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Armando Iannucci’s distinctive take on David Copperfield, streaming from Monday, is just the latest chapter in TV and cinema’s endless appetite for Pip, Oliver, Miss Havisham and co
There was a BBC documentary some years ago titled Dickens on Film that posited Charles Dickens as a kind of spiritual father of modern cinema. Television might be even closer to the mark, but there’s something to it either way: the DNA of Dickens’s busy, episodic storytelling, delivered in instalments and rife with cliffhangers and diversions, is traceable in everything from Coronation Street to the films of Paul Thomas Anderson.
No surprise, then, that more than 400 big- and small-screen adaptations have been made from his novels, with Armando Iannucci’s recent, rumbustious The Personal History of David Copperfield the latest. Out on DVD and streaming platforms from Monday, it enjoyably retains all the ornate period finery and star-speckled romping of past versions, but modernises things with imaginative multiracial casting and an added twist of Iannucci’s signature salty vernacular to the original text. It’s all a bit compressed: Copperfield’s winding saga doesn’t fit neatly in under two hours, so it’s constantly in motion but less moving than it could be. Still, it has a frisky, Dickensian spirit: for many younger viewers, it may come to seem definitive. Continue reading...