'Scrooge', 1970

The Muppet Christmas Carol was not the first musical adaptation of Dickens’s Christmas story. In this 1970 production written and produced by Leslie Bricusee and directed by Ronald Neame, Albert Finney plays the all-singing, all-dancing Scrooge with Alec Guiness as Marley’s Ghost. The marketing made fun of itself as a ‘big, new musical’ with the tagline ‘What the Dickens have they done to Scrooge?’

Programme and photographs, Scrooge, 1970 
DH1252 © Charles Dickens Museum

Image taken by Lewis Bush, 2025. This image is provided under Creative Commons License 4.0 until 1 April 2031, made possible with The National Lottery Heritage Fund.