Dickens on screen…

Nobody is going to be excused Dickens in his bicentennial year. This is good news for television people, since Dickens wrote his novels in the form of screenplays. He worked closely with his illustrators, making sure the scene they drew was exactly what he had in mind. He even acted out the roles as he wrote them, so the family would hear Fagin, or Pecksniff, or Squeers booming from his study as he worked.

Someone pointed out in the Arena documentary, Dickens on Film (BBC4, Tuesday), that it is impossible to overact any of those characters, as clips of W.C. Fields and Bob Hoskins in the role of Micawber proved. It must make a welcome change for thesps who spend a lifetime perfecting subtle and suggestive; instead they can roll their eyes, puff out their cheeks, gurn, roar, wheedle, chortle and cringe to their hearts’ content. Panto after Harold Pinter, a holiday for hams.

Dickens interleaved his scenes, exactly like a film, rapidly cutting from one plot strand to another. Two of the great early film-makers, Griffiths and Eisenstein, paid tribute to the way he had influenced their structure and their visual style. His books came out like a weekly television serial, leaving people barely able to contain their excitement till the next episode. (Older readers will remember the BBC Sunday teatime serials of the past. These days we are rarely expected to wait a whole week for our next fix; the show is streamed over a few days, followed closely by the DVD, purchased by all those people who were nagged by their friends: ‘Oh, you missed it, what a shame, it was absolutely marvellous…’)

The fact that Dickens was in a sense the first film-maker, long before the technology was invented, probably accounts for the fact that we all have vivid pictures in our minds of the best-known scenes: Oliver Twist asking for more, the Cratchits’ Christmas dinner, the death of Little Nell, Magwitch grabbing Pip.