![]() ![]() At its weakest it overplayed the obvious (particularly the Miss Havisham strand). I think also that twenty episodes was a bit much it would have worked that much better over a dozen. Part of the reason for this fall was the erratic scheduling, which seemed to change hour and day each week, though that must have been to some degree a consequence of waning audience interest early on, after its Boxing Day launch. The reason for a second series being dropped is cost and falling audiences for the first series, which started with five million viewers but saw this drop to two million by the time of the twentieth episode. You could see the delight in the actors’ eyes at the quality of the writing and the piquancy of the situations in which they found themselves. ![]() What could have been merely a clever intellectual exercise revealed itself to be an original and logical entertainment. ![]() Fagin rubbed shoulders with Scrooge, Inspector Bucket crossed with Bob Cratchit, Mr Bumble played host to Gradgrind, Amelia Havisham was best friends with Honoria Barbary. Over twenty episodes the series ingeniously wove together back stories to Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, Bleak House and A Christmas Carol, together with several other characters taken from Dickens’s vast cast list. What sad news that there is to be no second series of Dickensian, the superlative mashup of Charles Dickens’ characters by Tony Jordan, the Eastenders writer. ![]()
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