Tom Hardy and the 'Peaky Blinders' creator are teaming up for a new BBC show

Peaky Blinders and Taboo writer Stephen Knight is once again teaming up with Tom Hardy - this time for an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

The show will be part of a set of Dickens adaptations being made by the BBC, with Hardy on board as executive producer. Alien director Ridley Scott will also be involved, with his company Scott Free responsible for the show’s production.

Tom Hardy called it a “rare and wonderful opportunity” to “revisit and interpret Dickens’ classic works”. 

“A Christmas Carol is a fabulous magical piece of theatre and an embarrassment of riches for our creative team – from character all the way through to design. Here’s to having a lot of intricate and wonderful fun. We feel very lucky,” he said.

A Christmas Carol will be aired at Christmas 2019, so we’ve got two full years to wait until it hits our screens.

“Any question about narrative storytelling is answered by Dickens. To have the chance to revisit the text and interpret in a new way is the greatest privilege. We need luck and wisdom to do this justice,” Knight said. 

And it won’t be the fusty old adaptation it might sound like, with Knight previously complaining about period dramas not being “accessible or normal”.

“There’s a convention in English stuff that if something is more than 100 years old, people have to say ‘do not’ instead of ‘dont’,” he told the Hay Festival in 2015. “They have to say ‘will not’ instead of ‘won’t’. People are speaking in a way that is not accessible or normal, and people didn’t ever speak like that.”

“No-one ever spoke like that, even in Victorian or pre-Victorian times. People wrote novels like that because they felt they ought to - except for Dickens. So you have this barrier between what we consider to be how human beings were then, and how they are now. But everything was the same. All emotions were the same: jealousy was the same, love was the same, hate was the same.”

(Images: BBC)