I've read "Great Expectations" a few times in my life. I studied it at sixth form and again at University. I've written essays and answered exam questions on pretty much every single one of the novel's themes and influences, and even though all that was a while ago now, I'd like to think I know the text pretty well. 

So I was really surprised, last night watching the BBC's latest adaptation of 'Great Expectations', that an influence I must have stupidly missed is that of the "Twilight" books. I don't recall Dickens messing with Vampires - unless in one of the few remaining novels of his that I haven't yet read he goes at them like a steam train pushing a giant wooden stake at the head of it. It's unlikely, I would have thought, given that Dickens died thirty years or so before Bram Stoker published 'Dracula' and the vampire myth burst into popular culture over the following decades, but I could be wrong... (sarcasm mode engaged).

From the opening scenes depicting Magwitch rising from the foggy mudflats like a gasping, newly-resurrected zombie, to the transformation of Young Pip who, by working hard as an apprentice blacksmith for seven years, returns to Satis House a pale-faced, effeminate pretty-boy complete with pouty lips and giant eyelashes, the whole production was layered at every opportunity with symbols deliberately representative of the bland, beige vampire strain running through the DNA of current popular culture. Just as every band using real guitars and pianos feels the need to be a bit like Coldplay and every female singer has to sound a bit like Adele, so it seems that if you want the teens to enjoy Dickens, you have to make it look like Twilight. In the same way, I guess, that a couple of years ago Penguin re-issued 'Wuthering Heights' with a cover that made it look like a new novel in the Twilight series. (Jane Austen also suffered a cruel, torturous re-skinning just so that the booksellers - ie Waterstones - would put a couple of her novels back on their shelves which must have led to many disappointed teenage girls wondering why none of the posh men in those books turned out to be girly, angst-ridden bloodsuckers).

Shameless.....

Even bad-boy Orlick, who does for Mrs Joe, descended on young Pip in one scene complete with bloodied teeth, ripped shirt and pale skin, sunken eyes etc to torment and taunt our young hero as he ambled down the paths through the marshes with an expression as bleak and doomy as the Hammer-House landscape surrounding him. So clear and obvious was the reference that I wouldn't have been surprised if the villain had transformed into some shady night-creature and slunk into the Fens leaving nothing but a curl of acrid smoke behind him.

Arguably, Miss Haversham is the closest 'Great Expectations' gets to a real Vampire. Sitting in the shuttered rooms of her decaying mansion, hiding from the lights of a society she believes has spurned her, she deliberately, maliciously manipulates the lives and passions of Estella and Pip, sticking pins through their hearts (wooden stakes anyone?), sucking in other players who stray too close to her dark domain. But ... massive but!... Gillian Anderson plays her magnificently, I have to say. She is totally mesmerising. I think in all previous adaptations this character has been played by someone over eighty years old ( or at least made to look that way), but Anderson's portrayal as a younger, still beautiful yet irrevocably damaged Miss Haversham was just hypnotic to watch and I can't wait to see more of her.

So to watch her again, I'll stick with this over the remaining couple of episodes. I'll stick with it also because despite my rant, there was so much else to like about it: the photography was astonishig in places -  the looming prison hulks rising out of the fog, the bleached colours of the Fens ( I was pretty sure the setting was the Thames Estuary in the novel but I could be wrong - it doesn't matter); Some brilliant acting - I've already said about Gillian Anderson, but there's also Ray Winstone as a truly bollock-tighteningly-terrifying Magwitch and David Suchet as a dark, smooth and viperish Mr Jaggers. Also, I know that it's a great story, and despite the producers' best efforts to turn on the Twilight, this seems so far to be a very detailed, very faithful adaptation of one of my favourite Dickens novels.

I just hope that in their quest to pull out the darkness that runs through the novel's narrative, they don't miss out the scathing humour that Dickens laces his text with. In a story as grim as this, you do need the light as well as the dark. Otherwise it'd be a very biege, one-note show.

Oho

• Mon, 20:20: Debating whether or not to start reading 'Dune' again....