(Encore!) Copperfeld, Chuzzlewit ... Partridge? : with Armando Iannucci

Ahead of a new series this month Dominic re-shares his popular interview with the inimitable Armando Iannucci!

Armando is one of the leading comedy writers and political satirists of our time - where we delve into his literary passions and influences.

This lively conversation peels back the layers of Armando's lifelong love of Charles Dickens - Martin Chuzzlewit in particular -and his interest in John Milton's masterpiece Paradise Lost and how these literary giants have left an indelible mark on his work. How he would later go on to write, produce and direct his own adaptation of David Copperfield, and whether he agrees that the character of Alan Partridge belongs in Dickens' canon of comic creations!

With readings from the wonderful Rebecca Tanwen.

Original cover headshot of Armando Iannucci © Matt Crockett / Original cover headshot of Dominic Gerrard © Jane Lloyd & Original Dickens illustrations sourced from Michael John Goodman's incredible Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:01

Hi everyone! A new series of Charles Dickens' A Brain on Fire is fast approaching, with brand new guests and some old favorites returning to talk to us. But as you wait patiently for their arrival, I thought I would reshare a classic episode from the series where I got to interview the inimitable Armando Ianucci. Welcome to Charles Dickens of Brain on Fire, a series that digs deep into the life and works of one of the greatest novelists of all time. Hi everyone, I am thrilled to welcome today's guest, Armando Ianucchi, who is one of the leading comedy writers and political satirists of our time, both sides of the Atlantic. Creator of award-winning shows such as The Thick of It, Veep, for which he won two Emmys, and Avenue Five. As a filmmaker, he directed, wrote, and produced The Death of Stalin and The Personal History of David Copperfield. With laser-like focus in all of his work, Armando reveals the awkwardness and absurdities of human behavior, from trying to greet people with fist bumps to the far more serious political misdemeanours of our elected representatives. During the pandemic, he sat down to write his mock epic poem Pandemonium, which heaped scorn and derision on Boris Johnson's personal history of mishandling the COVID crisis here in the UK. He is now expanding this work into a full stage adaptation opening in London's West End this year, and with new verses to include Liz Truss's thirty seconds as Prime Minister. In a far reaching chat today we talk about Armando's love of Dickens, but also John Milton, plus ideas of how to portray comic and serious characters in ways that are truthful, and why I certainly believe that his co-creation of Alan Gordon Partridge is absolutely a Dickensian character. Reading excerpts from Dickens and John Milton is the brilliant actress Rebecca Tanwin. Armando, welcome to Charles Dickens, A Brain on Fire. It's so great to have you here. Nice to be here. So you're very, very well known for your career in satire and comedy and keeping your finger on the pulse in terms of politics, both sides of the Atlantic. But when did your interest in Dickens first manifest itself?

SPEAKER_03 2:35

Um we had, I remember at school I had a rather slightly old-fashioned uh English teacher who was a big fan of fat Victorian novels. Um which is all well and good. A lot of the fat Victorian novels are very good. And I think I was introduced to Dickens via one of his slimmer novels, which was Great Expectations, which I thought, you know, as anyone who's read Great Expectations thinks it's, you know, wonderful. Um and I thought I'd go off and do a bit of Dickensing around myself and um the local library, the Hillhead Public Library that had just opened up two blocks down for me, um, in Byers Road, Glasgow, meant I could just borrow any book I liked. And I thought I'm gonna explore this Dickens. And I picked up Old Curiosity Shop, and it was very funny. I mean, just really funny. And no one had told me that Dickens was funny. Everyone tells you that Dickens is a great moraliser and a you know, a social comedy and satire and whatever, but not actually funny. And I remember there was a character in Old Curiosity Shop who whose name wouldn't really survive now in any adaptation now because it's called Dick Swiveller. But um he he was always in debt and he carried this book around with him, which was a map of London, and every day he would just cross the streets on the map that he can no longer go down because he owes people money there. And it just felt like a kind of comedy routine, really. I mean, but also desperately sad, you know. But he he's able to make a kind of comic construction out of it, and that really appealed to me.

