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Friday 9 January 2009

Dickens delivers

Little Dorrit (BBC1); Prescott: the Class System and Me (BBC2)

About 25 years ago, during a particularly bad acid trip, I had my soul stolen by Mister Migarette, an evil glowing man with a huge hat, like the mad hatter’s, who lived in the ash on the end of my cigarette. It put me off smoking for a while and I considered giving up. But then I realised, ‘If you’re not careful, you’re going to do a Syd Barrett. Only by keeping your routines as close as possible to pre-bad-trip normality can you ever hope to arrest your slide down the slippery slope to madness.’

And see! It worked totally! But that wasn’t the point of the anecdote. I mention it by way of comparison with the joy we must all no doubt be experiencing now that there’s another brilliant Dickens adaptation — Little Dorrit (BBC1, Sunday, Thursday) on TV. It makes you go: ‘Hurrah! My house may be worthless, I’m so worried about the cost of fuel I haven’t even dared turn on the Aga yet, and I’m about to lose my job. But at least the world hasn’t tumbled off its axis completely.

‘Here’s Andrew Davies! Here’s another excedingly tasty, fresh-faced bit of stuff (Claire Foy) in the female lead! Here’s James Fleet and Alun Armstrong and Tom Courtenay and David Bradley and — no, hang on, Bradley’s not in this one for once, but most of the others are! Here are dusty, gloomy, cobwebby interiors and crabby old widows with dark secrets and lurching, leering hunchbacked servants who grunt like animals! Dickens is back! The BBC is doing what it does best! Maybe there’s hope for us yet!

Mind you, the whole thing is quite ridiculously Dickensian. I can’t pretend Little Dorrit is a book I know — I can’t, indeed, pretend most books by Dickens are books I know — but I do rather feel, as I invariably do with Dickens, that I’ve been here before. Why must Little Amy be such a paragon of sweetness? Why does Frederick Dorrit have to be so vague, and eccentric, and battered-top-hat-wearing and irritating? Why must Mrs Clennam be so grotesquely — frankly, implausibly — cantankerous? What’s the proto-Hannibal-Lecter French murderer doing in the story? Obviously, none of this is going to stop me avidly watching the whole series to find out. But I do sometimes find myself asking with Dickens: why can’t you show us some normal people for a change?

More articles from: James Delingpole | this section

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