You've got to adapt a Dickens or two

Bleasdale's doing `Oliver Twist'. Tony Marchant's doing `Great Expectations'. And John Sullivan's doing `David Copperfield'. Three great novels, three great TV dramatists: but why now? Jasper Rees finds out

The faces of Charles Dickens cover the wall above the desk where Alan Bleasdale works at his home in Liverpool. You can picture the two bearded writers confronting each other through a looking-glass. Each has used the serial to deliver improving entertainments to the masses. If Dickens were alive today perhaps he would have written something like Boys from the Blackstuff, Bleasdale's grim portrait of joblessness in Liverpool. If Bleasdale had lived 160 years ago, he would have written something like Oliver Twist.

In fact, Bleasdale is writing something like Oliver Twist: a television adaptation of the novel, though how alike remains to be seen. That is why Dickens patrols the wall: he is there to inspire, but also invigilate. You wonder if he'd applaud Bleasdale's decision to take the contorted segment in which Dickens hastily explains Oliver's parentage towards the novel's end, and remodel it as the opening one hour of a seven-hour drama. Bleasdale speaks of this like an avuncular script doctor. "The one advantage I have over Dickens," he says, "is that I can put that where he perhaps would have liked it. It's only in the wrong place because Dickens was young, and writing in monthly episodes."

This is Bleasdale's first attempt at literary adaptation. When he was approached by ITV, he said that he had been waiting for this call for 25 years. That's not the way it would have looked to anyone familiar with his work. Apart from a brief excursion into the First World War with The Monocled Mutineer, Bleasdale has confined himself to the contemporary. But then so have two other senior television writers who have been paired off with Dickens in forthcoming series. Last November, filming finished on a BBC adaptation, in two 90-minute parts, of Great Expectations. The script is by Tony Marchant, best known for Holding On, a series which took the temperature of Britain in the 1990s. And this summer, the BBC will film a three-part David Copperfield by John Sullivan, who wrote the sitcoms Citizen Smith, in which the Revolutionary Front came to Tooting, and Only Fools and Horses. All three men have huge hits on their cvs, but a punt has none the less been taken on each of them in a way that it wasn't with TV versions of Our Mutual Friend (Sandy Welch) and Martin Chuzzlewit (David Lodge). But if you look closer, the picture starts to make sense.

No one writes Dickensian novels these days. But people do write Dickensian television drama. Marchant's Holding On and Bleasdale's GBH were doorstoppers on an epic scale, with big themes and huge casts of characters milling around within loosely woven plots. GBH, a teeming saga about left-wing corruption in local government, started out as a 1,000-page novel in which Marchant took the teeming metropolitan anthill of Our Mutual Friend as a template. His fellow Londoner, Sullivan, also has a Dickensian feel for the city's limitlessness. In Roger Roger, his comedy drama about minicab drivers, Sullivan finds a way of crowding Londoners of all hues into one story. "An attraction of Copperfield," says Sullivan, "is that Dickens was writing about places I knew. I've walked those streets. So I felt at home."

Only Fools and Horses may be more modest in scope but, as its author, Sullivan has for several years played the Dickensian role of the nation's Christmas entertainer. His eye for fleshy caricatures and ear for demotic catch-phrases belong to the same comic tradition that gave us Mr Micawber and Uriah Heep. As with Bleasdale's "gissa job", his "lovely jubbly" has followed "Humbug" and "Something will turn up" into the language through the tradesman's entrance of the popular serial. In fact it was the leyline connecting Dickensian archetypes to Sullivan's Trotter brothers that gave him the idea of attempting Copperfield. "As I re-read it I couldn't help but cast," says Sullivan, "and see the characters as actors I know." It shows a shrewd understanding of their appeal that Micawber and Heep have been earmarked for David Jason and Nicholas Lyndhurst. (Nor should Bleasdale-watchers expect too many casting surprises in Oliver Twist.)

But what unites all three writers is something that separates them from Dickens. They are all working-class. Dickens may have felt shamed by his four-month stint as a 12-year-old in the blacking factory, but he was teased there for being a gentleman. Bleasdale is the son of an oil- refinery foreman. Marchant was brought up on a Wapping housing estate. Sullivan is from Balham, with a past as a manual labourer. Although all were avid readers, none went to university. It can't be coincidence that all three novels - one early, one mid-period and one late - have something in common. They are Dickens's three great novels about boyhood, about roots.

Bleasdale, of course, has made inquiring tours of the psychological map of childhood, particularly in Jake's Progress, in which a disturbed boy watches his parents' marriage self-destruct. "That's clearly why they've asked me to do it," he says. Marchant, too, acknowledges the parallel between Pip's escape from his humble background in Great Expectations and his own rise to the upper echelons of BBC2. "I can't deny that it had a lot to do with why I responded to the novel," he says. Working-class boy makes good? "Working-class boy makes good literature," he retorts.

Sullivan goes further than either, though. He specifically credits David Copperfield, a novel about a child who grows up to be a writer, with opening the door on to the literary world. "You were almost frightened of English classes at school," he says. "Then we got a teacher who, instead of making us just read and answer questions, actually read Copperfield to us. All of a sudden the whole thing became Technicolor and I understood what I'd been missing. It released this imagination within.

