He is a mischievous and black-hearted man. To his beloved Dora (Morfydd Clark), meanwhile, he’s Doady: a cute pet to be snuggled, like her lapdog Jip. Uriah Heep is an important figure in the novel David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. He is continually being defined by the nicknames others bestow on him: to Betsey Trotwood he’s Trot, a generic descendent, while Steerforth (Aneurin Barnard), his worldly wise schoolmate, sees him as a delicate Daisy. And Hugh Laurie is just treasurable as the scatterbrained Mr Dick.įaced with this lot, David is inspired to write – so write he does, jotting down quotes and observations on scraps of paper that he will later piece together into the “Personal History” of the title. Peter Capaldi brings a disheveled nobility to Mr Micawber that calls to mind the great Alastair Sim. Ben Whishaw’s Uriah Heep is a kind of a wilted leek in human form. Tilda Swinton brings a shiver of surrealism to the eccentric Betsey Trotwood. You’d be hard pressed to draw up a more pleasing guest list. David himself – adorably played as a boy by Jairaj Varsani and with consummate sparkle and charm as a young man by Dev Patel – could almost be hovering behind reception, the unflappable Polly trying to keep track of the comings and goings. The Personal History of David Copperfield barrels along like a farce, with characters bustling in and out like guests in the Fawlty Towers lobby. This rollicking new screen adaptation from master satirist Armando Iannucci suggests what Dickens himself might have felt while piecing together his manuscript: that our best hope of making sense of life is writing it down. For two men of letters, it feels apt that each one’s initials were the other’s mirror image. Both toiled in factories as children, fell in love with pretty young women above their station, eventually made their livings from words, and had fathers, or father-figures, who struggled with debt. And his name is David Copperfield.” Dickens’s affection for his eighth novel surely stemmed in part from the fact that its hero’s story ran close to his own. Micawber, in a grandiose manner, proceeds to expose Uriah Heep by reading a detailed account of his crimes against the firm, Mr. Micawber begins to berate the clerk for his trickery. “Like many fond parents,” Charles Dickens wrote a few years before he died, “I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. Despite his usual nervous, slimy manner, Uriah attempts to play the 'gracious' host however, when Agnes joins them, Mr. Cast: Dev Patel, Tilda Swinton, Jairaj Varsani, Hugh Laurie, Ben Whishaw, Peter Capaldi, Daisy May Cooper, Paul Whitehouse, Rosalind Eleazar, Aneurin Barnard, Morfydd Clark, Benedict Wong.