Janet Gogerty's Blog: Sandscript - Posts Tagged "a-christmas-carol"
Sandscript Goes Dickensian
Just as divisive as the Presidential Campaign or the referendum on the European Union is a BBC television series that has just finished, ‘Dickensian’, a delightful confection of twenty soap style half hour episodes that started at Christmas. This drama entwined many Dickens characters together in the same pocket of London Streets, filling in back stories. It started with the murder of Jacob Marley, we followed the domestic life of the Cratchet family and events in the life of young Miss Haversham leading to her tragic jilting; equally tragic, her friend who will become the widow Lady Dedlock with a secret. In the last episode The Artful Dodger takes Oliver to meet Fagin.
In the unlikely event you have never heard of any Dickens characters you would have enjoyed a rattling good tale. Keen readers and watchers of BBC dramatisations could enjoy picking out the characters and novels. Opinions were divided, some thought Dickens should not be tampered with, or didn’t like the attempts to give his simpering female characters some zest. I don’t usually like the idea of prequels and sequels written on behalf of dead authors, when they have no say in the matter, but this series was fun and delightfully dark for pre watershed viewing.
Dickens wrote short stories, plays and of course his novels, which started as weekly installments and ended as public readings on both sides of the Atlantic in the last years of his life. He was a great publicist, so no doubt he would have been delighted to see so many film and television portrayals of his tales. As for ‘Dickensian’; famously he changed the ending of Great Expectations, would he mind others constructing the beginnings of his stories?
Whether you like it or not Dickens is surely part of many people’s lives. One of my earliest memories is having nightmares after watching black and white Miss Haversham on television. The first Dickens books I actually read were my mother’s library books ‘One Pair of Hands’ by his great granddaughter Monica; disillusioned with her upper class origins she went ‘into service’ and then into nursing –‘One Pair of Feet’. I recall them being hilarious, I don’t know if they have stood the test of time like her ancestor. In high school in Australia we had to ‘do’ Great Expectations. Picture a gnarled old bloke with nicotine stained hands and a hacking cough. This was our literature teacher. ‘Personally I can’t stand Dickens’ were his first words to us. Most lessons we were left to do ‘free reading’. I was determined on principal to read and enjoy the work of a fellow Englishman.
Since then I have read some, but not all of his novels, usually prompted by enjoying a BBC television series. We have a house full of Dickens paperbacks as a teenage member of the family discovered one could buy paperback classics for a pound and hit upon these as cheap birthday presents. The novels of Charles Dickens are bound to feel heavy and the print small in paperbacks, not to be read on the bus or tube, but savoured at a leisurely pace. Every sentence is packed full of description of people and places, but if you lose your way and don’t finish you can always catch up on DVD.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06vbmfq
In the unlikely event you have never heard of any Dickens characters you would have enjoyed a rattling good tale. Keen readers and watchers of BBC dramatisations could enjoy picking out the characters and novels. Opinions were divided, some thought Dickens should not be tampered with, or didn’t like the attempts to give his simpering female characters some zest. I don’t usually like the idea of prequels and sequels written on behalf of dead authors, when they have no say in the matter, but this series was fun and delightfully dark for pre watershed viewing.
Dickens wrote short stories, plays and of course his novels, which started as weekly installments and ended as public readings on both sides of the Atlantic in the last years of his life. He was a great publicist, so no doubt he would have been delighted to see so many film and television portrayals of his tales. As for ‘Dickensian’; famously he changed the ending of Great Expectations, would he mind others constructing the beginnings of his stories?
Whether you like it or not Dickens is surely part of many people’s lives. One of my earliest memories is having nightmares after watching black and white Miss Haversham on television. The first Dickens books I actually read were my mother’s library books ‘One Pair of Hands’ by his great granddaughter Monica; disillusioned with her upper class origins she went ‘into service’ and then into nursing –‘One Pair of Feet’. I recall them being hilarious, I don’t know if they have stood the test of time like her ancestor. In high school in Australia we had to ‘do’ Great Expectations. Picture a gnarled old bloke with nicotine stained hands and a hacking cough. This was our literature teacher. ‘Personally I can’t stand Dickens’ were his first words to us. Most lessons we were left to do ‘free reading’. I was determined on principal to read and enjoy the work of a fellow Englishman.
Since then I have read some, but not all of his novels, usually prompted by enjoying a BBC television series. We have a house full of Dickens paperbacks as a teenage member of the family discovered one could buy paperback classics for a pound and hit upon these as cheap birthday presents. The novels of Charles Dickens are bound to feel heavy and the print small in paperbacks, not to be read on the bus or tube, but savoured at a leisurely pace. Every sentence is packed full of description of people and places, but if you lose your way and don’t finish you can always catch up on DVD.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06vbmfq
Sandscript
I like to write first drafts with pen and paper; at home, in busy cafes, in the garden, at our beach hut... even sitting in a sea front car park waiting for the rain to stop I get my note book out. We
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