The Mystery of Edwin Drood - 9pm, BBC2
Continuing the national obsession with all things Dickensian at the moment - coinciding with the 200th anniversary of the great novelist's birth - the BBC brings his final, unfinished novel about the tale of a missing boy and an opium-addicted choir master to our screens tonight, in the first of a two-parter (concluding tomorrow).
The tale of an orphaned boy and an opium-addicted master, the story was only half-written when its famous author died on June 9 1870. After a full day of working on Drood, and exactly halfway through the 12 planned monthly instalments of his novel, Dickens suffered a massive stroke... so this version is how screenwriter Gwyneth Hughes imagines it would have concluded.
Choirmaster John Jasper's unecclesiastical dreams of killing his beloved nephew Edwin Drood and stealing his fiancée Rosa Bud are brought to life in vivid, hallucinogenic fashion, in contrast with the brooding shadows of this dark adaptation.
In a blog on the BBC's website, the director Diarmuid Lawrence said he spent weeks with the writer and exec producer in "intense discussions about how to bring this exciting and challenging work to the screen, not necessarily as Dickens would have done - because who knows what he intended - but in a way that remains true to most of what he did write."
Here are some pics of Edwin Drood and Co - usual pale cheekbone rules apply: