Digital Dickens

City scams, banks going bust, people losing money, huge debts mounting and looming bankruptcy. No, we're not talking about the credit crunch. This is Dickens.And not a moment too soon. While Jane Austen has had her moment in the sun, Charles Dickens is the latest author tickling the petticoats of television's period drama commissioners. Dickens has been given a new lease of life with an adaptation of his book Little Dorrit set to light up the autumn evening schedule from tomorrow night. Little Dorrit's focus on debt, poverty, fortune and greed is a tale for our times and Dickens's particular brand of scathing satire slots snugly into our straitened situation. Dickens, it seems, has never been more relevant. Little Dorrit is a biting critique of capitalism, impotent government and the avarice that permeates all classes, and it could have been written yesterday. Even throwaway comments, like this one on the wildly varying prices of property, have potent relevance: "there were two or three small airless houses at the entrance end of Mews Street, which went at enormous rents on account of their being abject hangers-on to a fashionable situation ... "Television writer Andrew Davies is a master of period drama adaptation and the man behind the 1995 BBC version of Pride and Prejudice which kick-started the trend. When he adapted Dickens's Bleak House three years ago, it was a massive ratings hit, with six million viewers tuning in to see X-Files star Gillian Anderson (main picture) taking on the lead role. Having made some of the most successful period dramas of our times, why did Davies want to take on the lesser-known Dickens novel, Little Dorrit? "It was partly because it's always been a favourite of mine, and the other reason was it seemed a very timely book to do," he said. "Economics isn't his (Dickens's) strong point, but he's got some very good general principles."His father was a bankrupt and got himself into terrible debt and Dickens has got a very strong feeling in favour of paying your own way."Daniel Doyce (from Little Dorrit) is an engineer and inventor and having a difficult time raising investment, and Mr Merdle is in the City just coining money out of nowhere, very much similar to these mysterious economic instruments. "But I didn't think it was going to be as pertinent as all that," he says, laughing at the timely series release. Dickens's relevance to modern times is particularly visible when dealing with class attitudes and wealth, said Alan Stanford, who will adapt Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop for The Gate Theatre this December. "If you look at the society we live in now, a lot of the attitudes of the rich and the attitudes of the haves against the have-nots are re-emerging, because the whole world is greedy. Everybody wants to spend more than they earn, and the danger of that is the world runs out of credit, which is what has happened in the last few weeks."It seems curious that Dickens's satire and irony should remain as biting to modern readers as it was to his contemporaries over 150 years ago.Dr Fionnuala Dillane, from the English Department in University College Dublin, said: "I do think there is something in Dickens, because of his critique of capitalism and government bureaucracy in particular, and of the way in which the individual is caught up like a cog in the greater machinery and bureaucracy of the age and they're powerless ... that is something that obviously speaks to this day and that is the engine on which capitalism is built." That may all sound a bit grim, but Dickens offers plenty of light escapism too. Nobody would have read his books or watched the TV adaptations otherwise. Dillane says Dickens is a sentimentalist as well as a satirist, which could explain some of his abiding popularity."We are a culture that seems to be more and more engaged with the sentimental -- if you look at our reality-television programmes, from X Factor to Strictly Come Dancing, the purpose of a lot of those programmes is to appeal very directly to sentiment. In those little short cuts they do of the background to the story, the purpose and the enduring popularity seems to be to play on those heartstrings in a very deliberate way, which Dickens did as well. 'He used melodrama a lot of the time as a way of escape from the quite grim urban reality," Dr Dillane said.Little Dorrit --which stars Claire Foy in the title role -- will appeal to fans of melodrama, not only for its content, but also as it will be presented in the style of a soap opera, airing in half- hour episodes directly after East-Enders. The BBC's head of drama, Jane Tranter, said it was "like the soap Dickens originally intended, not that he knew what a soap was".Irish director Dearbhla Walsh is lead director of Little Dorrit, having previously worked on EastEnders, The Tudors and Shameless. "I suppose the parallels would be the pace of the story-telling," she said. "You have to hit so many characters in a short time, how the stories interweave. There's plenty of melodrama, but always rooting it is the straight guy." Dickens naturally lends himself to this sort of serialisation, having written many of his books in serial format for a weekly readership. "It's not every author that it would work with," said Andrew Davies of the serial soap format. "It's very easy to find cliff-hangers."Davies is already set to take on another lesser-known Dickens work, Dombey and Son, for adaptation and there is no sign of Dickens's popularity, or relevance, waning any time soon. Davies sums up Dickens's popularity as a combination of a number of things: "He's got a huge heart, his principal characters are loveable, he manages to write about good people and make them interesting, which is a difficult thing to do."'Little Dorrit' starts tomorrow at 8pm on BBC One Download our iPhone App Now