A Dickens of a task
EVEN IF YOU haven’t read Charles Dickens’ (and if you haven’t, you should), chances are you’ve heard of some of its greatest characters. Uriah Heep. Mr Micawber and, of course, the title character. But those are just names. When it came to turning them into flesh-and-blood creations for his adaptation of Dickens’ most personal novel, Armando Iannucci and his co-writer, Simon Blackwell, found themselves having to put meat on bones, motivations in mouths and, occasionally, making great, big whacking changes to the source material. “If we had to make changes,” he says, “we tried to make them in the spirit
