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behind tv
classic collection
Andrew Davies, The Academy’s newest Fellow, talks to Matthew Bell
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Viewers could be forgiven for thinking that every clas- sic drama on TV has been adapted by Andrew Davies.
In the last year or so Take A Girl Like You, Othello and The Way We Live Now have all received the Davies makeover. Doctor Zhivago, Daniel Deronda and the story of the warrior queen Boudicca are to follow in the next 12 months.
And there was Bridget Jones’s Diary in the cinema, which Davies co-wrote, and its follow-up, The Edge Of Reason, on which he’s working now.
After Harold Pinter, Davies is only the second ever home- grown writer to be honoured with a BAFTA Fellowship. “It’s a terrific thing and rather humbling. It rarely seems to be given to writers and I feel exceptionally hon- oured to be in such august com- pany,” says Davies.
Although he’s made his name adapting literary classics for TV, Davies has also written original dramas, notably the mid-eighties series, A Very Peculiar Practice, which remains the writer’s favourite.
“That was two series of original work and I made up every line of it. Its something I can say was really my own,” he tells me. Davies has also worked extensive- ly in radio and theatre, and writ- ten children’s books and latterly films. There’s also a novel, B Monkey, and a sitcom, Game On, in his back catalogue.
The Cardiff-born writer achieved early success in the six- ties with radio plays and his first TV work, Who’s Going To Take Me On?, aired in 1967. During the sev- enties he wrote plays for TV and theatre, but he admits that the theatre isn’t his natural medium.
“I don’t particularly enjoy going to the theatre. I find it a bit claustrophobic, like being in church,” he says. In 1979, Davies won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award for Conrad’s War, to which he has subsequently added numerous TV awards.
Davies is a prolific writer, yet until he was 50 Davies was still working as a lecturer at the University of Warwick. Since he turned to full-time writing in the mid-eighties, a stream of adapta- tions - including Middlemarch, Pride And Prejudice, Wives And Daughters, Vanity Fair and Othello - have flowed from Davies’ pen.
“It’s very hard to turn down an opportunity to adapt a master- piece,” he says. “The adaptations, in a way, link in with the teaching that I don’t do anymore. I used to give lectures on all these great books and try to show students what I though was wonderful about them. Doing an adaptation is doing the same thing but on a multi-million-pound budget.”
The next Davies on TV will be his version of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago on ITV1 and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda for the BBC.
He then hopes to return to Trollope with He Knew He Was Right, again for the BBC. “It’s not one of his typical ones,” explains Davies. “It’s about a marriage breakdown and involves a hus- band abducting his baby boy - it’s very modern stuff.”
“These are the [type of] books that appeal to me most, the ones that seem to directly relate to people’s concerns now. You get some Trollope novels I wouldn’t be interested in adapting because they’re mostly about church politics in the 19th century.
“I prefer something that’s got a bit more contemporary bite. The Way We Live Now related so well to Enron and the dotcom collapse and the general urge to make money.”
Davies describes his work as a “funny sort of business”, explain- ing: “You are expressing yourself while at the same time being faithful to the spirit of the work that you’re adapting.
“Occasionally, and [the Michael Dobbs novel] House of Cards is the best example, the tel- evision version was so different from the book that it was almost like an original except for the bare bones of the plot. I reinvented the characters, most of the dialogue and switched the political view from right to left,” he laughs.
“In a way that was rather cheeky, but I wouldn’t take those sort of liberties with, say, Jane Austen because I admire the originals too much.”
“You are expressing yourself while at the same time being faithful to the spirit of the work that you’re adapting.”