"Durham produced his plays as a freelancer; he was never part of the WMAQ staff during his show's run. "I had spent a lot of time studying Dickens," he said in a 1983 interview, a few years before he died. "I had discovered that a Dickens character made you love him or hate him almost at once, and I used that same approach, of setting the characters as quickly as possible, as sharply as possible."