Dickens on the BBC: Television

Great Expectations

Sarah Phelps' (Oliver Twist, EastEnders) bold new three-part adaptation presents the heart and grit of Charles Dickens at his very best.

Suspenseful and thrilling, this visceral retelling captures the romance and warmth of the classic to mark Dickens's bicentenary, especially for Christmas 2011 on BBC One.

Great Expectations forms part of the BBC's focus on Dickens at the end of the year.

Songs Of Praise: A Dickensian Christmas

In a special festive Songs of Praise for the Advent season, Aled Jones is in Kent to discover more about Charles Dickens whose novels help perpetuate the image of a very traditional Christmas. Members of Rochester Cathedral Choir perform God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, which featured in Dickens’ classic story ‘A Christmas Carol’ and choirboys from the Cathedral Choir will sing ‘A Child’s Hymn’, published by Dickens in the weekly journal Household Word, Christmas 1856.

Aled will also talk to Dr Tony Williams, Associate Editor of The Dickensian and Professor Michael Slater, Dickens Scholar and Emeritus Professor at the University of London along with two direct descendants of the writer himself, Gerald Dickens and Lucinda Hawksley.

Traditional carols will be sung by the congregation at St George’s Church in Gravesend, dressed in Victorian costumes, including Hark! The Glad Sound, See Amid The Winters Snow, Unto Us A Boy Is Born and While Shepherds Watch.

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The Bleak Old Shop Of Stuff

The Bleak Old Shop Of Stuff is a new four-part comedy adventure set in the Dickensian world of Jedrington Secret-Past, the up-standing family man and owner of The Old Shop of Stuff, Victorian London's most successful purveyor of miscellaneous odd things.

The Bleak Old Shop Of Stuff is a BBC In-House production comprising a one hour Christmas Special followed by three 30-minute episodes to air early 2012. It is written by Mark Evans who penned Radio 4 comedy Bleak Expectations, a Victorian adventure about a different set of Dickensian characters.

The series has an impressive ensemble cast led by Robert Webb (That Mitchell & Webb Look) in the role of Jedrington and Katherine Parkinson (The IT Crowd) who plays his wife Conceptiva.

The Christmas special will feature Stephen Fry as the evil lawyer Malifax Skulkingworm alongside David Mitchell (That Mitchell & Webb Look), Celia Imrie (Nanny McPhee), Pauline McLynn (Father Ted) and Johnny Vegas (Ideal). The rest of the series will feature Tim McInnerny (Blackadder), Kevin Eldon (Nighty Night), Sarah Hadland (Miranda) and Derek Griffiths (West End's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang).

Armando Iannucci On Dickens

Two centuries after he was born, Charles Dickens stands alone as perhaps the world's most popular novelist. His characters are famous in their own right, his novels endlessly adapted for film and television – he even has his own theme park.

However, for life-long Dickens fan Armando Iannucci, something has been lost along the way. By turning Dickens into an institution we've forgotten why he matters as a writer in the 21st century.

Using David Copperfield as a focal point, Armando unpicks Dickens' language and explores the revolutionary development of a master story-teller. Armando also explores Dickens brilliant use of comedy with the help of comedians Barry Cryer and Phill Jupitus to reveal the emotional truth behind even the novelist's most outlandish characters. And through encounters with the types of people Dickens wrote about, including a group of lawyers and a debtor, Armando shows Dickens was not just a writer of the Victorian era - but for all time.

Mrs Dickens' Family Christmas

Looking at the marriage of Charles Dickens through the eyes of his wife, Catherine, Sue Perkins exposes the lesser known reality of the Dickens family Christmas - very different from the heart-warming versions he pedalled in A Christmas Carol.

In this 60-minute film for BBC Two, Sue turns her attention to the woman behind the man, revealing parallels between the female characters he created and changing in his affections for his wife, namely, in Dickens’ mind her transition from innocent virgin to middle-aged frump.

Scrutinising Dickens’ public defence via a national newspaper of his treatment toward Catherine, Sue seeks to set the record straight, promulgating her unconditional love to Dickens and support for his career.

Along the way, she has plenty of laughs, evokes the realities of Victorian marriage, interviews many of today's leading biographers of Mr and Mrs Dickens, explores Charles’ role in creating Christmas as we know it- and gets to make a Twelfth Night Cake.

Unfinished

Taking Dickens' unfinished masterpiece Edwin Drood as a starting point, Alastair Sooke explores what it is that makes the unfinished story so tantalising. With contributions from John Sutherland, Paul Morley, John Mullan, and Robert McKee as well as writer and Dickens descendant Lucinda Hawksley, Alastair examines what makes a work finished and what makes it complete, in a journey that takes him through some of the most iconic literature, art and contemporary TV.

In conversation with writer Gwyneth Hughes, who has completed the latest BBC adaptation of Dickens' unfinished novel, The Mystery Of Edwin Drood, Alastair considers the motivations behind our desire for closure in a story and the extent to which artists have consciously left their work apparently unfinished in recognition of the imaginative faculties of their audience.

The Mystery Of Edwin Drood

An ambitious two-part adaptation for BBC Two sees writer Gwyneth Hughes (Five Days, Miss Austen Regrets) finishing Charles Dickens's final novel Edwin Drood.

The mystery novel was left uncompleted at the time of Dickens's death, and its ending remains unknown. Alongside Great Expectations, this will form part of the author's bicentenary celebrations on the BBC.

BBC Four

Arena: Dickens On Film

From the magical films of the silent era to the celebrated work of director David Lean and high definition television, Arena: Dickens On Film revisits films and interviews from the archive to answer the question, why have Dickens’s novels inspired so many hundreds of adaptations on screen?

This co-production with Dickens 2012 not only encapsulates the history of Dickens’s time but also of the 100 years in which his work has survived most acutely on screen.

It is not only the stories, themes and characters of Dickens’ writing that translate so well onto screen, Sergei Eisenstein argued that there is something essentially filmic in Dickens’s unique prose style.

Dickens’s rapid ‘cutting’ within scenes and from scene to scene, coupled with his seamless mixture of the bizarrely comic with the terrifyingly profound was itself proto-cinematic. Dickens wrote the way a camera saw before film had ever been invented and he remains to this day the most cinematic of writers.

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