SPEAKER_00 4:12

I enter in this little book the names of the streets I can't go down while the shops are open. This dinner today closes Longacre. I bought a pair of boots in Great Queen Street last week and made that a no thoroughfare too. There's only one avenue to the Strand left open now. The roads are closing so fast in every direction.

SPEAKER_03 4:34

Then weirdly I moved on to a novel that very few people when I talked to them about Dickens, seem to know much about Martin Chazelwit, which is hilarious. Yeah. Absolutely you know, every scene is like a comic classic, really. And obviously, yeah, then as Dickens' work uh got more mature and you know, he he recognized his position of influence, he was able to marry that ability to entertain and to be popular, um, you know, to to speak to the masses, but at the same time, you know, using that public platform to you know expose and explore really difficult social themes. And I've always admired that about his, you know, he could have taken it easy, he could have, you know, off his success, he could have played the same thing again and again, again, um, done all of a twist to and all that, which was happening in the theaters, all the theatres. There was no copyright law in those days. So the theaters were just putting on baldlerized and made-up versions of his novels. You know, he could have done that, but he just decided to keep moving on and and keep exploring and become more adventurous and daring. Um, Bleak House is one of the most innovative, structurally innovative and experimental novels ever written, because it's like in two different there's two different narrative voices that alternate the chapters. One is in the first person, the other's the third person. One is in the present tense, one is in the past tense. What made him think that? You know, and and yet it kind of worked.

SPEAKER_01 6:17

And to be writing as a woman as well is extraordinary.

SPEAKER_03 6:20

Yes, exactly. Exactly. And he started off writing these things as periodically, you know, as weekly or as monthly installments, not really knowing where they were going. So, you know, Pickwick Papers famously, he was just hired to write words to go with pictures and the selling point with the illustrations, really. But his words to go with the illustrations were so entertaining that it really took off. And he so he became the most famous writer in Britain at the age of whatever, 21, 22. And so I think he never set out to be a novelist. I'm not even sure he set out to be a writer. I think he set out to be some kind of observer of the world, you know. Uh, he started off as a parliamentary sketchwriter, I suppose, and then along came Pickwick Papers. Um so he didn't have a plan, he didn't have uh, you know, a novelist's agenda. So I think he was working it out as he went along, as he went on to do Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. He could see the audience that he was connecting with, and it was a mass audience. Um, I mean, I mentioned Pickwick Papers, that famously people were queuing up at the docks in America for the final instalment of uh the old curiosity shop because they wanted to know whether Little Nell lived or died. So it was a real sort of season finale of the old curiosity shop was arriving uh on a on a ship that taken six weeks to get over. So he could see this mass appeal, and then as he started exploring where else he could take the novel and how he could expand its scope, I think he then started to challenge himself, to almost like take himself out of his comfort zone in his later novels.

SPEAKER_01 8:05

I'm so struck, and I agree totally with what you were saying about that surprise at finding how funny Dickens is, but then the surprise of finding how serious he can be in a book with characters called Chuzelwitz or Swedlepipe. Yes. And these bizarre character names, and yet as you read them, they settle. I know that Martin Chuzzlewit is a big favourite of yours, um, but I remember in my early twenties seeing that title in a bookshop and thinking, I really don't want to read that one. You know, it sounds a bit rubbish. Just looking at the title. And then later on finding out I was completely wrong and that Dickens can hold all these opposite things together in the same narrative.

SPEAKER_03 8:47

Yes, you get this sort of impression by with those sort of middle books of his that he has a kind of a plan. There's a sense of structure, but at the same time, it's still spontaneous because he is still writing it in in regular instalments. Martin Chusselwood, the sales of Martin Chusselworth were slumping, so he decided to send half his characters off to America for no reason. And there's 200 pages of a very, very funny satire on America's capitalist obsession with wealth and property and underneath the guise of these kind of um values about freedom and liberty and so on. Um so it's still kind of messy, and that's what I like about him actually. I'm sure if he did these drafts of these books and then looked at them two or three years later, he he he would have gone back and changed the names and done that and that. But he couldn't because they were already out because of this monthly and then weekly kind of publication uh model that he had. So he couldn't really change them. But I kind of like that because it allows us the messiness and the um sprawl, the fact that he's really looking at life and then turning it into writing. And you shouldn't be conscious of it having a shape and a structure, really. You should be feeling that much more organically and instinctively rather than hearing the novelist or the writer tell you, you know, this will parallel that in 200 pages and this thing will emerge slightly differently here. It's not about that at all. I think he he's trying to get under the skin of the people, which is why they seem, yes, they seem they've got funny names, and yet they seem so lifelike. They seem so fully formed.

SPEAKER_01 10:27

Yes. Well, this leads me straight on to one of your creations, Alan Partridge. Right. And I I see him, yeah, sorry to throw that straight at you, but no, no, no, it's all right. I see him entirely as a Dickensian character. But hearing what you've said about him in the past, it's really interesting to see you trying to work out what is plausible and what is over the top for him.

SPEAKER_03 10:49

Yeah, I mean, I'm flattered that you've equate part of Dickens in the Dickens Canon, but uh there is something about that that we didn't have a plan for Alan. He emerged spontaneously in that I just asked Steve Coogan to be our sports reporter on On The Ar, which is a fake news programme. And he came up with his voice, which was a kind of amalgam of lots of sports reporters, but no one in particular. And it felt so real that we were instantly saying, Oh, he lives in Norwich. And you know, we were we're already coming up with a biography for Alan. And and also we didn't plan that character as a project that we would then do for four series of something, a sketch show or chat show for four years, and it's been popping up and up and out over the last 30 years now in different guises, because he sort of feels like there is a there is a thread of life in him. And uh, whenever Steve and I met up when we weren't doing Alan Partridge, we would get into a conversation about what what do you think Alan's up to now? And we would speculate, you know. So so there was this running life going on at the back of our heads of uh that was Alan, uh, that seemed to have a kind of momentum of its own that we occasionally dipped into. Um, and Dickens talked about, I mean, his daughter, I think, spoke about when he was writing, you could hear him writing because he would act out some of the characters in the mirror. He would look in the mirror and be the characters, and that was how he he brought them to life.

SPEAKER_02 12:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 12:21

He did talk about whenever he ended a novel, it it felt very sad to him because he felt he was saying goodbye to these people who'd become his friends in his head, you know. And he kind of feels then that each Dickens novel is part of his output, is almost like a continuous novel. I suppose the Marvel cinematic universe is the is the model that comes, you know. I think there is a Dickens novelistic universe that where characters from the different novels must live near each other and would occasionally bump into each other, I'm sure.

SPEAKER_01 12:55

Yes. And it's interesting what you're saying about Dickens practicing in the mirror and improvising his characters aloud, which I think is what you did as a group to create Alan Partridge. Yes. As well, yeah. Just on Alan very quickly though, you disagree slightly with Patrick Marbour about the first series and the second series, because Patrick Marber felt that the second series would be less realistic or naturalistic if it was a kind of over-the-shoulder in the hotel.

SPEAKER_03 13:22

Uh yeah, I think Patrick was just nervous that uh I mean it was also Patrick had just written, I think it was just written Dealer's Choice, and it was a great success in the National. So he couldn't, he he had to bow out gracefully from writing the series. He was nervous. We the three of us had decided we did want to do a kind of sitcom with Alan, but how do we keep it real? And and and Patrick was nervous that it might feel like a sitcom. Um, but that just I think encouraged us to try and think okay, how do we avoid that? How and watching sitcoms at the time, it was a lot of loud acting because you know it was very theatrical. It was people on a stage projecting out to the audience in the studio. And so what I did was I uh we built the sets within these crates of um four walls that would force the actors to look at each other instead of to the audience. But the audience would be in the studio watching them on screens, and and so the actors could still hear the audience laugh and be able to take their timing from the laughter, but it would feel real and it wouldn't feel pressurized into speaking loudly outward but quietly to each other. And then as the evening went on, the recording went on, we would take the front wall off so that the audience could actually see into the set, and that would give it that air of feeling like it was filmed on location, but actually the sense of an audience being there to respond to it. Some people thought that it was filmed in a hotel, but it was it's not it was filmed at TV Center. Dennis DeGroot, our designer, did a very, very good lifelike hotel for which he was not rewarded because everyone thought he'd just moved us to a hotel. Sheer bloody hard work on his part that then Yes.

