Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There's huge, visionary poetry in it.
Everyday I found some new and extraordinary thing. The whole thing about his conjuring is just utterly fascinating.
He always describes his characters' voices and their physique so brilliantly. As people have said, they are cartoons, caricatures. They're grotesques really.
He invented this idea of telling the life story of a great writer through becoming his characters and becoming him. It was such a pleasure and I thought we must find another writer.
He spent hours and hours and hours practising these conjuring tricks. It's just such a curious thing.
I did a show called The Importance of Being Oscar, about Oscar Wilde, which was written by a great Irish actor called Micheal MacLiammoir.
I get sent a lot of scripts which feature him as a kind of all-purpose Victorian literary character and really understand little, if anything, about him, his life or his books.
I knew him a little bit socially, and obviously his book is the definitive biography, and I knew that he was interested in writing for the theatre.
I saw the very first episode in 1963, with William Hartnell as the Doctor, and decided it wasn't for me, so I missed the entire procession of Doctors that followed.
It was a constant negotiation. And Patrick Garland, who directed it, made a huge contribution in those ways too.
The Barnaby Rudge scene was absolutely Patrick's suggestion. Mrs Gamp was me; I was determined that she would be in there.
The criterion was that the person was not only a wonderful writer but that his life should have been deeply interesting.
The nicest thing they say, and they say it quite a lot is, "I've got to start reading Dickens all over again now; I know him in a completely new way."
When the BBC decided to bring Doctor Who back as a feature film a few years ago, one national newspaper ran a poll to ask its readers who should be the new Doctor, and I topped it.
When you look at English writers, Dickens is about the only person who fulfils these criteria. I thought, "Who could possibly write this?"
With Mrs Gamp from Martin Chuzzlewit one hardly needed to go back to find out about her, she's so very vividly described by him.
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