The TV Series Nut!!

Dickens creates a world. All great writers do this, but there is no writer in our language of whom it is truer than of him. The novels - even The Pickwick Papers - are drenched in tears and sadness. We weep quite as much as laugh over his pages. But the laughter, the jokes, the language itself, all confront life in a manner that compels us to share his robust attitude to the wretchedness of childhood, the humiliations of poverty, the dread of death.

Many of the funniest moments occur during extremely sad episodes. This is what makes the dramatisation of his novels such a ticklish business. The Roman Polanski film of Oliver Twist evoked the squalor of 19th-century London, the pathos of the workhouse, the misery of Fagin's lair. But it could not catch the atmosphere of the novel which, for all its terribleness, and terror, is a comedy - or a tragedy shot through with comedy.

Oscar Wilde was trying to be clever, and succeeding perhaps, when he said you would need a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell, but in his clever joke he captured something of the essence of The Old Curiosity Shop. Dick Swiveller is one of the most wonderful characters in Dickens, beginning as a wastrel who has to dodge the streets, where he has run up debts in pie shops and pawnbrokers, and ending as the hero who marries the put-upon parlourmaid of Sally Brass - "The Marchioness".

In cancelled passages of the novel Dickens had made it clear that the Marchioness was the natural child of Sally Brass and the villain of the novel, Daniel Quilp, the terrifying dwarfish self-projection of the writer (Quill-Pen/Quilp) himself. Quilp is always comic - viz his bursting in upon the supper party when his mother-in-law, Mrs Jinnywin, is dissecting his character - and always evil. His persecution of his wife, his diddling of the owner of the Old Curiosity Shop, his lecherous designs upon the 14-year-old Nell are seen through the comic mask of Dickens's language.

An ITV dramatisation on Boxing Day was a disaster. It presented the whole sequence of events and characters - even the Punch and Judy men Codlin and Short, or Mrs Jarley the waxworks proprietress - with a muted actorly seriousness that castrated the atmosphere of the book. It made a sad contrast with a BBC effort at dramatising the book, which I remember from my childhood, in which the sometime Doctor Who, Patrick Troughton, brought Quilp to life with violent animation.

Dickens's characters, if viewed by anyone other than Dickens, would not necessarily be comic at all. Witness Mr Micawber, reborn as Marmeladov in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Burglars, child-molesters, swindlers, workhouse proprietors, prison "screws", orphans, bullying fathers and cruel step-parents are not funny when met with, either in contemporary life or in history. Dickens's way of coping with the dreadfulness of human wickedness is to make them into grotesques. His was the most glorious artistic apogee of a generalised English irony - witness the manner with which the population at large made Hitler a comic creation during the Blitz.

Now, we live in a different atmosphere. Esther Rantzen encourages the Artful Dodger to ring Childline. Mr Dombey and Mr Murdstone would be urged to seek family therapy. Mr Dorrit, rather than languishing in the Marshalsea, would find that his investments in Northern Rock had been compensated by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Probably we are all much nicer in consequence, but with our You and Yours culture of whinge, we have lost our sense of humour. In consequence, we are less noble than Dickens.

In Catford and Toxteth and the Gorbals, there are still plenty of Little Nells, warding off dwarfish lechers. The Artful Dodger is on crack cocaine. Addicts of drink and gambling every bit as pathetic as Nell's grandfather shuffle from government-sponsored casino to the corner shop for their lottery tickets. Dickens was not heartless in finding comedy in their lives. On the contrary, by making them tragi-comic he allowed his readers to remain alive to the dignity of the poor even in their most abject state. But we live in a state run by Mrs Jellybys and Mr Bumbles, where laughter is frowned upon and those in authority see their job (which Dickens never did) to improve those less fortunate than ourselves.