SPEAKER_01 15:03

He worked so hard to make his work invisible. Exactly, you know. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 15:07

So you should consider that an honor.

SPEAKER_01 15:09

Yes, that's interesting. And um so reading Dickens as a young boy, did that do anything to garner your interest in politics and satire?

SPEAKER_03 15:20

I always was interested in politics, I think more in the kind of the drama of it, the the procedure, the the the grandeur of it, really. Um and then over the years I've become more interested in how politics doesn't work and why it isn't working, and and and the tricks that politicians use to get, you know, which takes us down to language. And in fact, you realise that politicians are doing a performance anyway. But it was interesting, Dickens as I said, he started off as a parliamentary sketchwriter, so he was there at the start, really. That's his first writing task, really, to write not just summaries but funny and amusing takes on what had been happening that day. And I thought it reached reached the height, I think, for me, in Little Dorrit, where he invents Circumlocution Office, which is this fictional government ministry where just you know good ideas go to die, really, and nothing gets done. And I saw it as a precursor to you know Big Brother in 1984, and uh Yes Minister and the Sir Humphrey and Yes Minister Brazil, or or uh you know, modern times, and even the great dictator, the Charlie Chaplin-esque take on the madness, the Kafka-esque nightmare of institutions, and the little person, the little guy being caught up in the middle. I've always seen Dickens and Charlie Chaplin having a kind of similarity because both of them, obviously, both of them were born in poor circumstances in in London. Both of them became the most famous comic writer or performer in the world at about the age of 21, and so on. Both of them were known for doing everything themselves. You know, Dickens famously was really in there and not just in the book, in the writing, but wanted to know how it was what the paper was going to be like. He was a hands-on, he ran a newspaper at the same time on various occasions, and really involved doing everything. And both of them were there, really inventing the rules uh of their medium for how comedy and um satire should be done, and setting those rules that you know have been maintained to this day. So I I think there's a big similarity between the two of them.

SPEAKER_01 17:45

Yes, and you mentioned Yes Minister, and I absolutely love that programme, and its natural heir and successor is your show, The Thick of It. But I've been re-watching Yes Minister recently, and it's wonderful. But I wondered if you felt that it might be a little bit too cozy or cuddly. You know, that the bad behaviour, all the quangos and all the corruption behind the scenes, the massaging of the truth and figures, is it's all kind of smoothed off. And as a viewer, you don't get as angry about it all as maybe you should.

SPEAKER_03 18:18

It's interesting. I was doing a documentary about Yes Minister, which meant going back and watching every episode, didn't, and I thought they all stood up really in terms of the themes and the topics. It was all about Europe, it was about terrorism, it was about cuts, it was about austerity, it was about, you know, it was the same old, same old. Um, beautifully done, beautifully performed. And at the time we had no recordings of Parliament, we weren't allowed to. They started by putting microphones on so we could listen to Parliament on the radio. We couldn't really get pictures of Parliament until after Yesminster started. So it was almost like this is our way of seeing into how Whitehall works. I felt though that it might feel cozy now. I think at the time it felt quite radical, but it seemed to blame the civil service for uh ills. And my sense when I was watching it and when we did the thick of it, which would be about 2005, 6, 7, something like that, was that that relationship had changed. You know, the civil service weren't really the powerhouse behind things. They'd been sidelined, and it was the government bringing in their own alternative civil servants, which were the aides and the advisors and the the spads, the special, the special advisers, aged about 12, uh and their culture of and and we've seen it in the last four or five years with every change of prime minister, unelected, brings in her or his set of little helpers who then think they can now run the country any way they like, forgetting that they have to answer to parliament and they have to answer to us. Um sort of typified in its absolute worst by the crazy um Liz Truss month. Um so yes, but I was picking up on the beginnings of that trend, I think. Blair did it really, and Asta Campbell trying to control the grid. But before then, Thatcher, I think, was the first to actually try and impose her will across Whitehall, and if required, bring in her own people to do it, if the civil service didn't. So I wanted to capture that change and also just how much the media is driving events as well. In that, I mean, when we were doing the thick of it, it was becoming 24-hour, you know, phones and everyone's a reporter now because you've got a phone and a microphone, and you so you've got a camera and you can film any, you know. So everyone is like on, and how difficult that makes things because you know, you can't get everything right all the time. Somebody sticks their camera in front of you, you're bound to say something that 10 minutes later you you think, I don't know why I should have said that, I should have said something else. Don't know what I'm thinking. But you by then it's too late. And it's that um crazy pressure that we now all put on politicians, I think, that no wonder they kind of crash and burn much more uh frequently.

