Ross Kemp plays "Eddie Scrooge" in this ITV TV movie adaptation of A Christmas Carol from 2000. While the film Scrooged (1988) is obviously the definitive present-day-set (present day at the time of making, that is) version, this attempted to set itself apart from the many, many other adaptations by being set on a London housing estate, with Scrooge and Marley as loan sharks.
An additional twist on the traditional story is that, after each visit from one of the ghosts, Scrooge relives Christmas Eve over again until he mends his ways - a subplot blatantly stolen from the film Groundhog Day - did the writer just watch a bunch of Bill Murray films as his inspiration for this?
There's a level of cheesiness and sentimentality inherent to A Christmas Carol that is hard to escape from. Once you accept and get past that, this was better than it had any right to be for what must have been fairly cheap to make, and little more than a vehicle for Ross Kemp as the 'star.' The Groundhog Day stuff actually made for an interesting twist on the usual story - Scrooge gets genre-savvy pretty quickly once it starts happening to him, although that was probably forced upon the makers due to the restricted run-time.
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