Penny Dreadful?
Posted: Sat Dec 26, 2015 12:05 am
Before Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple and even Sherlock Holmes, there was Charles Dickens' Inspector Bucket. He may be less well-known and not possess the deductive brilliance of his successors, but in his plodding, dogged, methodical, clean-shirted way Mr Bucket is one of the all-time great detectives.
In Bleak House, while others soak themselves in gin and criminality, the Inspector has his breakfast of tea, toast and marmalade before a day's work quietly, politely dredging up the truth from London's darkest depths.
Inspector Bucket is a central character in the BBC's ambitious new 20-episode series Dickensian, which starts tonight.
It's something of a cliche, but almost certainly true, that if Dickens were alive today then — ever the populist and an innovator — he would be penning scripts for TV soap operas such as EastEnders or Coronation Street.
That's where EastEnders scriptwriter Tony Jordan got this idea. What if, he wondered, 30 of Dickens' most memorable characters — out of the 989 named people across 16 novels and many short stories — were put into one fictional story, living in one street, jostling elbow-to-elbow? There would be all Dickens's favourite characters in a Victorian version of Albert Square.
So we have Ebenezer Scrooge from A Christmas Carol hoarding his ha'pennys, while next-door Fagin, the handkerchief thief from Oliver Twist, fries his evening sausages.
A few doors down, Mrs Gamp, the midwife from Martin Chuzzlewit, pickled in gin, bustles past the pub where the reprehensible Silas Wegg from Our Mutual Friend is balancing against the bar on his wooden leg.
The series doesn't just take liberties by removing the characters from their original novels, it also throws their timelines into chaos.
For example, Miss Havisham isn't the pale middle-aged jilted bride we know from Great Expectations, but a girl with a bloom in her cheeks, yet to fall in love. Lady Dedlock, from Bleak House, goes by her maiden name and is carefree in a decollete pink dress — quite unrecognisable from the buttoned-up, grieving recluse she will become.
What would Dickens himself have made of this ambitious mash-up? It's certainly ingeniously done and an admiring tribute — but he might cavil against another writer jumping on his bandwagon, as he did at the many pirates who borrowed his characters for their own books, plays and music hall turns in his lifetime.
Here's your indispensable guide to who's who, what to watch out for and how to be a Dickens know-it-all...
WHAT'S THE STORY?
The first of the 20 episodes, which each cost £500,000 to make, begins with an intriguing premise. What if the first three words of A Christmas Carol weren't 'Marley was dead', but 'Marley was murdered'?
Nothing like a murder at Christmas to hook audiences and no man better-placed to solve the crime than Bleak House's Mr Bucket.
There's no lack of possible culprits. Jacob Marley, remember, with his partner Scrooge, was a money-lender, and a man liable to make enemies.
'Your problem, Inspector,' says Scrooge to Inspector Bucket, 'will not be in discovering someone who hated Jacob Marley enough to kill him, but rather finding someone who didn't.'
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