SPEAKER_01 21:25

This is a natural step then towards your pandemonium. Right. Um yes.

SPEAKER_03 21:31

It's almost like this is whole planned by whole by design. Right, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:39

I was going to say that's my first question on that was was are you writing to include Liz Truss and some of the things that happened since you first Oh yes.

SPEAKER_03 21:47

So this started as a poem, an e a mock epic poem that I published during lockdown, and it came out October twenty twenty, November. So it was before mentions of parties and

SPEAKER_02 22:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 22:00

All that sort of thing. And before, obviously, Boris hitting the buffers and then Liz Trump and then Rishi Schuneck. So and I'm doing it now as a play, more or less starting from scratch on it, because the bulk of it is new events. But starting with the pandemic and taking us to the present day, and doing it like an epic drama, really, like a like a Shakespeare history play or a Greek tragedy in 90 minutes.

SPEAKER_01 22:29

And this, of course, this pulls out one of your other very key influences, John Milton. Where does John Milton then feature alongside Dickens and your influences? What is the connection?

SPEAKER_03 22:38

Milton, I was rather taken by Paradise Lost because, again, it's the scale of it. It's the arrogance of this poet who says, I'm going to tell you all about good and evil and right and wrong and free will and determinism and God and the devil. And then writing a very, perhaps against his own nature, very ambiguous uh novel-length poem, where Satan, rather like Darth Vadar and and all the other villains, is the most interesting thing. You, you know, you he gets the best speeches. Um and I found that rather appealing. And but it's all about temptation, it's all about, you know, are we free to choose or is everything by design? And and was it saying to us that we actually find the devil much more interesting than God, who's very boring in Paradise Lost, very dull. I think he smiles once, and I remember coming across uh an academic article where it talked about God smiling in heaven and called it as an example of Jehovialism. Um writer was very pleased with himself, but that was the point where I thought uh I think I should move on and do comedy now. Um but I like that loftiness, you know, the loftiness of the plan. You know, I'm not gonna tell you about little boring things, I'm gonna tell you about the big things, right and wrong. Yes. And I put Boris in that setting because he sees himself as a classically trained eye on history, Churchill is his hero, you know, the Greeks and the Romans are his his inspiration. He wants to be in the big league. So I thought, okay, let's place him on that stage and see where we go.

SPEAKER_01 24:28

Absolutely. And there's something in that character of Boris that reminds me of young Martin in Martin Chusselwitz, uh that lazy entitled position of, oh, if I become a great architect one day, Tom I'll I'll look after you.

SPEAKER_03 24:46

It'll all happen. It'll all come my way, yes.

SPEAKER_00 24:49

If I should turn out a great architect, Tom, said Martin one day, as he stood at a little distance from his drawing and eyed it with much complacency. I'll tell you what should be one of the things I'd built. I cried Tom. What? Why, your fortune. No, said Tom Pinch, quite as much delighted as if the thing were done. Would you, though? How kind of you to say so. Oh, I mean what I say, retorted Martin, with a manner as free and easy in its condescension to, as if he were already first architect to all the crowned heads in Europe.

SPEAKER_01 25:27

I absolutely loved your mock epic poem Pandemonium, and it inspired me to go back and read Milton's Paradise Lost. And something I found very powerful and moving in the Milton was the time as a reader you get to spend with Adam and Eve.

SPEAKER_02 25:43

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 25:44

Much more than you do in the Bible. And there's that tragic moment uh where Eve has that dream, that premonition about being tempted by the serpent, and you think, Well, of course she's going to fail. Her whole existence she's been raised to be entirely innocent and unaware. How on earth is she going to stand against the forces of darkness?

