Husband-and-wife team Rhys Thomas and Lucy Montgomery and Universal International Studios’ Mark Freeland talk about making Oliver Twist-inspired family drama series Dodger for CBBC and BBC iPlayer.
Family drama Dodger is aimed squarely at a co-viewing audience
Dodger is a family comedy-drama series created by Rhys Thomas that follows the exploits of one of Charles Dickens’ best-loved characters, The Artful Dodger from Oliver Twist, as he and the rest of Fagin’s gang find ingenious ways to survive in Victorian London.
The 10-part series was produced by Universal International Studios for the BBC’s children’s channel CBBC and VoD platform iPlayer, where it premiered on Sunday. It features a cast including Christopher Eccleston (Doctor Who), David Threlfall (Shameless), Billy Jenkins (The Crown), Saira Choudhry (Life) and Javone Prince (PhoneShop).
According to Thomas, who along with his wife Lucy Montgomery is a writer, producer and actor, the idea to make a TV show centred on Dodger and Fagin came to him when he was just a child himself.
“I’ve always loved the [1968] musical film Oliver!,” he says. “When I was about 12 or 13, I was in a production of Oliver! as Mr Brownlow, which was a very boring part, and I remember thinking at the time how much fun the characters of Dodger and Fagin were and how they would be a good idea for a television programme.
“Years later I had an idea to do it as a book, but that didn’t come about. Then once Lucy and I had children of our own, I thought I’d love to make something we could watch as a family. Lucy and I come from a comedy background and often the comedy we do is grown-up and the kids can’t watch a lot of it, so I wanted to make something fun and exciting the whole family could watch together, like the programmes I watched when I was younger.”
As a family drama, the notion of co-viewing the project was extremely important to Thomas and Montgomery, who wrote and also have minor acting roles in the series. To make it appeal to both children and adults, it had to offer a balance of action, adventure and humour.
“It doesn’t talk down to children. We deliberately wrote the scripts so adults would enjoy it in a similar way to a [Disney] Pixar film or The Simpsons, or a family film like Back to the Future. I’d love it if people would watch this together, not just on their phones or in their own rooms but as a family,” Thomas says.
“Children are much more sophisticated viewers because they watch a wide range of things across streaming platforms and channels like the BBC,” Montgomery adds.
Lucy Montgomery and Rhys Thomas
“Dodger has a certain level of humour and wordplay that adults will get, as well as the action-adventure the kids will love. There’s also real jeopardy for the characters, so whatever age you are you’re going to be on the edge of your seat. We wanted to make it extremely fast-paced and have the drama of a mainstream BBC One show but with the kids always at the fore.”
With a background predominantly in comedy aimed at adults, Thomas (Star Stories, The Fast Show, Nathan Barley) highlights “a slight snobbery” towards children’s drama among those working in adult drama, but encourages them to give the genre a go.
“A lot of people take it for granted how brilliant children’s television is in this country and how entertaining it can be. I like that side to it because you don’t have to have swearing, you don’t have to have violence and you don’t have to appeal to an older audience just to be cool,” he says.
“I would happily do this for the rest of my life. There’s nothing better than working with young children. They’re so enthusiastic and fun, they’re not cynical like sometimes people working on a comedy can be. The children brought the best out in everybody because they didn’t moan about the hours or the lines, they just enjoyed themselves. I would recommend a lot more people do this. Also, the joy you get from children’s faces watching it is brilliant.”
And while Dodger may have been written for a family audience, the money behind it was certainly not that of a low-budget kids’ show. Mark Freeland, who exec produces Dodger for Universal International Studios, says: “We’ve put every single shekel, dollar and pound on screen.”
For Freeland, maintaining a childlike element was also extremely important in highlighting the show’s serious themes, which would not have had the same impact had it been written purely for adults.
Mark Freeland
“We’ve always wanted the whole series to be as if it’s seen through the eyes of a child; a child questioning things, not accepting things, being forced to do things. That childlike quality of looking at the world is really powerful, particularly at the moment,” he says.
The serious tones of the series also encouraged the team to cast children who had “really lived life” to portray the hard lives of the characters, according to Freeland.
“If you took a picture of an 11-year-old in those times, they looked like they were 25 years old because they had lived almost an adult life already, either in poor houses, on the streets or even worse. So in the casting we tried to find young performers who either appeared to have lived a life already or had done so. We wanted to find genuine kids who felt authentic and real,” he says.
At C21’s Content London event in December, execs at BBC Children’s revealed they are in the market for “one big-ticket item a year,” to follow Dodger’s lead. So will Dodger return for a second season?
“We really hope so. We’ve got tons of ideas, enough for 10 seasons,” Montgomery says. “There’s further for Dodger to go and we want to do more with this new group of young stars. If they don’t suddenly run away to Hollywood, we need to keep them.”
“What’s lovely about Dodger is we’ve written the first season on our own but we could hand it over to other writers who come in with ideas. There is scope for it to run and run and run for a long time and you could do spin-offs with other characters as well,” Thomas adds.
As Freeland concludes: “We leave season one on the most enormous cliffhanger, so hopefully we’ll get the chance to show what happens after the cliff hangs.”
