Peaky Blinders creator responds to major changes made to new show
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Great Expectations, the new Charles Dickens adaptation from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, is currently airing on Sunday nights on BBC One.
While it's visually stunning and features a cast including the likes of Olivia Colman and Fionn Whitehead, it has come under fire from Dickens fans for deviating from the source material, including a lot more sex and drugs than the written original.
Defending his tonal decisions, Knight told Radio Times that our knowledge of what life was like in those times is more in-depth now, so it would be remiss of him to pretend those things didn't happen, whilst stating that his version is in-keeping with Dickens' pushing of boundaries.
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He explained: "Having read lots of factual stuff about 19th century London, particularly Mayhew's London, knowing what was really going on in London at the time, knowing that Charles Dickens was a great observer so therefore knew exactly what was going on in London at the time, the only reason that he didn't deal with those things is because he couldn't, he wasn't allowed to. Not because of censorship, you just didn't go there...
"I think it would be odd to then write a fiction where all the things we know were going on don't go on. Almost as if we're not trying to offend someone.
"Normally when you're writing fiction you don't care, you're not treading that tightrope. You're forcing yourself to do it because it's Dickens. But Dickens didn't walk that tightrope, Dickens pushed his own parameters. So I think it's quite faithful to the spirit of him."
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He added that the characters and their journey at the heart of the story are overall the same, and all he's really doing is showing more of the world around them.
In Digital Spy's review, we praised the vivid interpretation of the world, as well as how its casting leaned into how diverse the times actually were, but felt that the chemistry between the lead characters was flat and undermined the whole enterprise.
Great Expectations airs on Sunday nights on BBC One at 9pm.
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