SPEAKER_00 26:04

Methought close at mine ear one called me forth to walk with gentle voice. I thought it thine. It said, Why sleepst thou Eve? Now is the pleasant time. I rose as at thy call, but found thee not. To find thee I directed then my walk, and on methought alone I passed through ways that brought me on a sudden to the tree of interdicted knowledge, fair it seemed, much fairer to my fancy than by day, and as I wandering looked, beside it stood one shaped and winged, like one of those from heaven by us oft seen, but with venomous arm he plucked, he tasted, he drew nigh, and to me held even to my mouth of that same fruit held part, which he had plucked. The pleasant savory smell so quickened appetite that I, methought, could not but taste. Forthwith up to the clouds with him I flew, and underneath beheld the earth outstretched immense, a prospect wide and various. Wondering at my flight and changed to this high exultation, suddenly my guide was gone, and I, methought, sunk down and fell asleep. But oh how glad I waked to find this but a dream.

SPEAKER_03 27:25

And Milton is trying to make it so you can read it two ways simultaneously, which is yes, of course she's going to do it, because we all know that's the story. But at the same time, oh no, at any point she could, because she's free, choose not to.

SPEAKER_00 27:40

Serpent, thy overpraising leaves in doubt the virtue of that fruit.

SPEAKER_03 27:45

But of course, Milton, like most people up till now, is a terrible misogynist, blames it all on her. Adam gets off really lightly, you know. He just wear a line cloth. That's his punishment.

SPEAKER_00 28:01

Oh, why did God, creator wise, that peopled highest heaven with spirits masculine, create at last this novelty on earth, this fair defect of nature, and not fill the world at once with men as angels without feminine.

SPEAKER_03 28:17

But what I like about it is the, and various people have written about it, how you know Milton is a bit like Adam and Eve and a bit like Satan in that he is tempted, he's tempted to try and think he understands how God works and can put it in writing, uh, which of course is the ultimate temptation. And he just about manages it, um, thus proving that we are better than God.

SPEAKER_01 28:44

And when you sit down to write pandemonium and you're and you're thinking of the epic poets of the past, when you're writing in verse form, are you do you make a conscious decision not to write in regular pentameters, for example? Because Paradise Lost is mostly pentameters, I think, isn't it?

SPEAKER_03 28:58

Yes, I'm trying to, and it's free verse. It's not, I'm not writing. I mean, uh uh two hours listening to rhyme after rhyme in a theatre would drive everyone insane. So it's more, it's more it's a heightened form that is sort of like heroic verse, but you know, gives me enough license to to not have to stick to it rigidly. Um, but enough to allow each of the characters not just to be themselves, but to be able to voice and articulate grander ideas if they want to, or come up with visual images and comparisons and similes and so on, if they want to, if it sounds a story, really. Um, so it's the opposite of naturalistic dialogue, as it were. But yes, hopefully, and I've we've now done a couple of table reads just to kind of hear it back. It should sound clear. As when you go to see any Shakespeare, where they've really thought carefully about every line and how it should be delivered, so it's delivered like speech, rather like something artificial.

SPEAKER_01 30:00

Yeah. And um you're working on pandemonium, you're expanding pandemonium for the stage. Just to wind back a few years, when you approached adapting David Copperfield for the screen. With most Dickens adaptations, it's usually a choice between the narrative as a you know a voiceover in the film, or you have none of the narrative sections and it's just the dialogue. But you seem to find clever ways of introducing the narrative into the frame or into the dialogue. Did you have any ground rules for how you would do that?