So this, in a nutshell, is why three writers who have never before adapted fiction for television are all jumping in at the deep end. What are the problems they face? How do writers with such a strong identity keep faith with an iconic story while putting some of their own flesh on the bones? Is Dickens as available to recontextualisation as Shakespeare?

Apparently not. "I was asked to find something millennial in Great Expectations," says Marchant, "which I thought was a bit ridiculous. I naturally think it's got a lot to say to us, and certainly the proximity between criminality and respectability is something I've made a big thing of. But at the same time it doesn't lend itself to the breadth of interpretations that a good Shakespeare would."

As they talk about adapting Dickens, it comes to sound almost like a job for an archaeologist - digging for reality under the encrustation of myth, but ever so carefully. Take Marchant's gingerly approach to Miss Havisham (who will be played by Charlotte Rampling). "Portrayals I have seen tend to make her some kind of pseudo-witch or slightly scary panto dame. You could say she is suffering from depression, but at the same time characterising her like that is reductive. What you are also aware of, and you can't deny, is that she is a myth, and a self-mythologising character. She is larger than life, and you can't reduce her simply for the sake of psychological plausibility."

Bleasdale has a different hurdle to clear with Oliver Twist's most memorable character. Oliver is a blank page on which he can write more or less what he wants, but Fagin is up there with Shylock as a pejorative portrait of Jewishness. Dickens iconographically links him with the devil. But Bleasdale has corrected what he calls "Dickens's accidental anti-Semitism." "I've read the letters where Dickens wrote to his Jewish friends and said, `I'm very sorry, I didn't mean it.' In this version Fagin isn't Jewish. He will be a magician and almost a stand-up comedian, born and brought up in Prague. If people want to represent him as Jewish, they can, but I'm not." This is his one act of revisionism.

In other areas, both Marchant and Bleasdale are more frank than previous treatments, notably David Lean's Great Expectations and Lionel Bart's Oliver! In Bleasdale's Oliver Twist, everyone will be younger, and drink copiously. The violence, particularly Sikes's on Nancy, will be more honest. The beatings that both Oliver and Pip take - "tantamount to abuse" in Marchant's phrase - will not be glossed over. Marchant talks of putting some detail on the blacksmith Joe Gargery's forge "so you would understand why Pip is so anxious to get out of there." When Oliver asks for more gruel in the workhouse, Bleasdale will have him asking "in a more demanding way" than the cowering child in Oliver! "Any child who has had the upbringing that that child had, thrown from pillar to post and beaten senseless, I don't think he would go up there and grovel."

That, of course, is one of the great set-pieces of English literature, a snapshot of a child facing his demons. The canonical equivalent in Great Expectations is Magwitch's appearance to Pip from behind his parents' gravestone. These are the most testing moments for Dickens's adaptors, when a new way has to be found to package the familiar. "I did have to think how not to replicate that scene," says Marchant "and I have done a version which is self-consciously different from the way it's described in the novel. You can't do much about the content. It's just the presentation and structure of the scene."

It's too early for Sullivan, who is halfway through adapting Copperfield, to comment in detail, and for the moment he has confined his updating to Dickens's dialogue. "I started off virtually always using the text. Then I decided that I can sharpen areas. Modern humour is drier and more subtle. You can see what's meant, but it just needs slight modernising, which is what I'm doing with an awful lot of it."

One area in which they will stay close to Dickens is sex. In his study, The Violent Effigy (1973), John Carey memorably wrote that "Dickens and sex is an unpromising subject." It may be helpful to them that none of these writers is as fixated on nudity as many of their colleagues are. Marchant judges that to show Pip and Estella having sex would be "gratuitous iconoclasm: sixth-form yaa-boo stuff". Ditto David Copperfield and his "child-bride" Dora: Sullivan is prepared to contemplate no more than "heavy kissing: otherwise you're stepping into areas that perhaps you shouldn't".

Like Dickens, neither Bleasdale nor Sullivan can bring themselves to out female characters as prostitutes. "On two occasions Nancy is called a drab," says Bleasdale. "A drab was a prostitute, so Dickens got as near as he could. But I haven't got her doing Bands of Gold. There's no need." The same goes for Little Em'ly in Copperfield, who runs away from Peggotty's home. "When they find her it's obvious she's a prostitute," says Sullivan. "But it's left to you to use your imagination."

All three writers are aware that they are tampering with a well-fenced literary heritage. Marchant suspects that he is "on a hiding to nothing". Sullivan says that his Copperfield "won't be one for the purists: they'll go potty". Bleasdale equally predicts that he will "get shouted at by people who go to Dickens weekends". We'll have to wait and see. Of course the best person to adapt Dickens would be Dickens. But the evidence suggests that these are the most Dickensian writers of the age. He is in three safe pairs of hands. Though not, let's hope, too safe.

`Great Expectations' will be shown on BBC2 this spring. Filming of `Oliver Twist' begins in March; transmission is set for November on ITV. `David

Copperfield' will be filmed this summer for BBC1.