As the BBC adapts Great Expectations and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the writers and producers explain Dickens' appeal
2012 isn't just about the Olympics. It is also the bicentenary of Charles Dickens' birth and the BBC is kicking things off with two big Dickens drama adaptations – Great Expectations and The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
It's strange to think that nearly three years ago the BBC drama department signalled a move away from "bonnet" dramas" towards more "modern" period fiction. But you won't find me – or millions of others – complaining about excessive TV exposure when it comes to the work of a certain 19th century writer which seems uniquely made for the box.
"He knew how to work an audience and how to get them laughing their heads off one minute or on the edge of their seats and holding their breath the next," Sarah Phelps, screenwriter of the forthcoming Great Expectations, says. "The other thing about Dickens is that he loved telling stories and he loved his characters, even those horrible, mean-spirited ones."
Those characters have prompted many adaptations over the years. Whether it was the cheaper BBC teatime shows of the 1970s, the more expensive adaptations of recent times, or even – and we're talking proper quality here – The Muppet Christmas Carol, it sometimes feels as though Dickens understood how TV and cinema storytelling worked before the mediums were invented.
It's often said that Dickens's episodic style of writing was the precursor of TV soap. His cliffhangers were so compelling that Victorian passengers sailing from England were mobbed on US quaysides by fans desperate to know the latest plot twist. His long-form narrative certainly makes his work perfect for TV serialisation.
Early next year an Arena film, Dickens on Film, will illustrate how Dickens' use of narrative – juxtaposing separate scenes for emotional effect for example – was hugely influential for early film-makers. The great Hollywood film-maker of the early 20th century, DW Griffiths and the great Russian auteur Sergei Eisenstein both claimed to have been massively influenced by the writer.
The sheer ebullience of his characters and the fact they are instantly recognisable also makes for compelling, emotionally charged TV. Even if it's sometimes at the expense of plot.
"In Little Dorrit, for example, there are many changes of fortune, some of which come from outlandish pieces of plotting," says the director of the BBC's 2008 adaptation of Dorrit (as well as the upcoming Drood), Diarmuid Lawrence. "But what always interests Dickens is the emotional impact of these changes."
Kate Harwood, who is controller of series and serials at BBC Drama Production, is a Dickens fan who believes that the writer's love of theatre infused his writing – that is what makes him work perfectly for TV.
"Dickens had an external, expressionistic form of writing," she says. "He was writing at time when theatre was quite fallow and there was very little room for anything intimate or anything personal. But he loved the theatre. In many ways he was a playwright manqué. In some books it's about a look or a gesture – in Dickens they tend to say it. If it's gesture, its grand gesture; it's big, it's bold, it's chewy."
Such is the dramatic appeal, less scrupulous contemporary theatre producers were putting his books on stage even before the ink was dry on the last instalment (much to his annoyance). His works were filmed in the very early years of the last century, long before talkies emerged.
However strong the inclination to ridicule Dickens's books, with all those whiskers, top hats, ruddy-cheeked urchins and villainous ne'er-do-wells, his popularity is lasting. "When you read Drood you see that he was in many ways strikingly modern," says Lawrence. "It's a book which is essentially about drugs and stalking and I have no doubt that if he were writing today he would have something pretty cutting to say about the banks and bankers."
