Things move at a rattling pace – accentuated by a spoons on saucepans soundtrack – before the pair even get started on the road south. There’s a fight, a theft and a fire. They arrive in a capital city where the newspaper sellers are crowing the headlines about a 10-year-old, sentenced to the gallows for the theft of a spoon. Dunderheaded policemen in clownish uniforms pursue the kids up and down the steps by the Thames. Whistles and covers are blown. The city’s palette is all misted, muted blue-grey-browns. Until we meet Christopher Eccleston’s Fagin, hunched over his roaring-bright fire, sly blue eyes a-twinkle in the murk.
“As a young actor,” Eccleston recently told the Radio Times, “I took myself far, far too seriously. I thought that great acting was straight acting. I now think the opposite.” So the former Dr Who goes full tilt pantomime villain with Fagin. I’ll admit to a lifelong discomfort at the antisemitic stereotype of the character. It’s an unease I felt accentuated when I thought about how to address it with my children. Eccleston leans into Fagin’s ethnicity with a Yiddish-cockney snarl. But there’s not much time for analysis during the show which keeps pelting merrily along at an untaxing CBBC pace.
Younger children will love the daft comedy of the pre-computer tech scene in which the mill owner tried to describe the missing Dawkins to the police. As a terrible artist he is forced to demand more and more pieces of paper – “No! This one looks like a girl! This one looks like a bear!” – until proudly handing over a stick man sketch which he believes captures the fugitive’s essence.
Older kids – who are all over their “rights” – will enjoy the way Fagin pitches his pauper gang against the injustice of the hierarchical society. When a former gang member is hanged he tells his kids: “We take more. We hit em harder. They think they can hang us from the highest beam and we’ll back down. But we’ll take revenge for every kid who, like you, has to nick to survive.”
The ideas and dialogue aren’t as nuanced as in a show such as His Dark Materials. The budget isn’t as big. But Dodger is cosy, conversation-provoking family fare. Please, BBC, can we have some more?
