The modern age specialising all too expertly in heartless financiers, Adrian Dunbar’s Ralph makes for an entirely credible villain. Either way, homelessnesss brings a bereaved widow ( Bronagh Gallagher, pictured below) and her two children Nick (Andrew Simpson) and Kat (Jayne Wisener) up to London to fall on the mercy of their uncle Ralph Nickleby. Perhaps a trick was missed in not hinting that, like a lot of penniless modern farmers, the deceased had committed suicide.

Nick Nickleby begins as it means to go on, with bailiffs arriving at the Nicklebys’ Devon farmhouse as they head back from burying Nick’s bankrupt father. This adaptation challenges the idea that inequality is a social ill consigned to the dustbin of Victorian fiction. The really clever thing in this new version is its updating of all these elements to the present day. This is a fresh and urgent introduction to Dickens's pioneering imagination Where The Pickwick Papers established Dickens's reputation for episodic comedy, and Oliver Twist introduced the social reformer and creator of grotesques, Nicholas Nickleby combines all of the above and thus became the first work to convey the full meaning of what we understand by the word Dickensian. A baggy, babbling melodrama, with a supporting cast of heroes, villains and eccentrics all in glorious 2D, it is set in a London where vast wealth and desperate poverty live cheek by jowl. But Nickleby – the tale of a young man forced by the death of his father to take responsibility in a hostile world for his mother and sister - is the soapiest book in the canon.

Indeed, Andrew Davies latched on to the idea a few years ago with half-hour bi-weekly instalments of Bleak House. Joy Wilkinson's script underpins the idea that Dickens, as no one ever tires of saying, would be writing soap opera if he were active today.

Will it fight for its place in the world like the novel’s impetuous young hero, or be trampled underfoot like poor beleaguered Smike?īBC Northern Ireland have certainly found a way of attracting the audience’s attention by screening five episodes across the week.

But into this bustling crowd the BBC has thrust its own new version.

Nick nickleby