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GIVING IT MORE - PLE
How Oliver Twist, BBC One’s new primetime five-parter, is getting the Dickens of a fresh approach to the famous tale.
W hether it’s David Lean’s dark-hued Forties’ film version or the all-singing,
all-dancing colourful Sixties’ romp by Lionel Bart and Carol Reed, Charles Dickens’ arguably most enduring story retains the sort of familiarity that still resists contempt. Yet even those two per-
haps most iconic of screen treatments are merely the tip of the iceberg. There have been more than a dozen films in a little under a century, including Britain’s first-ever four-reeler in 1912. As for TV, Oliver Twist has undergone at least 10 adaptations over the past 50 years.
Certainly this weight of past screen attention weighed a little heavily at first with director Coky Giedroyc (The Virgin Queen, Fear Of Fanny, Blackpool). “Personally, I came to it with a lot of trepidation because I though it was such a well-known, well-trodden story and there are some pretty iconic Fagins, Nancys and Sikes’ out there. I was worried, really.
“However, Sarah Phelps (EastEnders) is one of the most exciting, muscular and interesting writers around and she basically grabbed it by the throat and made it her own. She’s turned it into a real page-turner. From being a subject that you feel is very familiar, she’s man- aged to inject it with new life and new energy. I think it’ll feel fresh and reinvented.”
Designed as a five-parter – that’s a one hour opening episode followed by four half hours, probably all across one week - the programme makers, not to mention the BBC, hope this production will strike the same sort of chords with the public as the network’s hit Bleak House.
There is certainly no shortage of familiar names in those great literary frames. Timothy Spall (Fagin), Sophie Okonedo (Nancy), Tom Hardy (Bill Sikes), Gregor Fisher (Mr Bumble), Julian Rhind-Tutt (Monks), Edward Fox (Mr Brownlow), Rob Brydon (Mr Fang), Anna Massey (Mrs Bedwin), Sarah Lancashire (Mrs Corney), John Sessions (Mr Sowerberry)... as well as a pair of young newcomers, William Miller and Adam Arnold as, respectively, Oliver and The Artful Dodger.
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Photo: William Miller as Oliver in Oliver Twist
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