Thanks to a Christmas Eve e-mail from the all-knowing Rick Scheckman, I corrected a minor factual error in the preceding post.
Also, several folks have written me to note that while Fields never played Scrooge, impressionist Rich Little did play Fields playing Scrooge. Chris Smigliano offers the following recollection…
It was a cable TV special, late seventies/early eighties, if i remember, called Rich Little's Christmas Carol. It wasn't a concert performance. It was a fully setted and costumed presentation, the idea being that Little would play about every major role in the story and each character would be based on a "celebrity," which basically meant there were a lot of back of the head shots as the camera cut back and forth between Little and a stand-in when his characters "interacted." The video tape editor for this special must have gone nuts after all the cutting and resplicing this thing required!
So it was Fields as Scrooge, Paul Lynde as Bob Crachit, Truman Capote as Tiny Tim, Johnny Carson as Scrooge's nephew Fred, Groucho Marx as Fezziwig and Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau as the Ghost of Christmas future. Sadly, memory fails me on the rest of the cast, but I'm sure Jimmy Stewart and Richard Nixon were somewhere in the mix.
Yes, I remember that now, and I just looked it up. Edith Bunker was Bob Cratchit's wife and the three ghosts were Bogart, Peter Falk as Columbo, and Sellers as Clouseau. Nixon was cast as Jacob Marley and instead of chains, he was burdened down by tapes, which was still a more-or-less topical reference in 1978. I recall the whole show as a joke that didn't sustain for the hour. Anyway, thanks to everyone who wrote and I'm going to take the rest of Christmas Eve off from weblogging. Have a nice holiday, everyone!