The BBC's Little Dorrit

[poliphilo]

I'm enjoying the BBC's Little Dorrit.  I like how Andrew Davis has tightened up the ramshackle plot, given Amy a little more fire and turned the underpowered Rigaud into a proper villain of melodrama (Andy Serkis- plus beard and moustache, minus eyebrows) but it's not Dickens. Dramatized Dickens never is.  Take away the authorial voice- with its poetry, rhetoric and fantastical drollery- and you've taken away three quarters of what makes him so extraordinary. Little Dorrit is a huge novel, a great three-decker warship of a book (I'm borrowing a image from Kipling here) - like Turner's Fighting Temeraire with the sunset behind her- and Davis has turned it into a streamlined racing yatch. I miss the weather too. Dickens' London is dark and and foggy and muddy and hallucinatory. The BBC's London is so clean and brisk you could enact Jane Austen on the streets.