‘No soppy heroines...and no brothels’: Sanditon’s Andrew Davies on the new rules of costume drama
A new Andrew Davies adaptation is a major television event. This summer, though, the latest work from the screenwriter who has ushered onto our screens everything from House of Cards to War & Peace made its debut at a local theatre near his home in Kenilworth, Warwickshire, with an amateur cast. It was a stage version of Pride and -Prejudice – and, Davies tells me over lunch, one scene was non-negotiable. “The thing everybody kept -asking was, ‘Are you going to have the wet shirt scene?’ I thought, well, yes, it’s an essential part of Pride and -Prejudice.” He grins. “Although Jane -Austen didn’t know that …”
The production had “a very dishy Darcy. He’s in IT sales or something. Though I don’t think his heart is in IT sales …” Maybe an -alternative Colin Firth-style career awaits? Firth must give his eternal thanks to Davies for transforming him into the nation’s heartthrob by -having his white-shirted Darcy emerge -dripping from a lake in the 1995 BBC -adaptation. “Well, yes and no,” says Davies. “Because it became, and still is, what he’s known for. And he likes to feel he’s got a bit of a range.” Davies had to be persuaded about the casting of Firth in the first place; he doubted the actor was sufficiently brooding. “I said, ‘But he’s sort of ginger.’ Not Duke of Sussex ginger, but that way inclined.” One dark dye job and one smouldering -performance later, Davies had forgotten his misgivings. “He was wonderful, just wonderful.”
Lunch with Davies is a joy – and not just because it comes with a large glass of wine. He has such a mischievous streak and delights in sharing opinions on his rival screenwriters’ efforts that -others would be too nervous to express. When I ask what he made of the BBC’s most recent Great -Expectations, -featuring a gun--toting, crack-addled Miss Havisham, he’s unequivocal: “I hated it.” Davies says it’s nonsensical to turn Dickens’s novels into grim, hard-boiled thrillers, yet “they keep doing it, they leave out the humour. It’s Dickens, folks! He’s a very funny writer and the humour makes the whole thing much more human.”
He also dismisses A Spy Among Friends, ITV’s sober Kim Philby drama, as “a dull, dull show” while, as for Bridgerton, “I watched it with my wife and at first I thought it was ridiculous.” However, “then we both sort of surrendered to it and thought, it is ridiculous, but it’s fun.”
Davies is more responsible than any other screenwriter for -taking the classic texts you may have slogged through at school – Middlemarch, Bleak House, Sense & Sensibility and Little Dorrit among them – and making them feel fresh, sexy and, well, fun. When he watched Bridgerton, did he find himself thinking that he’d started all this? Davies looks momentarily bashful. “I didn’t quite think that … but in a sense it’s true.”
He is returning to television next month with a third, -concluding series of Sanditon, a period drama based on Austen’s final, unfinished novel set in an English seaside town. ITV cancelled it after the first series, but it was revived -following a campaign by a group of devoted fans who call themselves the -“Sanditon Sisterhood”. Many of them are American, and US -broadcaster PBS is now the show’s lead -producer.
Davies is fond of the drama and its young cast, which includes Rose Williams as the protagonist, -Charlotte Heywood, and Crystal Clarke as heiress Georgiana Lambe. Indeed, he loves writing young characters. “You may look like a shagged-out old buffer, but inside, you see, you can remember how it feels to be young,” he says.
In his very Andrew Davies way, he included a risqué sex scene in the first episode of series one. He tries to convince me that -Austen hinted at such a thing in her text: “Read it and there is something very ambiguous going on there,” he insists. “The thing is, all these sorts of things used to go on. What Jane Austen usually does is keep them off stage.”
He tried to have more fun with this new series, but the US producers reined him in. “There is a regiment of -soldiers encamped in Sanditon, so we were -thinking, well, there’ll be two brothels in town, one for -officers and one for the other men. And there’ll be two madams, who would be great -characters.” After running that by PBS: “No brothels.” Is that because American viewers are more conservative? “I think it’s PBS’s -perception of their viewers, which is probably wrong,” he says. “I think viewers are probably much more sophisticated than they imagine.”
He wonders if the dial has now shifted on period dramas: after all, compared to bodice-ripping, slang-spouting, pop-soundtracked shows such as Bridgerton, Sanditon is “quite old-fashioned, really”. He says that The Favourite, the quirky 2018 film for which Olivia -Colman won an Oscar playing a troubled Queen Anne, “shook me a bit, because I thought, ‘This is so good, but it’s more extreme than I would ever think to do. Have I got to be like this now?’” For reassurance that Davies remains very much part of the -zeitgeist, just watch the new -Barbie film. It includes a scene in which “Depressed Barbie” spends her days bingeing on sweets while watching his Pride and Prejudice on a loop.
