Dickensian

I won’t be adding a full-blown review of Dickensian here, because it doesn’t really count as an adaptation of A Christmas Carol – it merely uses some of the characters from the Carol in a story of its own. I also didn’t see the whole thing – I watched the first five of its 20 episodes when they were broadcast over the Christmas and New Year period, but I am afraid I rather lost track of it after that, and lacked the time or the will to catch up with it on the iPlayer.

That’s a shame, as what I saw was by no means awful, and it is quite a fun idea. For anyone who’s not aware of what Tony Jordan and company have done, they’ve taken a large group of some of Charles Dickens’s best known characters from his most famous works, set them all down in the same part of London at the same time, and fashioned a story which weaves them in and out of one another’s lives.

As the final episode was broadcast on BBC One yesterday – for which I did dip back into the programme, out of curiosity – I thought it was worth recording at least a few thoughts on the drama, especially as it was the first time we’d seen Scrooge, Marley and Bob Cratchit on screen in a brand new original BBC drama for the first time in nearly forty years.

In common with the vast majority of the stories Jordan has taken elements from for Dickensian, the series acts as a sort of prequel to A Christmas Carol, with Marley alive and well and Scrooge’s partner at the outset of proceedings. Not for long, however – Marley is soon killed off, instigating a murder-mystery plot investigated by Bleak House’s Inspector Bucket which is the driving engine for much of the plot of the series.

Peter Firth as Jacob Marley, in life... for a little while!

While it’s true to say that it’s never explicitly stated how Marley died in the Carol, it’s also never mentioned that he was murdered, and Belle’s husband’s statement that he’s heard Marley “…lies on the point of death” only gives the tiniest amount of wiggle room if you’re very charitable and assume that he was speaking of another occasion, from which Marley subsequently recovered before his eventual death. You do have to be in a very generous mood to allow this, however, and it’s clearly not what Dickens intended.

Also, Dickensian explicitly takes place under the reign of a queen – Victoria, obviously – whereas if you assume that A Christmas Carol is set in its year of release, 1843, then Marley’s death seven years beforehand would have occurred under William IV, just before Victoria came to the throne. Tiny Tim also appears as a character in Dickensian, at about the age he should be in the Carol, so the timeline has clearly been squeezed up a bit – and it’s hard to imagine the cheerful Bob Cratchit seen here standing another seven years of employment under the deeply unpleasant Scrooge.

For make no mistake, Ned Dennehy is a hugely unlikeable Scrooge, played as such a realistically mean, miserable and unfriendly character that it’s actually quite hard to imagine him ever undergoing the redemption for which the character is destined. He’s almost too hard for Scrooge, somehow, as paradoxical as that sounds. Peter Firth as Marley is a similarly unsympathetic character, and to be honest as good as Dennehy and Firth are, it’s only Robert Wilfort as Cratchit who I can really picture slipping seamlessly into a genuine adaptation of the Carol.

Ned Dennehy as Scrooge - extremely unpleasant!

I did like the moments in the final episode where Scrooge, alone in his rooms, sees his candle flicker out and hears Marley’s voice ominously whispering his name, a little foreshadowing of what’s to come. But overall, the whole thing only made me wish that the BBC would perhaps one year have a go at doing a proper, faithful stab at the Carol. British television has never really had one – the 1977 BBC version simply isn’t up to it – and surely for one of the greatest pieces of literature ever written in this country, our greatest broadcaster ought to have given it at least one prestige outing on the small screen…?

There is evidently some talk of a second series for Dickensian, from Tony Jordan at least, which surprised me as it seemed to be set-up very much as a self-contained, one-off serial. I’m also not sure there’d necessarily be the will there, given how its viewing figures have decreased during the run, and it’s suffered being shunted hither and thither about the schedules. The final episode went out at 6.25pm on a Sunday evening, for goodness sake – hardly a prime slot.

But if it was a failure in ratings terms, it was at least an interesting one, and a worthy attempt to do something a little different with a costume drama and a literary adaptation. But for the purposes of this blog, at least, it goes down as an interesting curio rather than anything to ever threaten the best of the Carol adaptations.