Dickens series bought by TV2

Press, 20 March 1978, Page 15

Dickens series bought by TV2

PA staff correspondent Londoni South Pacific Television has bought a four-part serialisation of Charles Dickens’s novel, “Hard Times,” in; which a New Zealand actress, Barbara Ewing, i plays a working-class! woman named Rachel. The series, produced by i Granada Television, won the British Broadcasting Press Guild award for the best drama series of 1977. Made in conjunction with an American public broadcasting station. “Hard Times” also won the 1977 gold medal for drama at the New York International Film and Television Festival. The programmes, each of one hour, were shot at locations in modern British in- j dustrial cities, to recreate! the atmosphere of Dickens’s fictitious Coketown. Jacqueline Tong stars as Louisa Gradgrind, the daughter of a prominent citizen.; She is raised to believe in ; materialism at the expense; of her own feelings, and| with her brother, Tom, played by Patrick Allen, is; seen as a victim of their j father’s strong principles.i which emphasise duty over, emotion.

Louisa’s marriage to one of her father’s colleagues fails and Tom resorts to 'bank robbery. Miss Ewing portrays a slum dweller who defends a man friend when he is unfairly accused of robbing a bank. A spokesman for Granada i Television said that the research for the programmes posed some unusual problems. Coketown was “assembled” by shooting i n various locations i in the Manchester area. Foi the classroom scenes, researchers discovered a school founded in 1853 to educate children who might be ashamed to go to other schools because of the scarcity and raggedness of their' clothing. Hundreds of schoolchildren were auditioned to find a handful thin, enough to look like undernourished urchins of the mid-nineteenth century. A complete Victorian circus, covering a two-hec-; tare site, was built. It in-; eluded 25 acts, 15 horses.; hundreds of costumed; extras, and a dancing bear. Some of the performers were descendants of artists. who were circus troupers in Dickens’s time.