottom of the label in tiny, tiny print it says "by way of moderating symptoms". Thataboy.

Well I'm here to tell you that I am going to offer you instant relief. it is the relief of telling you that I'm not going to talk about Saddam Hussein, whose photograph in his hideaway, unfortunately for our view of him, gave him an astonishing resemblance to the noble, long suffering Job.

Not the best image to present to us of a man the military described as a coward in a rat hole.

Well for two hours I listened on Sunday morning to, it seemed, a hundred commentators - senators, congressmen, congresswomen, boring generals, pompous United Nations delegates - all of whom were there to tell us what it all means.

All in fact claiming a gift, not given to man or woman: the gift of prophesy.

I began to nod after I'd heard a score of repetitions, like a drum beat, of two favourite phrases: "the international community" - whatever that is - and an even more illusory body known as "the Iraqi people".

I've said before and I expect to say it many times that there is no such thing and there are the defiant Kurds who want to be no part of the Iraqi people and have lost hundreds of thousands of lives in a century in saying so.

I believe that if Churchill were president or prime minister of the coalition - not a bad idea - he'd say, as he said on similar thrilling occasions - do not be too jubilant, this is not the beginning of the end, it may not even be the end of the beginning.

So on to, to me, the never-failing magic, the most good-natured of all festivals: Christmas.

I mentioned I think two years ago how in the American South West the great influxes of immigrants - as many as poured into the North East a hundred years ago - had brought into the American Christmas a whole new variety of symbols - the Christmas tree being down there either a cactus or a pepper tree, the decorations green and yellow and black, and a whole variety of virgin Marys seen as senoritas.

The last Christmas that President Bush presided over as Governor Bush at the governor's mansion in Texas was such an exotic event that a northerner might wonder what was being celebrated.

He would soon guess however from the posting of crosses and crucifixes everywhere - inside houses and churches of course but often also stuck up boldly outdoors.

Little fear there of people bringing a First Amendment suit against the display of a religious symbol, simply because the vast majority of the new flood of immigrants from the South - from Colombia, Mexico, Puerto Rico - are Latinos and overwhelming Catholic.

We have recently, here in New York, had two separate weeks, notable for the festivals of Rosh Hashanah and Ramadan.

What occurred to me during these observances was that in the religions we know best, that are close to us in this country, each one has a period of a year, a month, a week, even with Yom Kippur a single day, which is meant to be a time of meditation about oneself, to say frankly with former Mayor Koch, "How am I doing?"

I must say, speaking as an outsider I've always thought that in the confessional the Catholics have a custom, you might say a discipline, that most of us could use - to look yourself over periodically, admit how you've behaved and might have done better.

But what penitent period does the unbeliever, the agnostic, the atheist have?

I believe I know - the Christmas Carol. Dickens's fairy tale is thought of by believers and non-believers alike as a charming bit of moonshine about an old, flinty, mean man who changed his character overnight - something we've only seen in life in a rash of Hollywood movies of the 1930s and 40s.

However, to see the Christmas Carol as something else, as an escape into one of the unsolved riddles of the human spirit, I think it helps to know how it was conceived.

It did not come about in a light-hearted Christmas party spirit. it was borne in a sweat of its author's despair and helplessness.

In 1843 Dickens was 31 and already the most famous novelist in England.

In the spring and the summer of that year he was preparing a novel on the new factory slums, a grim novelty throughout the north of England where the Industrial Revolution had been borne and was lustily thriving.

He went off on a personal tour of the manufacturing cities.

Day after day he noticed anew, what a famous visitor - the American author Ralph Waldo Emerson - had been shocked by.

"In the manufacturing towns the coal smoke and the fine soot darken the day, give white sheep the colour of black sheep, discolour the human saliva, contaminate the air, poison many plants and corrode the monuments and buildings."

I have to say all this was still true during my own boyhood in Manchester - adding, I should say, a thin veil of slippery mud that covered the pavements most of the winter.

It was to Dickens a new and far-ranging face of squalor but he was depressed by the wretchedness, the dirt and open immorality he saw among the inhabitants of these long rows of new, cramped brick houses.

And one evening in November he retreated to the comparative heaven of his hotel in Manchester and wrote to his closest friend: "God forgive us for the prosperity that is the fruit of our new machines and factories." Dickens add to his lament to his friend: "I am going to throw myself on the feeling of the people with a short story. it will attempt to exploit the notion that Christmas is a merry time but entails duties and obligations, especially to the poor."

In what William Makepeace Thackeray, his friend and rival novelist, called "a flash of genius", Dickens by conceiving the idea of a resurrected, decent Scrooge presented Christmas also as a special festival of redemption, a secular version available to believers and non-believers, a time for everybody to take stock and lead a better life.

This may sound heavy stuff to readers who've always thought of the Carol as a lightweight, jolly, sentimental thriller.

Thackeray saw in the light of the Carol "literary criticism is a secondary thing". the Carol "is," he wrote, "a sublime thing beyond criticism".

The book was an instant and immense success.

New printings went ahead at the rate of two or three in the first few weeks, so you might say that Dickens's spiritual purge earned him a material fortune. Far from it.

Throughout the run of his fame Dickens was badgered by literary pirates. The copyright laws were very ragged and the transatlantic protection of his work practically non-existent.

A couple of agile pirates printed in very large numbers their own cheap edition. Dickens sued them, whereupon the couple declared bankruptcy.

So even as Dickens was awarded £1500 damages - about £125,000 today - he received from the pirates nothing, but from the judge a bill for £700 court fees.

There's one other thing I ought to say - rarely, very, very rarely, a classic story is better in the motion picture version. it's true of the Christmas Carol.

I suppose I've seen every motion picture Scrooge since Rupert Julian (1916) to Finney, Alistair Sim and beyond.

almost without exception Scrooge is a paltering old crone or a croaking whiner, a suitable lead for a bad musical.

But in 1984 William Storke and Clive Donner put out a television version with the late George C Scott as the star.

The toy London emerged as the real Shrewsbury. the script was purged of Dickens moralising. the tone, the style of production was exactly right.

But Scott was far and away the best, the most believable Scrooge there has ever been: no paltering, no whining, a fine, well set-up banker, handsome in a portly way, firm, patient, with a fine line in low key sarcasm.

And in the subsequent replay of his life: a vital, sad, complex human being.

Before he died George C Scott gave an engaging, vibrant interview. He was in private life an engaging, vibrant man and often a violent man.

Nature built him to play the volcanic General Patton.

But the Carol, he confessed, had done something to him. He saw in it the vision of a different man.

So it was a surprising and happy thing to hear him say that his favourite role was Ebenezer Scrooge.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.