Tuesday 7th February is Charles Dickens bicentenary [View all]

[malaise]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/17/charles-dickens-bicentary-film-tv
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From Alec Guinness as Fagin to Miss Piggy as Mrs Cratchit, the BFI is staging a three-month retrospective of Dickens on film and TV on London's South Bank from January, to mark the novelist's bicentenary.. The season is curated by Michael Eaton and Co-curator Adrian Wootton, said Dickens's influence on cinema and TV had been immense and continues right up to the present day, with Mike Newell's Great Expectations the next movie outing for Dickens. "It demonstrates that he is not a dead, grey old man sitting on dusty shelves who nobody reads, he is a living breathing artist whose work just keeps on rippling and resonating through our culture."

All the novels have been adapted to some degree. There are around 100 silent films, of which around a third still exist, "although we keep finding new ones all over the world and I still think there's many more out there," said Eaton.The season will include the earliest extant example of Dickens on film, a fragment from 1901 called Scrooge – or Marley's Ghost, and a version of Oliver Twist starring Jackie Coogan, who made his name in Charlie Chaplin's The Kid and who, much later in life, made his name all over again as Uncle Fester in the The Addams Family. The film was believed lost for decades until a print turned up in Yugoslavia in the 70s. Coogan himself helped with its reconstruction. Classic Dickens adaptations will include David Lean's 1948 Oliver Twist, Carol Reed's 1968 musical Oliver! and Roman Polanski's 2005 darker take. The curators said many people first encountered Dickens through TV and so five major adaptations will be screened in their entirety, beginning with Our Mutual Friend (1976) and ending with Bleak House (1985) in March. The RSC's eight-hour production The Life & Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, which was on the fledgling Channel 4, will also be screened with a panel discussion involving directors Trevor Nunn and John Caird, and actor David Threlfall who died so memorably as Smike.
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Did you know that Dickens and Bob Marley shared the same birthday - both were great social commentators.

My favorite Dickens was always David Copperfield - what's yours.