The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby

Channel 4’s first major drama commission served notice that the BBC was not the only place in town for weighty drama. Over four consecutive Sundays in November 1982, its first month on air, the upstart channel broadcast the Royal Shakespeare Company’s groundbreaking, eight-and-a-half-hour production of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.

Dickens’s hard-hitting, socially concerned novel was entirely suited to both Channel 4, with its radical bent, and the times – in 1982, UK unemployment topped 3 million for the first time since the 1930s as the country fell into a deep recession.

The Nickleby family are destitute, living in a London slum, with Nicholas earning a pittance teaching at a dreadful Yorkshire school, Dotheboys Hall, run by the one-eyed crook, Wackford Squeers. Other notable villains include Nicholas’s uncle, the proto-Thatcherite Ralph, and the wealthy miser Arthur Gride... You can see why lefty playwright David Edgar wanted to adapt the novel, the RSC to stage it and Channel 4 to film it.

The cast includes Roger Rees as Nicholas, John Woodvine as Ralph and Alun Armstrong as Squeers. David Threlfall, later to find fame playing Frank Gallagher in Paul Abbott’s comedy drama Shameless, is poor Smike, one of Dickens’s most tragic characters.

If you think this all sounds a bit grim, don’t be put off. As with almost all Dickens, it ends happily, and The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby is a hugely entertaining roller-­coaster ride. “We come out not merely delighted but strengthened, not just entertained but uplifted, not only affected but changed,” was critic Bernard Levin’s take on the production in The Times. He wasn’t wrong. MB

Great Expectations

Time and again, TV and film have returned to Great Expectations. Steven Knight’s adaptation airing on BBC One – with Olivia Colman as the terrifying Miss Havisham and Johnny Harris as escaped convict Abel Magwitch – is, in one form or another, the 18th.

The BBC alone has contributed six, from Sunday teatime children’s versions to high-end drama.

Sarah Phelps’ acclaimed 2011 version with Gillian Anderson and Ray Winstone is barely a decade old.

All of them, though, doff their cap to David Lean’s magisterial 1946 film.

Dickens’s novel – arguably his ­greatest – contains far fewer grotesques and caricatures than normal in his works, and a memorable cast, featuring many of post-war Britain’s biggest names, give proper weight to the author’s most rounded characters. John Mills is the adult Pip, learning about life, love and humility.

Alec Guinness plays his friend, Herbert Pocket. Martita Hunt is Miss Havisham. Her adopted daughter, the haughty Estella, is portrayed by Jean Simmons as a girl and, in later life, by Valerie Hobson. Finlay Currie is an imposing Magwitch, while Bernard Miles is noble, sweet-tempered Joe Gargery.

The opening scenes on the bleak Kent marshes are as atmospheric and beautiful as anything shot in cinema, before or since. Guy Green deservedly won the cinematography Oscar for his contribution to an intensely cinematic film. He and Lean provide a succession of unforgettable scenes. Pip’s encounter with Magwitch in the churchyard, shot like the best film noir; the ghoulish appearance of Miss Havisham in her eerie mausoleum of a house; Magwitch’s moving revelation that he is Pip’s benefactor; and the horror of the fire that kills Miss Havisham.

Lean changed the novel’s ending in an otherwise faithful adaptation, offering a romantic but, arguably, better ending.

The director had already made Brief Encounter and went on to direct two of the best-ever British films, The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia, as well as another hugely influential Dickens adaptation, Oliver Twist, which is only absent from this feature to avoid it becoming overly obsessed with Lean.

Great Expectations, though, it is Lean’s masterpiece – it is the greatest translation of Dickens from the page to the screen, TV or film. As Joe Gargery says, “What larks!” MB

Little Dorrit

Nominated for two Oscars, Christine Edzard’s ambitious two-part feature film was shot entirely in a London warehouse and featured a roll call of top-notch British acting talent. No time-consuming and expensive shoots. The grasp of period detail is astonishing, as are the other craft skills on display.

No surprise that Edzard, who wrote and directed the movie, went on to design costumes for numerous period dramas, not least the matchless Wolf Hall.

Alec Guinness plays William Dorrit, “father” of the debtors’ prison, the Marshalsea, where he has resided for the past two decades; Dickens’s own impecunious father, frequently in hock to creditors, had been imprisoned at the Marshalsea for owing £40, the same amount owed by gambler Edward Dorrit, brother to Amy, the story’s eponymous heroine.

