Marley was dead, to begin with.
Oh wait, no he’s not. What the Dickens?! He’s standing right there, on the steps of his and Ebenezer Scrooge’s money-lending business. Contrary to what you may have read in A Christmas Carol, Jacob Marley is very much alive here, and being played by Peter Firth (Spooks) wearing a perpetual snarl.
Oliver Twist‘s Mr and Mrs Bumble bluster past him through the snow. Captain James Hawdon from Bleak House rowdily pours out of the pub. The living gin-blossom that is Mrs Gamp (Pauline Collins) scurries toward the Old Curiosity Shop down the street, where Little Nell lies dying. Dickens fans everywhere try to remember through their phones which book Mrs Gamp is from. (Martin Chuzzlewit… I had to look it up too).
Everyone’s out of their books and sharing a world familiar from a thousand period dramas. This is Dickensian, a Charles Dickens fan-fic dressed up in the quality trappings you’d expect from a BBC One adaptation: big sets, great costumes, plenty of recognisable talent.
Classic literary figures plucked from their texts and placed in a brand new adventure. It sounds like it could be a disaster, but it’s not. It’s actually rather brilliant. As much a sign of the strength of Dickens’ eye for characterisation as it is for the man taking those characters and plonking them together.
It’s written by Tony Jordan, who has clearly brought his years of experience writing on EastEnders to bear by essentially taking a cast of Dickens characters and placing them in a setting and episodic structure that mimics that of a soap, right down to its 30 minute structure and cliffhanger endings. Andrew Davies used the same format in his adaptation of Bleak House 10 years ago, with engrossing and terrific results.
It’s a terrific idea that harks back to the very way ol’ Charlie-Boy’s work was first published, as serialised chapters in the journal Household Words, rather than one great schoolboy-intimidating thick tome. Often, like soaps, they had cliffhanger endings. So much so that, in perhaps the first ‘Spoiler Alert!’ ever recorded in history, Americans were standing on the quayside and rowing out in boats to greet ships, asking if Little Nell lived or died in the next instalment of The Old Curiosity Shop. #RIPLittleNell
So to say Dickensian is EastEnders in a top hat is no slur. The main street, with its pub and familiar premises, is a Victorian Albert Square. The characters are a rag-tag bunch of interconnected Londoners to root for or sneer at. The main thrust of the plot is a pistol-free version of ‘Who Shot Phil Mitchell?’. All it’s missing are the famous ‘Doof-Doofs’ at the end. They certainly wouldn’t be out of place at the end of the opening episode.
Episode 1 is thinly-disguised set-up, introducing us to most of the principal players (it’s going to be interesting to see why Jordan has picked certain characters and eschewed others), and it really doesn’t matter at all if you’ve no idea what Charles Dickens novel any of those characters come from. Thanks to a script that introduces characters in the most heavy-handed way possible, you’re left in no doubt who anyone is.
Of course, the Dickens nerds (raises hand) who’ve come either by way of the novels or adaptations, will get a giddy thrill from seeing Compeyson meet a young Miss Havisham, pre-jilting, outside Satis House. Or the novelty of Bill Sykes sneering at Jacob Marley. Jordan’s clearly done his homework; allowing him to slide between the established truths of characters and give them new ways to express their idiosyncrasies.
The cast is uniformly strong, and true to their characters. It could be easy, in this public domain playground, to ham things up, to caricature. Ned Dennehy is an admirably restrained Scrooge, far from the Christmas panto version we’ve become so used to, and the character is all the better for it (although, would old Ebenezer loosen the purse strings to eat and drink in a public house?). Pauline Collins makes Mrs Gamp a comic but sympathetic drunk.
Although Peter Firth sneers admirably as Marley, he doesn’t have long to do it. Marley’s found murdered, and there’s a long list of (in)famous suspects. That would be a spoiler were it not all over the pre-publicity material.
Well, at least we’ve got 19 more episodes of mystery to go. And if you don’t take your Dickens too seriously – and no one ever should, the man wrote for the masses, not for scholars – then you’ll probably find Dickensian will live up to your great expectations.
Airs at 7pm on Saturday 26 December 2015 on BBC One.
> Order Dickensian on DVD on Amazon.
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