Woman's Hour Interview
Posted at 3:42 PM (PDT) on Monday, October 24, 2005

Gillian was on Woman's Hour today. If you'd like to hear the interview, click here.

Bleak House starts airing this week in the UK on BBC1, Thursday (Oct. 27), 8pm & Friday (Oct. 28), 8.30pm.

BBC's press pack phase two is now available. Click here.

Observer Magazine
By Sarah Hughes

One of the finest of Charles Dickens's novels, Bleak House is a fantastic detective story, a condemnation of the Victorian legal system and one of the few books to feature death by spontaneous combustion. It is also, as Andrew Davies recently noted, a wonderful soap opera.

Davies kicks off his atmospheric adaptation with an hour-long scene setter but thereafter the show will be broadcast, like a soap, in a half-hour chunks. It's a format that works surprisingly well, allowing Davies and his all-star cast to truly bring Dickens's tale to life. Everything is included here - from the ghastly Mrs Jellyby neglecting her own children for the starving of Africa to the haunted Lady Dedlock announcing 'I am so very bored of life,' as she stares mournfully at the rain.

This is costume drama as it should be done, with a sense of fun and an understanding of the source material. Charles Dance slithers magnificently as the self-interested Tulkinghorn, Gillian Anderson steals the show during her brief minutes as Lady Dedlock and Anna Maxwell Martin is a suitably plain and highly sympathetic Esther Summerson. From the fog at the heart of Chancery to the Lincolnshire gloom, Davies rarely misses a step. Quite brilliant - and there's still that spontaneous combustion to come.