Little Dorrit

Am I the only person in the land to think that the BBC production of "Little Dorrit" is pretty awful?
The praise it's receiving from TV pundits is lavish to the extent that I'm beginning to think I'm missing something. OK, the acting is excellent, the settings well presented, the story unfolds in an almost acceptably dramatic way but it's all so slow and tedious and un-literary. It is Dickens in the sense that it has his eccentric characters on display but the trouble is here that practically everyone is eccentric. And the names they have!
In the book one tends to accept these characters because they are basically funny; but here they are no fun, they are simply eccentrically daft.
And the story is so contrived and dull. And the two main characters, Little Dorrit and the male lead, Clenham, so plainly formulations of what Dickens believes are "good people".
I think it a disaster and I must put the blame mostly on the shoulders of the adapter, Andrew Davies.
Some of the TV critics have drawn attention to the contemporary significance of the theme: people in dept in the credit crunch. But that doesn't make the story credible - it's simply an excuse for the play's basic lack of credibilty.
"Mad Men", repeated now on BBC4 is a masterpiece in comparision and that has no contemporary significance at all, except that it deals with people under various stresses as they try to make meaning of their lives. Something that's always with us.