Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist is being given a new spin in a star-studded BBC prequel to the Victorian novel, which highlights the parallels between food poverty in the 19th century and now.
Echoing the most famous line from Dickens’ 1838 classic – “Please sir, I want some more” – and Marcus Rashford’s campaign to reduce child hunger, the writers of forthcoming 10-part family adventure series Dodger say they “made a conscious effort” to put food poverty “to the fore” in their show based on the exploits of Dickens’ characters the Artful Dodger and crime-lord Fagin.
The spin-off creates a backstory for Fagin, played by Christopher Eccleston, making him “more interesting, sympathetic and funny … like a Robin Hood character” than in previous screen versions and suggests he may have been the subject of an antisemitic attack, according to Dodger creators Rhys Thomas and Lucy Montgomery.
The husband and wife team have also updated other characters for modern audiences. Montgomery said that Nancy, who is played by Saira Choudhry, is no longer the traditional big-hearted fallen “Cockney sparrow”, but for the first time on screen as a wily northern thief who manipulates Bill Sikes.
As Tom Stoppard did with his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, creating a new show around the back-stories of characters from a classical work gives, as Montgomery put it, “an opportunity to create something fresh and new”.
They also wanted Dodger to be a programme the “family can all sit down and watch” for their children’s generation, while highlighting, with the use of food banks escalating due to the pandemic, that many children who will watch the BBC show will understand Fagin’s orphan gang’s battle against poverty and hunger.
Thomas said he could see the children in his area who were being hit by the cost of living crisis. He said: “We wanted to make something that’s really inclusive that everyone watching can identify with. You’ve got the Malory Towers kids going off to a fancy school and that’s one life and that’s fine, but this is a different world where I think kids watching this today, it resonates with them.”
He first came up with the concept after appearing in a school performance of Oliver Twist as a child and said “coming from a working-class background I’m not saying we struggled for food every week but we didn’t have a lot of money”.
Although the fast-paced Dodger does not condone the crimes the characters commit it does explain why they do them, as Thomas said. “The whole thing is survival, there’s no one to rely on. As Fagin says, ‘If we don’t rob we can’t eat and if we can’t eat we’ll starve and we’ll die’. It’s a survival instinct; he’s not a greedy man who wants money in the way you’ve seen in the past.”
Montgomery said that with no welfare state for Victorian children the “food bank was the local market and what could you nick”. She compared some of the exploitation of children today to the manipulation of the orphans by Fagin, with “children being used … obviously it happens today with things like county lines; this is like the 1830s version of that.”
Comedians and writers Thomas and Montgomery also appear in the show, along with stars who play real-life historical characters to help teach some history to audiences, including David Threlfall as the first Metropolitan chief of police, Sir Charles Rowan, and Sex Education’s Tanya Reynolds as Queen Victoria, along with newcomers such as Billy Jenkins as Dodger. The cast have also recorded history lessons for the BBC’s website.
The writers said they took Dodger to the BBC as they thought it chimed with the organisation’s mission to inform, educate and entertain.
Despite the social issues raised the series is optimistic and funny, said Montgomery: “It’s children being clever and using their bravery and wit to get themselves out of problems.”
Thomas added: “If Dickens was around I don’t know what he’d think of it; hopefully he’d like it and think it’s quite funny – it’s in the spirit of the writing.”
Dodger begins on BBC iPlayer and CBBC on Sunday 6 February
