This week the final 2 episodes air on Wednesday and Friday on BBC1 at 8.00 pm

And so we say farewell to Claire Foy’s hugely appealing Little Dorrit as Andrew Davies’s masterful adaptation reaches its climax.

There have been some wonderful characterisations throughout, with Tom Courtenay bravely unloveable as the self-indulgent, vain and brutally snobbish Mr Dorrit, Judy Parfitt as the dragon-like Mrs Clennam, the wonderful Eddie Marsan as snorting pit-bull Pancks, and Matthew Macfadyen as Arthur Clennam, the rock around which all previous storms have dashed themselves.

Macfadyen’s role could easily have been a bore but he somehow managed to convey Arthur’s saintly, solid reliability without ever making it tedious.

Beware: Spoilers ahead

That solidity is shaken in the final episode, when Arthur’s fortune disappears along with Mr Merdle’s bankrupt bank.

Amy, Fanny, above, and Tip are also in dire financial straits as Mr Dorrit’s money goes down the same plughole. But money troubles mean less than nothing to Amy when she learns that Arthur lies gravely ill in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, and she leaves her sister and brother to look after him.

source: Daily Record, December 6