The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby

By FRANCES GRANT

If you think Pam Ferris (Darling Buds of May, Where the Heart Is) was born to play cosy, cuddly characters, this weekend's Sunday Theatre should well and truly put paid to that.

Ferris, whose actually claims her favourite role to have been the world's meanest headmistress in the film of Roald Dahl's Matilda, is one of the stars in the latest television adaptation of a Charles Dickens novel, Nicholas Nickleby.

As Mrs Squeers, wife of the master of Dotheboys Hall school for boys, Ferris is a paragon of drunken licentiousness and grubby malice.

Forget Pioneer House: not a lot of starching and bathing goes on at Dotheboys Hall, judging by the state of Mrs Squeers' slatternly garb and bathcleaner-style headgear.

The Squeers are, of course, a pair of the Victorian master storyteller's most grotesque creatures, and this Channel 4 production cannot resist making a meal of them.

Their school is Hell for a group of Dickens' other favourite characters - innocent, suffering children.

The breakfast menu for the wretched orphans says it all: one large spoon of "brimstone," a dose of sulphur guaranteed to suppress the appetite. It's the sort of school grub that fits right in with the Squeers' philosophy of education: "Cheap, like learning should be."

While the poor boys cower, snuffle and starve, the Squeers and their two fat children giggle and squeal and stuff their faces.

Into this world of typical Dickensian social injustice, comes Nicholas Nickleby (James D'Arcy, Tom Jones, Dance to the Music of Time), a young man forced to find a way to earn a living following the death of his father.

And it wouldn't be Dickens either without a grieving widow and angelic maiden (Nicholas' mother and sister Kate), a rich and embittered old gent (Uncle Ralph Nickleby) and a mysterious stranger with a funny name (Newman Noggs) who holds the key to all the connections between characters.

The drama begins with the bereaved and indebted Nickleby family coming to London to beg help from wealthy Uncle Ralph (a wonderfully chilly Charles Dance, The Jewel in the Crown, Rebecca, Hillary and Jackie - see interview below). But Uncle isn't kindly disposed to the dependants of his feckless brother.

His response to his sister-in-law's plight? Instead of giving his straitened relatives a nice little allowance to live on, Uncle Ralph finds them jobs and a hovel to rent.

He sends Nicholas to the Squeers' frightful establishment in Yorkshire and Kate (Sophia Myles) to work for a lascivious milliner only too delighted to receive her.

It's a long way to Yorkshire when you're sitting on the roof of a horse-drawn coach and things don't improve for Nicholas when he finally arrives to take up his position.

While Mrs Squeers doesn't take to him - "He's a proud, haughty, consequential, turned-up-nose peacock!" - barrel-shaped daughter Fanny is all over him like a nasty dose of pox. Fanny's tea-party, arranged to showcase her attractions to the new young school teacher, has plenty of howling but is no success.

Then there's the problem of another Dickens regulation character, the unfortunate cripple Smike, and his inhumane treatment at the hands of the incorrigible villain Wackford Squeers.

Meanwhile, Kate isn't faring any better at the hat-maker's. When she is chosen to model a bonnet over the queen bee of the workshop, the horsy-looking Miss Knag, her lonely fate is sealed. Called upon by her uncle to play hostess at one of his dinner parties, she becomes victim of a gang of drunken, aristocratic yobs.

What will become of the young heroes: will they make their way to a happy ending or drown in the quagmire of Victorian England's infested streets? Will the Squeers get theirs? Will Uncle Ralph relent and learn to show a little kindness?

Well, this is Dickens, so you can expect a few plot twists along the way. And no one will get off too easy. It's a hard, cruel world out there. As Uncle Ralph points out to the grieving widow, "Husbands die every day."

* The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, TV One, Sunday, 8.30 pm