‘I didn’t think the wet shirt was particularly sexy,” Andrew Davies says, musing on the most famous scene from his most famous adaptation, Pride and Prejudice, when Colin Firth, as Mr Darcy, emerges from his dip in the lake in the aforementioned sopping shirt. “When I wrote it, I just thought of it as this funny, awkward little scene between the two of them, with Elizabeth Bennet standing there and he’s dripping wet.”
And yet, a nation swooned. When the BBC broadcast this still legendary scene in this still famous six-part series in 1995, 11 million people watched. “It was a great surprise, I have to say,” Davies says with a chuckle.
This was one of the rare occasions when Davies inadvertently wrote a sexy scene — most of the time his sexy scenes are entirely deliberate. “I’ve enjoyed writing about the kind of sex we’d all like, and are sometimes lucky enough to get,” he says.
Yet the heaving bosoms he wrote about almost three decades ago are a far cry from the violent sex scenes we see in today’s true crime dramas portraying Jimmy Savile, Peter Sutcliffe and the like. What does he make of this striking shift? “There’s a fascination about the worst thing that could happen to you, which is maybe sharpened if we know it’s a true story,” he says. But there’s one truth about 19th-century novels that is as true of 21st-century dramas, he says. “It’s the bad guy we want to know about.”
What Delia Smith is to cookery books Davies is to TV literary adaptations: the absolute blue chip British standard against whom everyone who follows is measured. The wet shirt illustrates why: Davies can take a novelist as revered as Jane Austen and stay true to her spirit while also putting his own characteristic stamp on the book: sex.
Advertisement
Purists scoff at Davies’s tendency to stick in sexy scenes — such as showing Lydia Bennet (Julia Sawalha) making out with Mr Wickham (Adrian Lukis) — but as he says, he is recreating how readers in that century would have experienced the novels. “It was always obvious to me that Pride and Prejudice is about sex and money,” he says. In his 1994 adaptation of Middlemarch, he showed Dr Lydgate (Douglas Hodge) and his wife, Rosamund (Trevyn McDowell), having sex in scenes that George Eliot definitely didn’t write.
“Well, there was nothing in the novel to suggest they didn’t have a good sex life,” he says, as though stating the obvious. “I thought, ‘Here’s a marriage in which they’re incompatible, except they turn each other on.’” In Davies’s eyes a good adaptation will “render a truthful and honest experience of the novel”. In other words, fidelity to the words is less important than fidelity to the emotion.
Why do almost 200-year-old books still make such blockbuster TV serials? “Well, they had bloody good stories that went on for a long time,” Davies replies, characteristically forthright. “Whereas contemporary novels seem mostly to divide up into, they’re very well written but there’s sod-all story, or there’s a lot of story but you can’t believe in the characters.”
He does concede that some more modern authors aren’t entirely hopeless. “Sarah Waters and Kingsley Amis write things that adapt vividly, and that’s what you need.” Coincidentally, or possibly not, Davies has written adaptations of Waters (Tipping the Velvet in 2002) and Amis (The Old Devils in 1992 and Take a Girl Like You in 2000).
Initially, like a fateful couple from one of his works, Davies and I seem doomed to be kept apart. First, our planned meeting at his home in Warwickshire, where he lived with Diana, his wife of 63 years, was scuppered for the deeply unromantic reason of train strikes (Diana sadly died shortly after our interview). We make do with Zoom but there are broken connections. Not even Lara and Yuri in Doctor Zhivago (ITV, 2002) had to deal with such impediments. By the time we actually speak, I am as flustered as Elinor in Sense and Sensibility (BBC, 2008) when she thinks she has lost Edward Ferrars for ever. Fortunately, Davies maintains the calm good nature of John Jarndyce in Bleak House (BBC, 2005).
Advertisement
“I’m sure it’s my fault,” he says, when at last we connect. “It usually is with technical things.” This seems unlikely. Ahead of our interview, Davies replies to my emails with an alacrity that would put a hyper online teenager to shame, and recently he sent off a mammoth adaptation of John Updike’s Rabbit novels, which he’s hoping will get greenlit “although Updike has a bit of a dodgy reputation these days, which I think is unfair”. Davies, incidentally, is 87 years old.
He has been writing literary adaptations for almost 50 years, ever since the BBC asked him in 1976 to write a script of a Dickens short story, The Signal-Man, which he did “in this very chair, at this very desk”. But he had been yearning to write literary adaptations for even longer, ever since a teacher at his grammar school in Cardiff told the class to write a film script when he was 13 years old, “and it stuck in my mind as something I would be able to do.”
First, he went into teaching, at a school in north London, writing scripts and novels on the side. His students struggled to get past the seeming strangeness of 19th-century novels, so Davies would “read the books aloud, so they could get the jokes, as it were. And I would say, ‘Look, these guys are just like you. Fred Vincy [in Middlemarch] buying a horse in the hope it will be a flash horse is like you buying a second-hand sports car.’ ” After all, he says, “every time we read, we’re adapting: we’re reinventing the book and seeing pictures and it’s a collaboration with the author across the centuries”.
Davies has the spark and cheekiness of a man a quarter of his age. He takes delight in revealing that Firth is actually not a natural brunette: “He’s fair to ginger, but we made him dye it, because you can’t have a ginger Darcy. And he’s stayed with it.”
● Check out our list of the best literary TV adaptations
Advertisement
And just as he reshapes actors’ looks, Davies reshapes the books. At the end of Michael Dobbs’s novel House of Cards, the evil MP Francis Urquhart throws himself off the House of Commons. Davies chucked that right out and instead had Urquhart (Ian Richardson) kill his mistress, Mattie (Susannah Harker), in the 1990 adaptation. Is it easier adapting works by dead writers, such as Dickens, than ones still living, like Dobbs?
“It can be, yes. It was very funny with Dobbs. With the first series, he was just delighted the book was on TV. But with the sequel [To Play the King in 1993], we had these kinds of public quarrels, going on chat shows and each claiming credit for the good bits and saying rude things about each other. But we see each other occasionally now and he’s nice as pie, and so am I, partly because we’re both getting lots of money from the American version,” he says.
The glitzy US version on Netflix ran from 2013 to 2018, but was scuppered by the allegations of sexual misconduct against its star, Kevin Spacey. Was Davies disappointed when it ended? “I was, because we were getting a nice cheque for every episode for doing absolutely nothing, which is a bit shameful, really,” he smiles, not looking the least bit ashamed.
Davies loathes it when someone adapts a book that he has previously adapted. “I get very possessive of them and take it very ill if someone comes out with a new one, especially if it’s highly regarded,” he says good-naturedly.
Are there any novels he hasn’t adapted yet that he would like to havea go at? “Honestly I don’t think so any more. Actually,” he says, brightening at the sudden thought, “I’d love to do Villette ...”
Advertisement
Brace yourself, Charlotte Brontë. Davies is coming for you.
What’s your favourite period drama written by Andrew Davies? Let us know in the comments below
