Great Expectations writer Steven Knight explains NSFW episode 2 scene

Dickens aficionados may have been surprised by a scene featuring Matt Berry’s Mr Pumblechook at the start of episode 2.

By James Hibbs

Published: Sunday, 02 April 2023 at 12:00 am

So… the second episode of Great Expectations certainly got off to an interesting start, didn’t it?

Viewers expecting Steven Knight’s new Dickens adaptation, which is airing on BBC One, to pick up where it left off from episode 1, with Pip meeting Miss Havisham for the first time, got what they were expecting – but they also found that the opening scene was intercut with another, more unexpected storyline.

As Pip is given his first lesson by Havisham, we also see his sister Sara closing her bedroom window shutters and taking off her wedding ring, before approaching Matt Berry’s Mr Pumblechook with an iron rod.

Sara then proceeds to beat Pumblechook across his back as he appears shirtless and on all fours on her bed, evidently getting sexual pleasure from the encounter.

Fans of Dickens’s original text may find themselves perplexed by the surprising sequence, but for Knight, it ties directly into inferences made in the novel.

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Matt Berry as Mr Pumblechook in Great Expectations.
FX Networks,Miya Mizuno

At a recent Q&A, Knight explained: “What I don’t want to do is say, ‘OK, I’m going to get a Dickens and then vandalise it and change it’. Because I think that point is, as far as I’m concerned, that when Dickens was writing he was not allowed to write about certain things.

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“And if you read about what Victorian London was like, there’s a lot of stuff going on and Dickens knew there was a lot of stuff going on and his readers knew. But they all knew he couldn’t write about that sort of stuff, not because he wasn’t brave, but because you just didn’t do that sort of thing.

“So I think if you take a microscope to the text of Dickens – for example, Pumblechook and Mrs Gargery, there are a couple of lines in there where they disappear together. And I think that a Victorian readership were a bit more forensic about what was going on.

“There’s many examples in Dickens where he sort of goes off on a tangent that we think, ‘He’s sort of suggesting stuff’. Human beings haven’t changed since then to now. Everybody was doing the stuff they do now then.

“And what I hope I’m trying to do is, if Dickens were around now and had the liberty to go down some of those dark alleys, this is what it would have been.”

When asked whether he was looking to include more dark, perverse and twisted elements in his script, Knight said: “It’s not even dark, perverse and twisted, it’s funny. That’s the point, it’s not trying to be like, ‘Let’s make it really dark’. Dickens is dark enough.

“For me, it’s just a question of saying the things that couldn’t be said at the time which Dickens was saying in code. And so it’s not an attempt to deliberately be dark, it’s an attempt to say, ‘This is what the world was like when Dickens was writing, but he couldn’t quite say that at the time’.”

Addressing the role of Matt Berry’s Pumblechook specifically, Knight said: “Pumblechook, I think, is a really interesting character. And as I say, there are lines within the existing book that suggest that maybe there is something there, where they disappear together.

“So I just mused that maybe there was something going on between those two and it was realised in that way. It’s not something that I sit down and plan, it’s something that came along and I thought, ‘Well that would be interesting’.”

Knight recently spoke exclusively with RadioTimes.com about Great Expectations for a Big RT Interview, where he also discussed the development of the Peaky Blinders movie, SAS Rogue Heroes season 2, Taboo season 2 and more.