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Television · 2005
Bleak House
Against the backdrop of the protracted Jarndyce and Jarndyce inheritance dispute in the Court of Chancery, young orphan Esther Summerson serves as companion to two innocent wards while an ominous secret connects her to the aristocratic Lady Dedlock.
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At the halfway mark (eight more episodes to go, thank God) it's already firmly in place as my best TV programme of 2005. Andrew Davies reinvented literary adaptations for the 1990s with Middlemarch and Pride and Prejudice. Now he's done it again, by the simple expedient of admitting that Dickens Knows Best, a motto that I imagine he has displayed in needlepoint above his workstation.
Rupert Smith on The Guardian Bleak House is a great cut-and-come-again fruitcake of a book, studded with plums slice by slice. If Ian Richardson, Charles Dance and Timothy West weren't wonderful, we would be justified in asking for our money back. The surprise and delight of the night, however, was Burn Gorman, an actor quite unknown to me. He played Guppy, the sort of dogsbody who is always directed to the tradesman's entrance.
Nancy Banks-Smith on The Guardian This admission is very hell for a critic, so I may as well just get it out of the way: BBC1's Bleak House adaptation is a masterpiece - and all the more thrilling for so dramatically improving upon Dickens's rambling potboiler.
Kathryn Flett on The Observer
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