Sweeney Todd is a fictional character who first appeared as the villain of the penny dreadful serial The String of Pearls (1846–1847). The original tale became a feature of 19th-century melodrama and London legend. A barber from Fleet Street, Todd murders his customers with a straight razor and gives their corpses to Mrs. Lovett, his partner in crime, who bakes their flesh into meat pies. The tale has been retold many times since in various media.
Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress, is the second novel by English author Charles Dickens. It was originally published as a serial from 1837 to 1839 and as a three-volume book in 1838. The story follows the titular orphan, who, after being raised in a workhouse, escapes to London, where he meets a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by the elderly criminal Fagin, discovers the secrets of his parentage, and reconnects with his remaining family.
Andrew Wynford Davies is a Welsh screenwriter and novelist, best known for his television adaptations of To Serve Them All My Days, House of Cards, Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice, Bleak House, War & Peace, and his original serial A Very Peculiar Practice. He was made a BAFTA Fellow in 2002.
Peter Barnes was an English Olivier Award-winning playwright and screenwriter. His best known work is the play The Ruling Class, which was made into a 1972 film for which Peter O'Toole received an Oscar nomination.
Norman John Pace is an English actor and comedian, best known as one half of the comedy duo Hale and Pace with his friend and comic partner Gareth Hale. Both former teachers, they fronted several television programmes jointly, most notably Hale and Pace, Pushing Up Daisies, h&p@bbc and Jobs for the Boys.
Kenneth Cranham is a Scottish film, television, radio and stage actor. His most notable screen roles were in Oliver! (1968), Up Pompeii (1971), Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988), Chocolat (1988), Layer Cake (2004), Gangster No. 1 (2000), Hot Fuzz (2007), Maleficent (2014), and Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool (2017).
Stephen Lowe is an English playwright and director.
Reece Dinsdale is an English actor and director of stage, film and television. He is a Huddersfield Town fan.
Detective Inspector Charlie Resnick is the protagonist of a series of twelve police procedural novels by British writer John Harvey, based in the city of Nottingham. Resnick is of Polish descent and loves sandwiches and jazz. The first novel in the series, Lonely Hearts was published in 1989, and was named by The Times as one of the "100 Greatest Crime Novels of the Century". What was believed to be the final novel in the series, Last Rites, was published in 1998. However, in an interview on BBC Four on 7 November 2006 John Harvey mentioned that he was working on a new novel in the Resnick series. In an interview with the BBC on 20 October 2007, it was confirmed that the novel would be entitled Cold in Hand and would see Resnick retire from the police force. Cold in Hand was published in 2008. The final novel Darkness, Darkness was released in 2013.
Burn Hugh Gorman is an American-born English actor and musician. He is known for his television roles as Owen Harper in the BBC series Torchwood (2006–2008), Karl Tanner in the HBO series Game of Thrones (2013–14), Major Edmund Hewlett in the AMC series Turn: Washington's Spies (2014–2017), 'The Marshal' in the Prime Video series The Man in the High Castle (2015), and Adolphus Murtry in Prime Video series The Expanse (2019). His film roles include Phillip Stryver in The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Hermann Gottlieb in Pacific Rim (2013) and its sequel Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018).
Christopher Guard is an English actor, musician and artist. He is known for roles such as Jim Hawkins in Return to Treasure Island (1986), Bellboy in Doctor Who serial The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (1988), Marcellus in I, Claudius (1976), Marius in Les Misérables (1978), Ken Hodges in the medical drama Casualty (1993), and voicing Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings (1978).
Michael Francis Gregson, known professionally as Michael Craig, is a British actor and screenwriter, known for his work in theatre, film and television both in the United Kingdom and in Australia.
Adrian Philip Scarborough is an English actor.
A Christmas Carol, the 1843 novella by Charles Dickens (1812–1870), is one of the English author's best-known works. It is the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, a greedy miser who hates Christmas, but is transformed into a caring, kindly person through the visitations of four ghosts. The classic work has been dramatised and adapted countless times for virtually every medium and performance genre, and new versions appear regularly.
Amanda Whittington is an English dramatist who has written over 30 plays for theatre and radio. Her work is widely performed by companies across the UK, with recent productions at Hull Truck, Oldham Coliseum, New Vic Theatre and Nottingham Playhouse. Be My Baby is a popular GCSE and 'A' level choice in English Literature and Theatre Studies. She currently has two titles in Nick Hern Books' Top Ten Most Performed Plays. In 2017, she was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy by Publication at the University of Huddersfield.
Steven Knight is a British screenwriter, film and television producer and director. Knight wrote the screenplays for the films Closed Circuit, Dirty Pretty Things, and Eastern Promises, and also wrote and directed the films Locke and Hummingbird.
A Ghost Story for Christmas is a strand of annual British short television films originally broadcast on BBC One between 1971 and 1978, and revived sporadically by the BBC since 2005. With one exception, the original instalments were directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark and the films were all shot on 16 mm colour film. The remit behind the series was to provide a television adaptation of a classic ghost story, in line with the oral tradition of telling supernatural tales at Christmas.
Marek Kanievska is a British film director. His films have won awards at the Cannes Film Festival and the Florence Film Festival. His 2004 film A Different Loyalty was entered into the 26th Moscow International Film Festival.
The Signalman is a 1976 BBC television adaptation of "The Signal-Man", an 1866 short story by Charles Dickens. The story was adapted by Andrew Davies as the BBC's sixth A Ghost Story for Christmas, with Denholm Elliott starring as the signalman and Bernard Lloyd as the traveller, an unnamed character who acts as a plot device in place of the short story's narrator.
Great Expectations is a 2012 British-American film adaptation of Charles Dickens' 1861 novel of the same name. The film was directed by Mike Newell, with the adapted screenplay by David Nicholls, and stars Jeremy Irvine, Helena Bonham Carter, Holliday Grainger, Ralph Fiennes and Robbie Coltrane. It was distributed by Lionsgate.
