Dickens 'would have chronicled City demos and NHS scandals '

The acclaimed actor, who has just completed a biography of the novelist, made the comments at the launch of a tour of the Dickens's family graves at Highgate Cemetery yesterday.

The event signalled the start of the celebrations for the 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth, which is officially marked today.

Callow, 62, said: "If Dickens were alive he would be writing about everything because he always focused on everything. He would have been up there with the anti-capitalist protesters. He would have walked the city non-stop.

He would have gone down to the hospitals and found out if it was true there were not enough beds.

"Dickens was a journalist to begin with. He would have found out what was wrong with the Tube. If there was scandal he would have exposed it."

Callow joined Joanna Lumley to help launch the tour with Dickens's descendants, including his great great grandson Mark Dickens and great great great grand-daughter, author Lucinda Hawksley. Absolutely Fabulous actress Lumley, 65, said she had been reading Dickens since she was a child.

"What appeals to me about his writing is the humanity and his love of people as colourful drawings," she said. "He was a great actor and that's why actors love him. On the times he was writing about he was on the money like Coronation Street or EastEnders."

Lumley and Callow performed readings from David Copperfield as a visiting group, including Booker Prize winner Howard Jacobson and Spandau Ballet star Gary Kemp, made its way around the graves.

Dickens's parents Elizabeth and John, his wife Catherine, daughter Dora, brother Alfred and sister Frances are buried at Highgate.

Mark Dickens admitted he had initially been apprehensive about holding the celebrations at the graveyard.

"I really didn't know what to expect - we're celebrating the bicentenary of his birth and here we are in a cemetery looking at graves," he said. "So I had mixed emotions when I arrived, but it turned out to be an exciting and moving event. It was very special."

John Caird, a director at the National Theatre who had organised the graves tour, said the presence of Dickens's descendants had given an emotional edge to proceedings. "It was very moving to watch Mark Dickens's face when he laid a wreath on Catherine's grave because the Dickens family still have a great care for her" he said.

Jacobson, 69, also paid tribute to Dickens, saying: "He valued entertainment and the first job of a novelist is to entertain. He's the model novelist -we'll never have another like him."

The tours of the Dickens family graves will only be able to be booked on certain days. Details will be released at a later date, Mr Caird said.