It would have been delightful to enjoy the well-rounded Dickensian characters again this Christmas. Instead we have been bombarded with repeats of dramas seen several times already. What has happened to this wonderful series?

Tony Jordan a long time writer for Eastenders created this soap opera type serial based on various Dickens novels and mixes various characters.There were main story threads involving the killing of Jacob Marley that is investigated by Inspector Bucket. Then there is the pending marriage of Miss Havisham.The series started in Christmas 2015 in a 30 minute format usually ending with a cliffhanger very much in the mould of the weekly editions of the Dickens stories. The series went on until late February 2016 and being irregularly scheduled which meant hard work to follow it around and find out when it was shown.The final episode tied up some story strands leaving the fate of the characters to be carried on in their respective novels. For example we last see Scrooge being bothered by ghostly sounds and images.However the show did not work for me, familiar characters but never really developed my interest. We have enough soap operas on television without having a Dickens based one and the final double episode was patchy in places.Maybe a shorter, sharper serial would have worked better.

A lot is already being covered about the virtues and flaws of this series in the press as it airs. However a major concern is that the writer appears to be falling into an unforgivable trap with regards both it's ambiguously stated gay protagonist, Arthur Havisham as well as it's token ethnic-minority male, Artful Dodger. In both instances the writer, though appearing to be mold-breaking on the one hand ,has in reality, evoked the tired and well worn negative depictions of ethnic minorities and gays living in a straight white world, that belong to an era we should have moved away from. The ambiguously asserted gay character, Arthur H, manages to adopt all the usual negative stereotypes assigned to a gay character for most of the 20th Century and widely castigated and made unpopular during the 70s and 80s. Havisham not only has no real voice as a gay individual, nor any active or satisfactory sexuality, but he's very much the victim, hysteric, corrupter, and corrupted all rolled into one. Usually the gay character with a negative stereotype has been assigned just one of these attributes. Yet Dickensian manages to roll all six into one. Not only is this unforgivable, It's totally anachronistic and homophobic.Likewise for the token ethnic-minority male, assigned to the Artful Dodger. Despite all appearances of being ground breaking, what non- white male viewers can enjoy is the usual negative images of a black man (in this instance boy) already well versed in the antics of crime and actively untrustworthy and a suitable suspect for accusations of homicide. As with LGBT depiction, this racist stereotype dominated for the best part of 100 years of moving image history, along side the more permissible image of the fun loving, cuddly, musical, cheeky but always servile black man. Artful Dodger appears to have been assigned something of all these negative stereotypes too. Here we are again, with the unconscious and unchecked racism of the writer and director who no doubt are both white and male, significantly, at a moment when there is uproar about this year's Oscars exclusion of ethnic minorities in the short lists of winners.It's not a trade off either. Just because a portrayal of ethnically diverse adolescent romance is included, it doesn't mean the writer gets away with the failures described. In fact, the choice continues to affirm what is palatable to the white-male-heterosexual, being his access to the not-too-black pretty girl, alongside the denigration of the gay and non-white male, both who no doubt represent a threat to his power. The series is still airing as i write, but one is now left speculating to what extent Havisham will escape an inevitable dismal ending (a nail- biter we've just gone through with the gay footman, Barrow of Downton Abbey)and the question of the degree of Dodger's immorality though of course where he'll be inescapably always bad. A good writer would have offered a different set of speculations.If white heterosexual writers are going to write in LGBT & ethnic monitory characters, then they should at least be familiar with the mistakes and criticisms made against script writers of their profession in the past and undertake not to repeat them. It all boils down to very bad craftsmanship, not political correctness, a defence so often sited by the offending. It's time to grow up, we can't drag these cliché derogatory stereotypes into the 21st century.

A newspaper reviewer of Dickensian wrote of Dickens' novels being "much loved". Indeed they were and are. But more than that they are enormously admired and respected. Dickens, also, was very much a popular entertainer. And all this with just words, without a flake of snow falling, atmospheric music or costume. His casts of characters are exactly that - individuals instantly memorable - some now immortal - and, typically Dickens, instantly recognisable by their manner of speaking. I am a great great admirer of Dickens' writing and it irks me to hear adaptations where additional (and usually inessential) dialogue is added - it's like driving along a smooth road and going over badly repaired noisy sections. It's not only that it doesn't sound like Dickens, but that it seems either like padding or plain exposition, and Dickens was never just plain. But I thoroughly enjoyed The Muppets' Christmas Carol - the characters were as per the book, quite a bit of the original dialogue used, an excellent Scrooge in Michael Caine and the moral message the same and undimmed - and, apart from being terrifically competent, it was thoroughly entertaining. Paradoxically it showed greater respect to Dickens than some "serious" adaptations. My feeling is that radio adaptations which keep close to the original are the most impressive. The BBC's radio adaptation of Bleak House was the very finest - the scenes between the haughty Lady Deadlock and lawyer Tulkinhorn (Anton Lesser) were if anything even more claustrophobic than in the book. When Dickens did a public reading of Oliver Twist some of the audience fainted at the dreadful scene where Bill Sykes, previously egged on by Fagin, bludgeons, the audience is encouraged to imagine, Nancy. There was a tradition of the Victorian stage monologue and nothing had a more powerful effect on an audience (A tearful audience at Simon Callow's rendering of Dickens "Dr Marigold" one case in point).From the sublime to the scarcely credible. The problem for me with Dickensian is that it blithely dispensed with Dickens' genius, replacing it with the very humdrum, just sprinkling it with a coating of Dickensian-style flavouring. There is nothing to love, to admire and little to entertain. Dickens can rest in peace - while his name can be stolen, his genius cannot.