SPEAKER_03 30:31

Um, the first rule I said really to as we were writing and also to the actors and to the crew was let's pretend that costume drama has never existed, and therefore there are no set ways in which you do this. So it's as if we're doing it for the first time. Because I wanted it to feel very real and direct and so on. But also, you know, David Copperfield does give us the way in because it's a book about a writer. You know, he he he grows up to be a writer, he he spends the whole book trying to work out who he is, and he's called different names by different people Dodie, Davy, Daisy, yeah, Totwood, and so on. And wondering also whether he fits in, whether he's in the right state, you know, his status, and he's full of status anxiety and imposter syndrome and all those other, you know, 21st century uh anxieties that we have. Um, and then he works out, oh, I'm a I'm I'm a writer. All these people around me, I should stop worrying about what they think of me, and I'll write down actually what I think of them. And and and that's how I will define myself, really. So it was really about a story that ends up becoming a book. Um, and that was the way into it. So that would allow us to start. It starts with Dev Patel as David coming on stage, rather like Dickens when he used to tour giving performances, acting out scenes from his novels. Um, Dev Patel comes on as David and starts with the opening lines of David Copperfield, but then the whole theatre disappears and we follow his story, but allows him as an observer of both himself and others around him to comment at any time if he wants, really, and then bring it all together at the end. So that that and also, yes, a lot of Dickens' adaptations I think throw away like the language and the comedy and just go for the story. I think the story is the least interesting thing. I think Dickens, I think, just used the story to to get to the next bit he really wanted to write, really.

SPEAKER_02 32:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 32:36

Um, so it was about trying to maintain that relish for people and for the way they spoke and behaved and so on, that David saw. Um, so try to keep that in the in the film and so that we get excited by the way people talk and behave as well.

SPEAKER_01 32:53

Yes, I'm picking up on what you were saying about how you wanted to pretend that there'd never been a period drama before.

SPEAKER_03 32:58

I remember telling that you gave the background uh act not to wander around slowly, sort of swinging your arms very slowly. You're on like you're on parade and some Victorian because people just just wander along like you normally don't speak like this, sir. Just speak like this, sir. You know, because that's how people speak. Um be aware that you're in the past, because you're actually in your present day. You are modern, as far as you're concerned.

SPEAKER_01 33:24

That's so true, because Dickens obviously parodies the pomposity of other characters, doesn't he? He has, you know, you honey thunders and people like that that talk like that.

SPEAKER_03 33:31

He makes fun of but but fundamentally, you know, his heroes and so on are are normal people, so they they just behave normally.

SPEAKER_01 33:39

I thought Dev Patel's casting was inspired, and a moment that really, as a viewer, won me over to him was when he walks to find his aunt and he's starving, and he totally plays that for real. You know, he's a real person, there's no histrionics, there's nothing operatic about it, and then moments later he's sprinkled with vinegar, and he can then deliver the comedy of that moment as well.

SPEAKER_03 34:05

No, he's great, Dev. And and he was the first and only person I could think of to play David, really. So I was very nervous when I asked him if he'd said no, because I didn't really have a I didn't really have a plan B. Um I always just imagine because um, you know, we've seen him grow up in uh skins and then obviously Slum Dog Millionaire.

SPEAKER_02 34:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 34:25

And then I saw him in line where he was very strong. So I've seen him be comic and funny and gawky and all that, and then in line he was very strong and charismatic and centered. Um that was the moment when I thought that's David Copperfield, because he has to be both David Copperfield. He has to be in in control in the end of his own destiny, while at the same time, early on being buffeted around and being a kind of participant in all these comic goings on. Um going back to Chaplin, actually, when we did the before you start a film, you do a little lighting test and a costume test, which is basically you get the cast in and they're trying out the costumes for the first time, the director of photography and the lighting crew are trying out the look on camera for the first time, and there is no sound, you know. We're just we were just doing that. And it's when when Dev walked on as David and did a bit of a a kind of walk and stuff like that, it was so funny because I thought it's Chaplin, it's Chaplin. And the fact that there was no sound when I watched it back, it was like a silent movie. Just um it was just incredible to to see, really. And there was someone who knew how to make his body funny and then at the same time um serious and and centered.

SPEAKER_01 35:36

And I thought Ben Wishore's portrayal of Uriah Heap was excellent. He becomes quite a sympathetic character, doesn't he? You're almost on his side, which I think is more than what you get in the original novel.

