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When it comes to Dickens adaptations, it helps to temper your expectations. The revered Victorian writer is perhaps the most frequently adapted novelist in history – but to what end? The results are wildly inconsistent: for every The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019) or Bleak House (2005), there are a dozen insipid Christmas Carols, or a handful of regrettable Oliver Twists. The BBC are once more throwing their (old-fashioned bowler) hat into the ring with a new six-episode screen version of Great Expectations. But how many more hats can this particular ring withstand?

Starring Dunkirk’s Fionn Whitehead as Pip, Shalom Brune-Franklin (Line of Duty) as Estella, and Oliva Colman as Miss Havisham, the new BBC series is a retelling of Dickens’s rags-to-riches bildungsroman – roughed up a bit with some distinctly modern sex and violence. Peaky Blinders scribe Steven Knight wrote the adaptation, the latest in a long line of Great Expectations adaptations for the screen.

David Nicholls, author of the hit novel One Day, has always loved Dickens's novel. As the film version is about to be released, he reveals how he set about his adaptation

Read a book at the right age and it will stay with you for life. For some people it's Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights, but for me it is Great Expectations. I first read it at 14 or so and, apart from some infatuations with Orwell, Fitzgerald, Salinger and Hardy, it has remained my favourite novel ever since. By some miracle, a story written in the mid-1850s had captured much of how I felt in a small provincial town at the end of the 1970s.

Yet if I saw myself in the book, it wasn't a particularly flattering portrait. It's clear why a young reader might aspire to be Elizabeth Bennet, but who would want to be Pip Pirrip?...