The English Sunday in the 1950s: incontestably the most boring day of the
week and immortalised in a classic radio episode of Hancock's Half
Hour, in which Tony Hancock, Sid
James and Bill Kerr spend the entire programme
trying and failing to think of something enterprising or even remotely
entertaining to do. One aspect of Sundays that did, however, become a valued
feature of British life was the literary serial on BBC
television, the channel here fulfilling its educational function of making our
cultural heritage accessible to all.
The most frequently adapted author was Charles
Dickens, partly no doubt because of the postwar popularity of David Lean's films of Great Expectations (1946)
and Oliver Twist (1948), but also because the novels themselves
teemed with the kind of incident, comedy, character and intrigue that had always
lent themselves to dramatic treatment. The original publication of his novels in
serial form suggested their suitability for television adaptation, where the
stories could unfold in weekly episodes. No one surpassed Dickens' mastery of the suspenseful cliff-hanger which left a
reader gasping in anticipation of the next instalment.
In a highly influential passage in his study of the English novel, The
Great Tradition (1948), the literary critic F.R.
Leavis had described Dickens as "a great entertainer" but a novelist who
fell short of the highest artistic stature because "the adult mind doesn't find
in Dickens a challenge to an unusual and sustained seriousness." Leavis was to
revise his opinion in the centenary year of Dickens' death (1970), but until
then, it tended to be Dickens the entertainer and cultural icon who was
highlighted, not Dickens the social critic. In his book Films and British
National Identity (1997), Jeffrey Richards recalls
how he "grew up in the 1950s watching Peter Wyngarde as Sydney
Carton (in A Tale of Two Cities) and Patrick
Troughton as Quilp (in The Old Curiosity Shop) and was
turned into a Dickens reader by watching the television adaptations." This was
just what the BBC intended.
However, an early adaptation that disturbed viewers - and occasioned
questions in Parliament - was the 1962 serialisation of Oliver
Twist, and particularly the brutal murder of Nancy (Carmel McSharry) by Bill Sikes (Peter
Vaughn) in its final episode. It was a reminder of the darker side of
Dickens and could be defended from the charge of sensationalising the novel
simply by pointing out how brutally the incident is described in the text. A
more sensitive issue was the timing of the broadcast. Was this suitable matter
for family viewing? On the other hand, if you made Dickens only palatable for a
young or family audience, were you not diluting his harsh vision of social
cruelty and injustice?
Arguably the most significant TV adaptation of Dickens in the 1970s was
Granada's version of Hard Times (ITV, 1977), adapted by Arthur Hopcraft and directed by John
Irvin and shown in four weekly episodes of 50 minutes each. Its strategic
scheduling during midweek primetime viewing challenged the BBC's strategy of the
Sunday serialisation and suggested a broader audience was consciously being
targeted. What's more the choice of text was unusually bold, Hard Times
being the most concentrated and severe of Dickens' major works, as well as a
novel about education - a controversial political issue in 1977. Then prime
minister James Callaghan was launching a so-called
'Great Debate', calling for a return of basic skills in reading, writing and
arithmetic and attacking the progressive, less regimented educational tendencies
of the previous decade. Hard Times seemed a relevant intervention,
for in it Dickens attacks an approach to education that starves the imagination
and that stresses utilitarianism over creativity.
The Hard Times serialisation anticipated a number of important
1980s' interpretations of Dickens (notably the Royal
Shakespeare Company's epic production of Nicholas Nickleby
in 1982 and Christine Edzard's mammoth two-part film of
Little Dorrit in 1987) that saw the novelist, in the absence of a
modern fiction equivalent, as the most relevant and trenchant of social
commentators in a Thatcher era that openly espoused the virtues of self-interest
and so-called 'Victorian values'. Wrestling with the tensions between the
requirements of public service broadcasting and the pressure of market forces
during the Thatcher years, the BBC responded with a
magnificent 1985 midweek serialisation on BBC2 of
Bleak House, also adapted by Arthur
Hopcraft and directed by Ross Devenish. A
particularly telling moment occurs when Dickens' indictment of Victorian society
is transferred from the novel's authorial voice and put into the mouth of the
main character, John Jarndyce (a superb performance from Denholm Elliott), as he rages at the death of the abused and
malnourished sweeper, Jo and implicates the whole of society in the tragedy of
the boy's death. 'Dead!' he cries. 'Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and
gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men
and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around
us every day.'
Since then a number of adaptations have lodged in the memory. ITV's 1989 version of Great Expectations
compensated for the miscasting of Anthony Hopkins as
the convict Magwitch with the inspired casting of the great Jean Simmons (the young Estella in the Lean film) as Miss Havisham, literature's most famous jilted
bride; and their 1999 serialisation of Oliver Twist, scripted by
Alan Bleasdale, caught something of the novel's
nightmarish evocation of corruption and criminality. For the BBC, David Lodge scripted a powerful adaptation of Martin
Chuzzlewit (1994); and its star-studded version of David Copperfield in
1999 (with Bob Hoskins, Maggie
Smith and Ian McEllen amongst the illustrious
cast) is now primarily remembered as being the production which, because of his
performance as young David, landed Daniel Radcliffe the
role of Harry Potter. The most striking production of the last decade has been
Andrew Davies' adaptation of Bleak House
(2005), less moodily atmospheric than the 1985 version, but with great visual
energy, the narrative magnetism of a soap opera, and some compelling
performances, notably from Charles Dance as the evil
lawyer Tulkinghorn and Gillian Anderson as the tragic
Lady Dedlock. Davies' splendid adaptation of
Little Dorrit (2007) had less impact, perhaps because the novel
itself is so diffuse; but in the recent three-part adaptation of Great
Expectations (2011), Gillian Anderson
consolidated her Dickensian credentials with surely the most emaciated and
mentally deranged Miss Havisham on screen, someone for whom unrequited love has
turned into a cancer of the soul.
Over the years the classic serial has come in for some criticism for its
cultural conservatism (recycling the same set of canonical works) and for
packaging up a heritage 'product' that appeals more to a nostalgia for the past
than an engagement with the present. Dickens, however, seems eternally topical.
He might have been born two hundred years ago, but his recurrent themes - child
poverty, Establishment hypocrisy, bureaucratic insensitivity, the corruption of
financial tycoons, the yawning gap between rich and poor - could have been torn
from yesterday's headlines. He remains a gift for any imaginative dramatist or
director for his startling imagery and rousing rhetoric; and his indignation at
social injustice can still bore holes in a nation's conscience. In hard times,
nobody does it better.
Neil Sinyard
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