SPEAKER_03 35:48

It's an interesting, I mean, in the novel, actually, David Copperfield is quite horrible to Uriah at times. And and we thought maybe Uriah is almost like the same age as David, and basically they started in the same, roughly the same kind of status in life, and it was then what they chose to make of it that took them in their two different directions, really. So almost Uriah could have been David, David could have been Uriah if they'd done things slightly differently, if either one had done things slightly differently. So he sort of that really as you know, without being explicit about it, but them seeing versions of themselves in each other and seeing that as a warning, really. But there are elements of that in the book. David is, you know, led on by Stan Forth and is horrible and snobbish and admits that he's become a snob and so on. And then it's funny, David Copperfield, all these themes are then distilled in some of the later novels Dickens did. So that thing of snobbishness and class and so on, it goes into great expectations and and and and status and poverty and wealth, and wealth and poverty goes into little Dorrit. It's funny how in David Copperfield all these themes are milling around in a kind of very raw and um still slightly baggy kind of telling of a life. Uh oh, the school, the whole growing up in the school in hard times with grag grind and facts. It's almost like once he'd finished David Copperfield's a novel about a writer who writes a novel. Dickens has then worked out what he wants to do with the novel in in the various experimental things he then does with it in his latter career.

SPEAKER_01 37:36

And in the cinematography, David's mother's face coming in out of focus reminded me of the moment where he talks about remembering her face or trying to remember her face. And we see that.

SPEAKER_03 37:45

Yes, the opening of David Cumberfield again is very kind of joy, and it's like all one-syllable words, and he he rema he's like a little baby trying to work out what words and smells and colours and shapes all mean. And you know, he's trying to put meaning into his sensations around him.

SPEAKER_00 38:05

The first objects that assume a distinct presence before me, as I look far back into the blank of my infancy, are my mother with her pretty hair and youthful shape, and Peggy with no shape at all, and cheeks and arms so hard and red that I wonder the birds didn't peck her in preference to apples. I believe I can remember these two at a little distance apart, dwarfed to my sight by stooping down or kneeling on the floor, and I going unsteadily from one to the other.

SPEAKER_03 38:34

It's like, you know, his language is starting to to form out of the clouds and and and become much more start to become real. It's a it's really fascinating. It's a great psychological novel, in a way, really, because it is about this person who doesn't quite know where he stands and uh, you know, if I should become the hero of my own story, you know. He doesn't know. He doesn't know where where he sits in everything.

SPEAKER_01 39:01

Armando, thank you. This has been so brilliant. Um, but before you go, I just wondered if you'd be happy to tell the listeners why you think they should read Martin Chuzzlewit. I completely agree, um, but for some reason I think it's one that's overlooked.

SPEAKER_03 39:16

Yes, from the early ones. So full of amazing set piece, comic, and indeed dramatic moments. It's the sheer power of the invention there. There's Mrs. Gamp who speaks in these um malapropisms, and who's a kind of precursor for characters you see the two Ronnies, Ronnie Barker and um, or in Little Britain, and you know, there's just getting words wrong and being quite confident about it. Um, the trip to America, it's so full of I think what pits people off is the is the name and also the you know the sheer length of it. So I mean my advice is to to buy it and just rip it into four 200-page notebooks so that it looks less daunting, really.

SPEAKER_01 40:02

I agree, and I and I think I think possibly where he wrong foots the reader a little bit is that opening chapter, which is that parody history of the of the Chuzzlewit family, with if you don't tune into the irony there and enjoy that that first chapter, I think it's quite hard. But that second chapter, and I was always and in for this chat I was trying to link you, Milton and Dickens, into one place. And I think the the prose in that second chapter describing the weather and the wind gathering is pure Milton.

SPEAKER_00 40:29

A moment and its glory was no more. The sun went down beneath the long dark lines of hill and cloud, which piled up in the west an airy city. Wall heaped on wall and battlement on battlement. The light was all withdrawn, the shining church turned cold and dark. The stream forgot to smile, the birds were silent, and the gloom of winter dwelt on everything. An evening wind uprose too, and the slighter branches cracked and rattled as they moved, in skeleton dances, to its moaning music.

SPEAKER_01 41:40

And Pecksniff is terrible for all the best reasons, and yeah. But there we go. I think we've covered quite a lot there. Yes, we really have. Thank you so much. Pleasure. Goodbye now. Bye-bye. Thank you for listening to Charles Dickens of Brain on Fire. If you're enjoying these episodes and would like to make a small donation towards the costs of producing them, please follow the link at the bottom of the description, and you can make a donation there. Every coffee you buy makes a huge difference. Thank you ever so much, and see you next time.