…and on the air

The trouble with Dickens is that there’s just far too much plot. How do you make sense of his incredibly complex stories in just three hours as the BBC tried to do at Christmas with its TV version of Great Expectations? It looked fabulous but the storyline made no sense because there was no depth to any of the characters. The melodrama was laughably inept, the plot so confusing you needed to have read the book to understand what was happening. Over on Radio 4, the writer Ayeesha Menon has also been given just three hours to retell one of Dickens’s least popular novels in a three-part edition of the Classic Serial (Sunday afternoons, repeated Saturdays).

The Mumbai Chuzzlewits takes us to India for a story containing all the usual Dickens ingredients — wicked old men, greed and jealousy, tragic orphans, thwarted love and unexplained death. Three hours on radio, though, is equivalent to at least six hours on TV. Words matter so much more, and the script has to do all the work, not the camera.

This was not Dickens as we have known him but then neither was the TV version of Great Expectations, which couldn’t decide whether it was a vampire movie or an advert for hair shampoo. Once you forgot that the original story is set in wood-panelled boardrooms and drawing-rooms stuffed with heavy furniture, and allowed yourself to be taken away to a hustling, steamy city, with an aural backdrop of constant birdsong, the whisper of a sitar, the din of a busy street filled with tricycle rickshaws and open-topped Mercs, then The Mumbai Chuzzlewits came alive. We’re two thirds of the way through now, and I’m anxious to find out whether young Mickey (Chuzzlewit’s grandson) will survive his exile in Dubai, that Mary will escape from the clutches of the evil Pinto (formerly known as Pecksniff) and how the story behind Louis’s guilt-induced fever will unravel.