Christmas Carole

Carole Mackay is a lipsticked Grinch with a killer bob. The sort of woman who tosses a half-drunk coffee from her chauffeur-driven 4×4 and owns a pristine penthouse with shelves of business awards and zero humanity. The modern embodiment of Ebenezer, in other words. Selling “Christmas tat” for maximum profit, she stands to pocket £100 million from a merger at midnight.

All this is unsustainable behaviour in a festive drama, of course: cue cathartic visitations from Morecambe and Wise (the delightful Jonty Stephens and Ian Ashpitel), Jo Brand and Nish Kumar, which is where the fun really starts. And while you can’t improve on Dickens’s original, Suranne Jones raises the “bah” with her modern miser, in a redemptive tale with twist of 2022.