Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times is set in a northern factory town at the height of the industrial revolution, far away from the writer’s normal stamping ground of London - but it certainly doesn’t lack the overlapping plots, the wide array of characters and the incorporation of melodrama, humour and tragedy that we associate so closely with the author.

Dickens had travelled north himself as a journalist to cover a cotton strike in Preston and seen first hand the various ways in which the factory system was oppressing the people living and working within it.

In the first of two episodes looking at the book, John Yorke considers how Dickens transformed that eye-witness experience into the fictional world of Coketown, with its soot-blackened bricks and serpents of smoke.

John Yorke has worked in television and radio for 30 years, and he shares his experience with Radio 4 listeners as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories that are being dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. From EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless, he has been obsessed with telling big popular stories. He has spent years analysing not just how stories work but why they resonate with audiences around the globe, and has brought together his experience in his bestselling book Into the Woods. As former Head of Channel Four Drama, Controller of BBC Drama Production and MD of Company Pictures, John has tested his theories during an extensive production career working on some of the world’s most lucrative, widely viewed and critically acclaimed TV drama. As founder of the hugely successful BBC Writers Academy, John has trained a generation of screenwriters.

Contributors:
Frank Cottrell-Boyce, screenwriter and current Children’s Laureate
Dr Emily Bell, University of Leeds
Deborah McAndrew, writer, director and actor

Researcher/Broadcast Assistant: Nina Semple
Sound: Sean Kerwin
Producer: Geoff Bird
Executive Producer: Sara Davies
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4