Bringing down the House

At Television Centre, they've been waiting for the clocks to go back, so that as soon as British Summer Time has choked its last, they can slam a Victorian novel adaptation into the DVD player and punch 'play.' Bleak House was a hit three or so years ago, so how about... um... Little Dorrit?

Little Dorrit? What next? Dombey and Son? Barnaby bejesus Rudge? Don't say it too loudly, but Little Dorrit divides opinions, like a big opinions knife. I have a peculiarly sentimental attachment to it, because very few people can say they met their wife through a novel (unless they're, say, psychotic and have misread the fact/fiction relationship dreadfully), and Little Dorrit was that novel. In summer 2005 I was invited over to the Dickens Universe at UC Santa Cruz, a week long examination of a different Dickens novel each year, and that year it was - oh, you guessed. Anyway, I went over to talk about Victorian detective fiction; I came back with the kind of long distance relationship that made me feel I was in a Channel 4 lifestyle drama and meant that the next two years or so were largely spent in airports. I also met Miriam Margolyes out there, which just heightened the low key surrealism of the whole week, along with seeing people reading Terry Eagleton on the beach. But what was striking was the number of people at the conference/shebang who admitted that they didn't really like Little Dorrit that much. The plot is kinda murky, the imprisonment metaphors are laid on a bit much, Amy Dorrit is one of those heroines that a certain kind of reader finds utterly irritating (not me, but I know people who would readily send a spaceship crewed by Amy, Esther Summerson and Little Nell into the heart of the sun - it could be another Star Trek spin-off). As for me, Dorrit is admirable but not particularly lovable - it's more Dombey and Son than Bleak House. It may be significant that the characters I find the most compelling are Maggy, partially because of her self-reflexive love of narratives, but also for the way Hablot Browne has illustrated her, a round eyed stare that conveys her feeble mindedness (to use the Victorian phrase) but also provokes immediate sympathy; and Tattycoram, more of whom later. And is it really coincidence that Little Dorrit appears on our screens at the height of economic crisis? The Merdle financial fraud subplot seems to be the most compelling reason for adapting it, at least as far as the papers are concerned. I don't know how long it took to make, but surely someone in the drama department at the BBC knew more about the economic climate than most.

So, is it any good? My hopes were not rasied by the continuity announcer promising that "Dickens' work comes to life now on BBC1", as if literature were some corpse awaiting revivification from the golden hand of television. Saying that it's better than 97% of the rest of television doesn't really mean much any more, as the medium has become the new poetry - massive cultural potential, but virtually impossible to get right (and even House, the goggle box's best offering of recent times, has its weaknesses - the slightly repetitive plots and its obsession with the "Everybody Hurts" montage, whereby at the end we see everybody thinking about what happened here today). Much like the novel, the televisual Little Dorrit invites admiration but defuses involvement. Part of the problem is the familiarity with the BBC's 'prestige drama' format, and indeed the title sequence offers a bewildering range of famous names, all in the tiniest typeface ever used on television (it's called Victorian Drama and it's set in 0.0000000000000000000004 point) and highly derivative of the opening to Bleak House three years ago. Accordingly, most of the episode was spent identifying the faces rather than the characters. There's Bill Paterson and Janine Duvitski! Matthew MacFadyen's at the door! Sue Johnston and Alun Armstrong are downstairs! The guy from The Vicar of Dibley pops round, and the keys to the Marshalsea are held by that bloke who looks like Kenneth Connor, but it can't be Kenneth Connor because Kenneth Connor hasn't looked like that for years (primarily because of death), so it isn't Kenneth Connor, but you recognise him anyway. You know the one I mean - the one who looks like Kenneth Connor. The one thing more predictable than the stellar casting is the sop to up and coming talent in the lead -last time, Anna Maxwell Martin was probably best known for being Lyra in the National's His Dark Materials, before becoming face-changing space-dreaming Esther Summerson; this time, it's Amy who's been given to a relative unknown, Clare Foy, and consequently she seems to be more of an actual character than the rest of them.

To be fair, I'm being a little harsh. MacFadyen is shaping up well as Arthur, Tom Courtenay is showing everyone else how it's done, and Andy Serkis as Blandois shows great potential (I'm not sure how authentic that French accent is, but then again that suits the more performative side of Blandois' character, and anyway Serkis captures the magnetism of the man beautifully). My initial resistance to the appearance of Alun Armstrong again so soon after his turn as Bucket in Bleak House was overcome at the end of the episode, when I was reminded of Flintwich's doppleganger, so Bucket's regeneration (so to speak) seems appropriate. Maxine Peake (who, to her credit, I didn't recognise at first) is also an intriguing Miss Wade. Which leads us to the stunt casting - in 2005, we had Johnny Vegas as Krook, which kind of worked; this time, we have Freema Agyeman as Tattycoram, and it seems to be a train wreck from the off. I imagine the Dickens traditionalist mafia will be indignant that Tattycoram is now black, and there does seem to be an undertone here of poking the Daily Mailers, which is perfectly fine; the problem lies in the fact that making the character black brings up intriguing questions of the consequences for social interaction, which the script completely ignores. Although no reactionary, Dickens was not famed for his progressive racial politics, and the casting seems entirely at odds with the writing. It's fine to make Tattycoram black, but nobody else on screen seems to have noticed that she is. It doesn't help that the character has been terribly underwritten and that Agyeman is struggling to make the part work - the effects of psychological bullying just come across as stroppiness. Trailers for subsequent episodes suggest that the intimations of Miss Wade's lesbianism, subliminal in the original, are going to be accompanied by fireworks in the screen version and footage of trains going into tunnels... um... perhaps footage of a tunnel being built right in front of another tunnel? What is Sapphic visual shorthand nowadays, anyway?

Acting aside, the direction and set design is a little jarring. Victorian London looks less like Victorian London than Dickensworld (TM) - where the hell is everybody? Where's the visual onslaught of posters and bills? Where did all this space come from? For a story all about imprisonment, the actors are swimming in acres, and there isn't much of a sense of enclosure when it requires a panning shot for Arthur to get from one end of a room to the other. With the exception of a couple of shots of Amy, everyone appears in middle range, and the only hints at the theme of the novel are a few hackneyed shots through prison bars (Blandois in prison) or arches (Miss Wade and Tattycoram). I'm hoping the earlier episodes have set up this sense of space in order to break it down later on, but that may be too much to expect. Similarly, the direction often seems intent on making Andrew Davies' (oh, he adapted it, but you knew that already) script ridiculous, which occasionally it is; both are equally guilty in the scene where Mr. Meagles declares that they are imprisoned "in Marseilles, of all places!" and then cuts to a tricolore immediately afterwards - where do you think they are? (No, not Lyme Regis, which is what it looked like).

Ah, it's easier to pick holes in stuff. More fun, too. Ultimately, Little Dorrit is good, but not great, and I'm damning it with faint praise when I say that it's probably worth your time. It's not Bleak House, but then again, what is? Bleak House, obviously.