The Artful Dodger: Jack Dawkins limbers for nimble twist of fait

If you’re going to revive the character of Jack Dawkins, you may as well do it with a whole dollop of irreverence. And this series hits the ground running like a sub-Guy Ritchie blast of fun.

Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Maia Mitchell star in The Artful Dodger.

As waits for a sequel go, a gap of more than 180 years must be up there – if the new series The Artful Dodger actually counts as that. Being a spirited, sunny caper set in Australia, it’s some way from the dank murk of Newgate (and yes, TV nerds might point out that there was already a 1980 series imagining the further adventures of the top-hatted urchin at a northern boarding school, but let’s not split hairs).

What’s more, the Artful Dodger, aka Jack Dawkins, is now, 15 years on from the events of Oliver Twist, a dashing and pioneering surgeon. One might be tempted to say this is something of a stretch. Still, old Dodge is carving out a living by carving off legs in front of baying crowds while raucous rock songs blast away in the background, as is now the way with period dramas (thankfully there’s not too much of the anachronistic soundtrack thing).

As the BBC’s recent prequel series Dodger has also shown, if you’re going to revive this character you may as well do it with a whole dollop of irreverence. And this series hits the ground running like a sub-Guy Ritchie blast of fun, the newly respectable Dawkins being given plenty of zip and charisma from the impish-faced Thomas Brodie-Sangster, once the boy in Love Actually who embraced getting “the shit kicked out of him by love” but who has since shown quite a talent for swaggering turns in The Queen’s Gambit and Pistol. Dawkins, who is content to have left behind his old life of petty thieving (that won’t last, of course), is not just an amputation expert. Pretty soon he is also a trailblazer in abdominal surgery, too, helped by the spunky proto-anaesthetist Lady Belle Fox (Maia Mitchell, who could almost be Brodie-Sangster’s sibling), the local governor’s daughter who has an unexplained obsession with revolutionary fields of medicine.

With their crackling love-loathe chemistry, Dawkins and Lady Belle spar verbally but also feel a growing attraction as they stand over a patient’s innards or achieve “the first ever successful ligation of a carotid aneuryism”, as she breathlessly exclaims. Bleak realism this is not, although Dickens would probably be tickled.

If the show’s medical obsession can put it more in line with, say, The Knick than Dodger, it’s certainly not short of light-fingered escapades. A card game in the opening scene has left Dawkins with a debt to pay off or he’ll lose a hand. Guess who then arrives in town, fresh off the boat? That’d be Fagin, played with the usual reedy relish by a shaven-headed David Thewlis. Of course it’s Fagin. Who cares about the Artful Dodger without his “mentor” around? It turns out the famed receiver of stolen goods escaped the noose thanks to a reprieve from Oliver Twist (which makes their later assessments of the boy as a “shitting do-gooder” and “a wet lettuce” seem uncharitable).

Guess who then arrives in town, fresh off the boat? That’d be Fagin, played with the usual reedy relish by a shaven-headed David Thewlis.

The pair’s further adventures provide much of the comedy as they go around visiting bored rich ladies, Fagin pretending to be an exotic European doctor (Dodge makes him smell, then taste, a patient’s sputum in front of her to spite him), although there’s no shortage of other ripely reprehensible characters, among them Tim Minchin’s contemptible Darius Cracksworth and Damon Herriman’s sinister Captain Gaines (giving Christoph Waltz’s Inglourious Basterds Nazi a run for his money in the polite interrogation stakes).

The spunky proto-anaesthetist Lady Belle Fox, played by Australian actress Maia Mitchell.

Yet for all that, and despite the sawn-off limbs and constant threat of a hanging, the tone is generally as light as gossamer. The problem is that it becomes hard to care about as the plot twists its way along at a canter. But it has wit, Brodie-Sangster and Thewlis are a fine double act, and it’s all so breezy you barely pause to consider how unlikely the whole romp is. An artful dodge indeed.

The Artful Dodger, streaming on Disney+.