TV Review : ‘Humbug!’ a Master Class in Vocal Reading

“Bah! Humbug!,” the Martin Sheen-James Earl Jones reading of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” might be seen as public television’s idea of the electronic fireplace. And what better time for cranking up the fireplace than Christmas night, when the gifts are unwrapped and the games are over and the collective stomachs are stuffed?

Taped at New York’s cavernous and imposing Pierpont Morgan Library (where Dickens’ original 1843 manuscript is stored) and produced by host Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer, this broadcast (also airing on KCRW earlier in the evening) is especially designed for those families with enough money to have gifts and full stomachs. Dickens, as MacNeil reminds us in one of several background narrations sprinkled throughout the reading, meant his ever-popular tale to be “a sledgehammer” against the social injustice and selfishness that Ebenezer Scrooge embodies. “A Christmas Carol” is an emphatic reminder that the well-to-do will also have their day of reckoning.

So this broadcast might also be a kind of sledgehammer against Scrooge politics and attitudes. (Scrooge’s admiration of London orphanages is headline-fresh.) Above all, “Bah! Humbug!” tries in its mild way to locate the story within Victorian English social conditions--the enormous gap between rich and poor, the sea of laboring children, working-class families barely eking out a living. MacNeil adds intriguing factoids: Dickens’ bitter childhood memories working in a shoe polish factory; 1843 saw not only the arrival of “A Christmas Carol,” but the first commercial Christmas card; Dickens’ rejection of friends’ advice to write a political pamphlet denouncing social inequities, in favor of a moral fiction that would lure more readers.

Sheen and Jones, two actors whom Hollywood seems to have no clue what to do with, provide a clinic in the art of public reading. Jones uses his rhythmically unpredictable, basso voice for Scrooge, while Sheen delivers a highly energetic performance for the narrative passages--one of his most energetic in memory. A tad stodgy for the small fry, this Dickensian electronic fireplace is still a good place to introduce kids to the English storytelling master--and to the moral that good and bad acts have consequences.

* “Bah! Humbug!” airs 8 p.m. Sunday on KCET-TV Channel 28. A radio broadcast airs from 6-7 p.m. on KCRW-FM.