Gerald Charles Dickens (actor) his own British and American tours, Gerald Dickens performs extracts from "The Pickwick Papers", "David Copperfield", "Oliver Twist", "Great Expectations", "Nicholas Nickleby" and "A Christmas Carol" among others, in the latter creating 26 characters in a performance described by "The New York Times" as "a once in a lifetime brush with literary history." Dickens has recorded unabridged audiobooks of "The Pickwick Papers" and "Nicholas Nickleby". In December 2011 he appeared on the BBC's "Songs of Praise". A keen golfer, he wrote and performs the two-act play "Top Hole!", based on four golfing stories by P. G. Wodehouse. In 2015 at
Great Expectations (1974 film) one actress the whole way through'. Brian McFarlane, writing in a 2008 study of screen adaptations of "Great Expectations", criticised the film for its tendency to give way to 'clichés of sentimentality' and assured the director, who had expressed a hope that people wouldn't feel the necessity of comparing it with David Lean's version that, 'he need not have worried: no one would have spoken of them in the same breath. It's not just Lean's film with which it would not stand comparison but with several superior TV mini-series too'. McFarlane expressed some admiration however for Margaret Leighton's interpretation of