At 86, Davies – who has been -married to Diana for more than 60 years and has two children as well as five grandchildren – continues to work at quite a clip. In addition to Sanditon, he has been adapting Simon Sebag Montefiore’s books about Russia and working on several projects that have not yet been picked up, including a drama called Downing Street “about a Labour prime minister who was a lot more sexy than Keir Starmer” and an epic about the last Empress of China.
He has also been trying to get a show off the ground about Guy Burgess (he concedes that his -dislike for A Spy Among Friends was “partly bitterness” because it dulled the appetite for another Cambridge spies drama). “I’ve done a script for it and it’s about the time when Burgess was in America, pissed out of his head all day long, making outrageous passes at everybody, including Anthony Eden. Just an -extraordinary comic story about this out-of-control gay bloke.” He adds with a twinkle: “Russell wouldn’t like that.” It’s a reference to screenwriter Russell T Davies saying, of his Channel 4 drama It’s a Sin, that gay characters ought to be played – and written? – by gay people.
The rejection that most --disappoints Davies, though, is his adaptation of John Updike’s -Rabbit novels – a tetralogy about the life of salesman Harry “Rabbit” -Angstrom, written between 1960 and 1990. Davies announced his plan to turn them into a television series in 2018, with a production company attached. But the books have been criticised for their misogyny, and television executives appear too nervous to take them on in these post-#MeToo times.
“It seems to be a very difficult sell because somehow poor John Updike is … a bit cancelled.” The project has been pitched to -various outlets “and they are -interested and then they think, ‘Uh-oh, maybe not.’ You don’t find an awful lot of women who are crazy about the Rabbit books, but a lot of men who are now rich and powerful [are]; there must be some billionaires whose lives were moulded by Rabbit. He is a great American -character – I mean, he’s not a figurehead by any means, he’s a very imperfect man – but he’s certainly representative.” Davies hasn’t given up, though, and still hopes that someone will be brave enough to say yes.
I wonder aloud if all drama now has to be woman-friendly. “Well, one wouldn’t want to be woman-unfriendly!” he counters. But he agrees that period dramas these days tend to feature only one kind of female character. “The audience for drama is mostly women, of course. And then, quite rightly over the years, it has become the case that the executives who control drama are mostly women, too. They’d say that the heroine has got to be a strong woman. And I’d say, ‘Can’t we have a frail, delicate, slightly soppy one?’ ‘No, certainly not.’”
Don’t mistake Davies for a stick-in-the-mud, though. He thinks that “some of the best TV is uncomfortable and challenging” and is full of praise, for example, for Michaela Coel’s groundbreaking rape revenge drama I May Destroy You. He is also “addicted” to Love Island and something called Below Deck, which he describes as “Upstairs, Downstairs on a luxury yacht!” Such reality shows have taken the place of drama for many viewers, he thinks, himself included. He was fascinated by the Love Island episode in which the contestants’ parents come to visit, because he found it so revealing about human nature: “Some of the most laddish guys are total mummy’s boys.”
Other developments in -television are less to his liking. There’s a sense, he says, that “everything has to be genre now, and big-time genre”, meaning that executives want scripts that fall squarely into a -single category, be it costume drama, true-crime or high-octane thriller. He doubts that -something harder to classify, such as A Very Peculiar Practice, which he wrote for BBC Two in 1986, could get made today. “It was trying to merge the campus novel and the TV doctor series. I remember when I made that, the producer said, ‘Well, what is it, Andrew?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s kind of satirical and funny, but sort of serious as well.’”
The campus element was inspired by Davies’s time in -academia: he was a lecturer at -Coventry College of Education, which then merged with the University of Warwick, before becoming a full-time writer. He snorts at the idea of students today “no-platforming” speakers with whom they disagree, claiming they “don’t feel safe” as justification for doing so. “Well, you’re not supposed to feel safe, you’re at university! You’re supposed to feel challenged. But a lot of students see themselves as customers now.”
Lunch over, Davies heads off to work on yet another -project, about which he is sworn to secrecy: the script has been commissioned, but it is yet to find a home. -Sometimes he goes to pitch these things in person but, he tells me, he isn’t always invited. “Maybe the producers think, ‘We shouldn’t expose them to the full Andrew. He might say the wrong thing’,” he chortles. They shouldn’t worry. The full Andrew is terrific fun.
Sanditon is on ITVX from Aug 17