The huge cast includes Derek Jacobi as Arthur Clennam. He’s a businessman whose endless goodness stands in contrast to William Dorrit’s vanity.

Amy, who was born in the prison, lives with her father at the Marshalsea and is befriended by the saintly Clenman. She is played by the unknown actress, Sarah Pickering, who never starred in another film.

The cast also features Joan Greenwood, Patricia Hayes, Miriam Margolyes and Max Wall.

Taken together, the two films come in at just under six hours. Despite the long-running time, critics praised the film for the depth of its characterisation, visual elan and innovative use of music, including emotionally highly charged passages of Verdi operas, which it is easy to imagine Dickens adoring. SC

The Muppet Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol narrated by The Great Gonzo and Rizzo the Rat; Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim played by frogs; and Michael Caine as Ebenezer Scrooge… it shouldn’t work, but it does.

The 1992 film is both joyous and heartrending – only the most stonyhearted viewer could remain unmoved as sickly Tiny Tim, played by Kermit’s nephew Robin, stoically faces up to his likely death.

It’s hilarious, too, with lots of slapstick involving Rizzo, as well as magnificent comic rants from Miss Piggy (Mrs Cratchit) about Scrooge. And the humour – because Muppet movies are for adults, too – is frequently sophisticated, especially the meta and knowing voiceover from Gonzo and Rizzo.

Caine loved the experience, wryly noting that puppeteers “compared with actors, are much nicer, gentler, kinder people”.

The film takes a few liberties – old miser Jacob Marley is given a brother so that the duo can be played by cantankerous critics Waldorf and Statler – but it’s largely faithful to Dickens’s novella, albeit with added song and dance numbers.

“Only an obtuse snob would not see the sweetness and good nature of The Muppet Christmas Carol,” reckoned Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw. Quite right. MB

Bleak House

OK, so there was little in the way of fog but this innovative, award-winning 2005 adaptation for BBC One by the master of the TV literary serial, the great Andrew Davies, more than did justice to the most baroque of all of Dickens’s great novels.

Some bookish folk consider Bleak House to be the greatest novel of all time. It’s certainly prolix, running to not far short of 400,000 words. To add to the complexity of a story that has at its heart a murder mystery and a sexual scandal, readers are faced with the perspectives of two different narrators.

While Great Expectations is a page-turner, Bleak House requires patience and stamina to read as the endless legal case, Jarndyce vs Jarndyce, goes on and on and on. Not so Davies’s version, which zipped along, taking, it must be said, a few liberties with the original on the way.

The all-star cast might have been a bit too populist for some – Johnny Vegas as Krook alongside Gillian Anderson and Timothy West as the Dedlocks, and the wonderful Alun Armstrong as dogged Inspector Bucket – but the decision to schedule this 15-parter on BBC One in twice-weekly, 30-minute episodes immediately following EastEnders was inspired. An omnibus edition was shown on Sundays.

A Dickens for the pre-­bingeing era. It looks great, too. SC

David Copperfield

For some film-makers, taking on Dickens’s favourite and most overtly biographical novel would be a challenge too far. Not Dickens superfan Armando Iannucci, who had already proved his cinematic chops with the hilarious, if sinister, black comedy The Death of Stalin.

The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019) to give the movie its full title, was co-written with Simon Blackwell, who had worked with Iannucci on The Thick of It and In the Loop and penned episodes of Peep Show. It was therefore no surprise that this take on our hero’s slow but inevitable climb up the very slippery Victorian greasy pole ­emphasised the comedic aspects of the novel.

Yes, there is darkness – poverty, humourlessness and Dickens’s own seminal experience of the blacking factory reinvented as a scene in a satanic bottling factory, but it’s the film’s sheer pace – what one critic described as the “muscular forward gallop the story” – that sticks in the mind. That and the lightness, an almost magical realist approach to David Copperfield.

Iannucci’s surreal imagination gets into top gear here – whether its Betsey Trotwood thwacking the donkeys off her field or her lodger, Mr Dick, dreamingly launching his kites to keep himself sane.

Yes, there were longueurs, but those who love Dickens know that, even in his greatest works, one sometimes wishes for a tad more economy.

The casting is, to say the least, imaginative. Everyone will have their favourite. For me, Hugh Laurie as Mr Dick is a total joy. Also outstanding were Dev Patel as David, Peter Capaldi as Micawber and Tilda Swinton as the fierce Betsey Trotwood.

One can only hope that Iannucci will be given an opportunity to do another Dickens. What might he make of Great Expectations, the most perfect of all the novels? SC