Why the Dickens are they climbing that?

TALK about being catty - that William Makepeace Thackeray was a real bitch. Consider his observation of rival novelist Charles Dickens and his wife on a night out: "How splendid Mrs Dickens was in pink satin and how fetching Mr Dickens was with geranium and ringlets. I would never dream of calling him vulgar but, could one say?, he lacks elegance. His novels have the same qualities. They are, how should I put it, overdressed."

He was clearly no lover of Dickens' work. "He made a career out of dying children. At his command, everyone took out their pocket handkerchiefs," he told the documentary Dickens.

Ah, you're thinking, surely Thackeray is dead? He lives again in Peter Ackroyd's compelling three-part TV biography of Dickens. This features interviews with key players, Dickens himself plus his family, friends and Thackeray (marvellously played with marvellous disdain by Geoffrey Palmer).

Ackroyd wanders in and out of the scene, bumping into Dickens (Anton Lesser) himself as he strolled the beach at Great Yarmouth seeking inspiration. Clips from TV versions of his books are interwoven into the action.

The result emphatically points up the link between Dickens' literature and his life. He used social and economic conditions, as well as his own life experience, to fuel his writing.

Through Oliver Twist he wanted to draw attention to workhouse conditions. Nicholas Nickleby was written to expose the horrors of private academies, leading to a public outcry and closure of such establishments.

The death of his wife's sister at an early age affected him deeply, and led to his obsession with "virtuous and innocent" girls in his novels. David Copperfield was about an aspiring writer in an unhappy marriage, a situation in which Dickens himself found himself.

Oddly, he named his ninth child, Dora, after a character he was in the process of killing in his fiction. And what should we make of his decision to open a home for fallen women, believing their reform should be enjoyable, not punitive?

Ackroyd could even trace the origins of the larger-than-life characters in his books - their broadness resulted from a childhood love of pantomime.

If Dickens was alive today, he'd probably be writing soaps and watching Soap Stars Up A Mountain. A dreadful title for a documentary following actors from The Bill, Coronation Street and Home And Away attempting to climb Mount Kilimanjaro for charity.

"It's a very big mountain and can take its toll," they were warned. "You'll all feel quite bad at some point. If you vomit, it doesn't mean you won't reach the summit".

Concerns about lack of toilet facilities soon gave way to simply trying to breath, with the high altitude causing sickness and headaches. It reduced at least one grown soap star (male) to tears and put several others in an extreme emotional state.

What probably started out as a bit of a lark, taxed them to the limit. Clare McGlinn, teacher and doctor's wife Charlie from the Street, summed it up: "I had never been through such mental and physical torture."