Bleak
House gets the soap opera treatment for BBC ONE
Writer
Andrew Davies, who delighted audiences with his adaptation of Pride
and Prejudice, is turning Charles Dickens' Bleak House into
a new series of soap opera-style episodes for BBC ONE.
Dickens'
original readers enjoyed the novels in short instalments which ended
in cliff-hangers to persuade them to buy the next chapter.
Laura
Mackie, BBC Head of Drama Serials, says: "It's a new way of
doing the classic adaptation, reinvigorating our approach to the
serial form, matching it to the serial structure and narrative development
of the original - and the way that it was originally published.
"The
Dickens novel was very much the soap opera of its day, and we hope
to emulate those same cliff-hanger emotions in televisual terms."
Andrew
Davies says: "Dickens seemed particularly suitable because
there are so many characters, there's such a lot of life, such a
number of criss-crossing plots, that it would be interesting to
do it in a new way, with shorter episodes and having a lot of characters
in the background of each other's stories."
Producer
Nigel Stafford-Clark worked with Andrew Davies to develop the concept
of adapting Bleak House in a completely new form.
The
pair has also worked together on the BAFTA award-winning adaptation
of Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now and has recently completed
Trollope's He Knew He Was Right, due for transmission in 2004.
All
the BBC's digital services are now available on Freeview,
the new free-to-view digital terrestrial television service, as well
as on satellite and cable. Freeview
offers the BBC's eight television channels, interactive services
from BBCi, as well as 11 national BBC radio networks.
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