We all have our blind spots. To be honest I’ve never had much time for the recordings of Bob Dylan, Hammer horror films, Star Trek (not since when I was a kid anyway) or the comedy of Spike Milligan. I have also found that I can happily live without any knowledge of Strictly Come Dancing, the royal family or Apple TV+.

And it’s also true to say that I’ve never really got on with the novels of Charles Dickens. Actually, that’s a slight misrepresentation. Because it suggests I’ve properly tried to get on with them. And that’s not true. I’ve not tried very hard at all.

Realising that Dickens was a big gap in my literary knowledge, I once came up with a plan to read his novels in the order of publication as a reading project. But the truth is I only managed to get through about 50 pages of The Pickwick Papers before throwing it across the room in utter exasperation.

This is, I know, my failing. And it’s not as if Dickens needs me. He is now the UK’s default Victorian novelist, his surname an adjective used to sum up an era. (We don’t walk around suggesting that things are getting a bit Gaskellian, do we?).

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There are good reasons for this over and above Dickens’s literary merits (even if I’m blind to them). A Christmas Carol - and therefore its creator - is now firmly established in the imagination as part of our Christmas story. And also Dickens is an urban novelist. His books speak of a world that may be distant in time but familiar in architecture and landscape.

And so while he work of Thomas Hardy - who was nearly 30 years younger than Dickens after all - can feel more distanced from us simply because Hardy’s world is for the most part a rural one. (In the interests of full disclosure, I have never thrown a Hardy novel across the room.) The result? Hardy adaptations on film, TV and radio are relatively rare, but you can’t move without tripping over a Dickens story.

All of which is a long-winded way of getting around to saying a series of drama adaptations of Dickens’ novels began last Saturday afternoon on Radio 4. And also that the series - which comes with the wraparound title of Dickensian, natch - wasn’t one I was looking forward to.

Still, there was certainly a sense of occasion about it. Big-name stars, eight hours of prime-time radio and even a double-page introductory spread in the Radio Times.

The series kicked off with Graham White’s adaptation of Dickens’s 1854 novel Hard Times, set, unusually for its author, not in London but in an imaginary northern location called Coketown (partially based on Preston).

David Morrissey turns up as fanatical schoolmaster Gradgrind and Shaun Dooley plays the self-made man Josiah Bounderby. Both have voices that you recognise instantly. And once it settled down this was a sturdy piece of radio drama, one that didn’t get too wrapped up in telling us how important it was, and instead just got on with telling the story.

Kerry Hudson on Radio 4Kerry Hudson on Radio 4 (Image: free) A little too eagerly to begin with. Radio drama doesn’t have the advantage of establishing shots to ease us into the world it wants to conjure up. And Hard Times threw us in at the deep end. The opening couple of scenes were rattled through rather too abruptly before Morrissey, as schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind appears in the novel’s famous “definition of a horse” sequence and things began to find some equilibrium.

After that the whole thing settled into that familiar Sunday afternoon classic ambience, a little buttoned up perhaps, but Morrissey and Dooley invested it with a sense of urgency and gravitas. I even stayed until the end.

Also on Radio 4 this week columnist for this very paper, Kerry Hudson has been reading special commissioned essays on the theme of receiving kindness from strangers. The result has been lovely little pen portraits of moments from her life. Lovely but not without the odd pointedness.

On Tuesday she talked of a visit to Ramallah on her way to the Dead Sea. “I stop at a pharmacy for travel sickness pills for the coach journey,” Hudson recalls. “This is the Ramallah of 14 years ago,” she adds. “As is customary in Palestine, the pharmacist asks, ‘Where are you from?’ “I’m careful to tell him I’m Scottish and he replies ‘Freedom’ because I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that most people in Ramallah have seen Braveheart.”

Listen Out For: Young Again, Radio 4, Tuesday, October 8, 9am

Kirsty Young returns with the third series of her interview series in which she asks her guests what advice they would give to their younger selves. Her first guest is Hollywood star Minnie Driver.