Is it Little Nell, or Tiny Tim on his crutch, or perhaps Bill Sikes with Bull’s-Eye the dog? Maybe it is Bleak House’s tenacious Inspector Bucket, or Mrs Gamp from Martin Chuzzlewit, with her furled umbrella? None would be exactly an unexpected caller in the run-up to Christmas. Charles Dickens’s highly recognisable characters have been endlessly repackaged for television audiences; but this year, for the first time, they will actually be meeting each other.
In BBC1’s key festive offering, Dickensian, Fagin, played by Anton Lesser, and Scrooge, played by Ned Dennehy, are to go head to head on the cobbled streets of a vast set, built inside an old factory in Greenford, west London.
Twenty-seven new “Victorian” structures will provide a den for the Artful Dodger and his fellow pickpockets from Oliver Twist, as well as draughty office space for Scrooge’s unfortunate factotum, Bob Cratchit. Spiralling around a 300ft-long high street, broad enough to drive a horse and carriage through, there are alleyways housing The Old Curiosity Shop, The Three Cripples pub from Oliver Twist and the great iron gates of Satis House from Great Expectations. It is a giant mash-up that sprang from the mind of Tony Jordan, creator and lead writer on the 20-part show.
“The set is a crazy place, but it feeds into the atmosphere for the actors. Dickens used the weather and the light almost like a character in his stories and this was a way for us to create daylight, dusk and night whenever we wanted it,” said the former EastEnders writer, who is confident he is doing right by some of the most venerated novels in English.
“If Dickens were here he would be doing this, because he was a showman,” said Jordan. At a cost of half a million pounds for each of the half-hour episodes, his Dickensian cityscape is peopled by some of the country’s leading actors, including Stephen Rea as Bucket, Pauline Collins as Gamp, Tuppence Middleton as a young Miss Havisham, Caroline Quentin as Mrs Bumble the Beadle’s wife and Omid Djalili as Mr Venus from Our Mutual Friend.
Jordan was determined to inject a tincture of risk back into TV treatments of Dickens and to introduce viewers to a wider population of characters than Scrooge and Miss Havisham: “With Miss Havisham, all you see each time is a mad old bird in a wedding dress. Do you really need another one after Gillian Anderson and Helena Bonham Carter have done it? I found a passage in Great Expectations explaining how, as a young woman, she was cheated by her half-brother and how he conspired with a man named Compeyson. You haven’t seen that before. It is only about 25 words, but it is still Dickens.”
Jordan also shows us Scrooge’s partner Jacob Marley (Peter Firth), before he acquired his ghostly chains, and looks at famous scenes, such as Oliver asking for “more” in the workhouse, from a fresh point of view. Inspiration came from imagining Dickens at work. The characters, Jordan suggests, all lived inside the author before they were committed to the page. It sounds like a description of the watercolour, Dickens’ Dream, by Robert William Buss, which depicts the sleeping writer at his desk in Gad’s Hill, with all his creations dancing around his head.
“That’s it! What I think I have done is created the inside of Charles Dickens’s head. The closest I can get to explaining it is that Dickensian is not inspired by Dickens’s novels, but that Dickens’s novels are inspired by Dickensian!” said Jordan.
Access to the great man’s brain allows Jordan to mix up timelines, as well as stories, so that one affects another. “Let’s face it, Charles Dickens has got more talent in his little finger than I will ever have. But this is the only way I could get into it – writer to writer.”
It is a risky trick to pull, inviting the scorn of Dickens fans and academics alike. “I am not a scholar. I have not read every novel,” said Jordan. “But the Dickens Society will love it. True, there is an irreverence within the DNA of the show which I could not have done if I were scholar, but there is also a respect for Dickens as a writer. I have worked with three Dickens experts and they have been universally positive because I am faithful to the characters.”
As Dickens himself brought back Sam Weller, popular in The Pickwick Papers, and revived him for further magazine stories, Jordan feels there is precedent. What was trickier was finding the right tone. “Someone said to me there are two kinds of Dickens, the soft focus one, the happy ending one, where it is snowing, and then the social injustice Dickens, with the gritty reality of Victorian England. He asked which one I was doing and I had to re-evaluate.”
Jordan found his answer in an image. “I have stuck with this idea in my head of an urchin boy with his face pressed up against a window looking through the glass at a big man inside, warm with a ham and a glass of port.”
Producing the new plots was a process of reverse engineering. Dickens’s original magazine instalments all ended as cliffhangers: no stretch for a man used to the closing drumbeats of EastEnders.
“I looked at All Year Round, his publication, and thought about Dickens the businessman, not Sir Charles of Dickenshire. An early episode of Great Expectations ends with soldiers knocking at the door after Pip has helped an escaped convict. Next episode you find out all they wanted was help with a broken handcuff. God, if I had ever done that!”
Jordan worked on the early scripts four years ago, looking at a cardboard mock-up of the set. He is amazed that others have not thought of combining the stories: “As a writer, sitting down to write a scene between Scrooge and Fagin, well, I don’t care about what broadcasters think. That is fun. I want to do that on a Saturday morning!”
Jordan admits that he is pretty close to being that urchin boy with his face pushed against a pane of glass. “I love that stuff. In a past life I was a Cratchit. My favourite bit of the set is their house. I want to live there. But then I love the whole place.
“I have just sat down in the street on my own sometimes after filming. It is a thing of joy.”
