Television Preview; What the Dickens?

Dickensian
BBC1

Peter and Wendy
ITV1

As if to get away from the commerciality of the modern Christmas, television at this time of year often plumps for nostalgia. Two good examples are the 20-part BBC series Dickensian (starting on 26 December), and Peter and Wendy (ITV, 26 December), both cleverly assembled from literary sources.

There has been a certain amount of purist grumbling about Dickensian, possibly because its creator/writer, Tony Jordan, let slip that he hadn’t read many of Dickens’ novels and that his favourite adaptation was The Muppet Christmas Carol. That’s to miss the point. What he has done is jam as many Dickens characters as his (substantial) budget allowed into one new story and a single purpose-built set; that’s a triumph, incidentally, with the camera swooping fluidly from house to pub to hovel and back into the street.

Jordan, who makes no apologies for his long career on EastEnders, has come up with plot lines that Dickens himself frequently used: a disputed will, a murder, a battered woman, a bourgeois family on the verge of penury and so on. The emotional palette is Dickensian too, with strong contrasts between the loving and the unloving, the moral and the immoral.

There is great pleasure to be had in spotting familiar characters in their new roles, in picking up sly references to the Dickens books, and in the fine cast of British actors. The lead storyline is developing as an early police procedural, with a baleful Stephen Rea as Inspector Bucket, representing a brand new department known as The Detective. As is customary in soapland, the women are tough, much tougher than Dickens wrote them, and Jordan’s attempts at Victorian speech are occasional and approximate. But on the whole this is splendid stuff.

Peter and Wendy, a one-off drama aimed straight at the family audience, is successful too. It wraps a modern tale of a teenager with a heart defect around a bright and witty retelling of the Peter Pan story. Everyone plays two roles: Lucy, awaiting her op in Great Ormond Street, reads Peter Pan and becomes Wendy. The boys to whom she reads the story in hospital become the Darling children and the Lost Boys. Her mother becomes Mrs Darling.

The American actor Stanley Tucci plays three roles: the surgeon Mr Wylie, Mr Darling and Captain Hook. He is tremendous, especially in the latter part. Tinker Bell is played by the pop singer Paloma Faith, subtitled, as a jealous, foul-mouthed harpy. She’s very good too. Writer Adrian Hodges works wonders in moving between the various narrative layers, and his dialogue is terse and funny.

The present-day scenes, especially a subplot whereby Lucy tries to engineer a romance between her mother and her doctor, are somewhat underpowered in comparison with the flying, fighting and wisecracking of the Peter Pan scenes, but that’s only to be expected. Like Dickensian, but in a different way, it’s fine entertainment for Boxing Day.