Steven Knight and Tom Hardy, who also work together on Peaky Blinders and Taboo, are collaborating once again on a BBC One adaptation of Charles Dickens’ iconic festive yarn, A Christmas Carol. Today, some fresh details have surfaced…

Trusted industry website The Knowledge Online reports that the BBC production will being pressing ahead shortly, with a late-spring shoot being confirmed.

Ridley Scott’s ‘Scott Free London’ company and Hardy’s own ‘Hardy, Son And Baker’ production company are both working on the project, with a view to making three 50-minute episodes.

Knight, talking to Collider, previously offered this explanation of the upcoming A Christmas Carol:

“We’re planning to shoot this year and hopefully get it on the screen for Christmas… It’s BBC plus an American element which has not been announced yet.”

That American element – could it be a streaming service like Netflix or Amazon Prime, who could carry the show to an international audience beyond the BBC’s boundaries? We’ll just have to wait and see.

Knight also said this, revealing that the Hardy-starring A Christmas Carol will also be a part of some larger Dickens-based plans:

“What I’m planning to do is adapt five Dickens books—A Christmas Carol plus four novels—and do it over a period of six or seven years and have a repertory of actors, and I think we’ll get the best actors in the world, hopefully, to take part because the Dickens characters are so great. And just do like [David] Copperfield and Oliver Twist and Great Expectations and do them in a modern way. Not really in a Taboo way, but sort of like that.”

This sounds like a similar approach that the BBC has employed with its Agatha Christie adaptations in recent years, with a cast of famous actors assembling once a year – normally around the Christmas season – to bring us a glossy, high-end adaptation of a classic.

This sounds like a strong idea to us, especially if it means more big names adapting iconic stories on the small screen. As we hear more, we’ll be sure to let you know.