" Mr Television " Television Review
Doctor Zhivago
If you've seen a literary adaptation on TV in the past 10 years, the chances are it was written by Andrew Davies. With his tale of a Victorian lesbian prostitute starting next week, Britain's most successful small-screen writer talks to Stuart Jeffries about strong women, the classics and rampant sex
Stuart Jeffries
Wednesday October 2, 2002
The Guardian
There's a scene in Andrew Davies's forthcoming adaptation of Doctor Zhivago in which the heroine Lara comes across her lover's dog snuffling at a bedroom door. "He's a badly behaved bulldog," explains Davies, "and in the scene I've written he's excited by the sounds and smells of sex coming from the other side of the door. Then I wrote this stage direction that the dog should turn round and look at Lara with this lecherous grin." Some stage direction, right up there with, "Exit, pursued by a bear." "Well, yes, but they managed to find the dog who could do that."
The dog with the lecherous grin, one suspects, is going to become yet another exhibit in the prosecution case against Davies. It will be shown, with other things - like the hard-on Davies claimed Mr Darcy got when he thought about Miss Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, or the lustful looks exchanged between Rosamund and Dr Lydgate that went unimagined in George Eliot's original version of Middlemarch, or the leather dildo in his adaptation of Tipping the Velvet (of which more later) - to support the charges that Davies is sex-obsessed, and too eager to write explicit scenes for the tastes of those who prefer oblique suggestion.
Recently, Davies was asked to sum up in one sentence why the readers of a lads' mag should watch his new TV adaptation of Sarah Water's novel, Tipping the Velvet. "Two women fucking," he replied, "each other!" He recounts the story with a certain glee, but denies the charges of prurience and monomania. "I am a writer who's interested in the dramatic potential of the novels I read. The sex is secondary," he says as he sits in the office of his delightful Tudorbethan home. He lives in Kenilworth, a sedate Warwickshire town that couldn't be more middle England if it tried, and has been there since he was a lecturer at Warwick University in the 60s.
He has just returned, blue eyes sparkling, from the gym where Kevin has been putting him through his paces. Why do you have a personal trainer? "Everybody posh has one these days." As if to prove the point, he tells me that, two years ago, he had enough money to buy the house next door and knock through, thus providing, among other things, a space for his wife Diana to exhibit her paintings. Now that's posh, in Kenilworth terms.
Davies, wearing tracksuit bottoms, sweatshirt and slippers, doesn't look like a member of high society, but he is feted and in demand. Bafta awards ring his workspace, and everything he writes there seems destined to appear on a small screen near you. His adaptation of the lesbian sex romp Tipping the Velvet will be shown on BBC2 this month, and next month his versions of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (BBC1) and Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (ITV1), in an insane scheduling clash, go head to head for three Sundays. The safe money says romantic Zhivago will wipe the floor with difficult Deronda. There's also a Sunday night South Bank Show about Davies on its way, for those who aren't heartily sick of him.
And there's more to come. He and collaborator Richard Curtis have finished the sequel to Bridget Jones's Diary. Another Trollope adaptation (He Knew He Was Right) looms to follow The Way We Live Now. Davies has also written a drama about Queen Boudicca and her war with the Romans. He's also working with his daughter, Anna, on a TV version of Elizabeth Jane Howard's novel Falling.
Recently he was called the busiest working writer in the British Isles. "I'm not so sure I write much more than other people. Most writers write a lot, it's just that I'm lucky enough to get it on telly." Why? Because sex sells? "No. Sex isn't the important thing. What I'm interested in when I write a love story isn't so much the sex as the dramatic question of 'Why not?'"
What does that mean? "Well, it's something that I got from Robert McKee's book on screenwriting. It's the unresolved 'Why don't Romeo and Juliet?' Because of their families. 'Why don't Lara and Yuri?' Because she's married." And why, one might ask, didn't Darcy and Bennet in the book? Because she was not yet Mrs Darcy.
This summer, Davies met some American women from the Republic of Pemberley, a sort of self-help group made up of people who couldn't stop watching his adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, especially that scene in which Colin Firth's Darcy climbs damp-shirted from his lake. "They were all most insistent on the point that it is unresolved sexual tension that makes for a romantic drama."
But the sexual tension in Tipping the Velvet is anything but unresolved. It's the tale of an oyster girl from Whitstable and her sexual adventures with a string of women set against the music-hall milieu of late-Victorian London. After falling for a male impersonator, the heroine becomes, by turns, the sex slave of a vicious dominatrix and a woman disguised as a man who plies her trade as a rent boy. That last incarnation interested Davies particularly. "There were only certain sex acts she could do. We thought it could be a bit of a problem."
What was it about young, nubile lesbians engaging in scenes of unbridled passion that attracted this heterosexual writer? For a moment a wistful expression passes over Davies that resembles the one that seizes hold of Joey's face in Friends when he daydreams about two chicks getting it on. But there is of course more to Davies's keenness to adapt Sarah Waters' cult novel than lewd fantasies.
"It reminded me rather of Moll Flanders [which he also adapted] in that it's a first-person narrative of a woman, a picaresque narrative. The book is a wonderful page turner. I had no trouble identifying with a girl who was a lesbian - Sarah makes her utterly sympathetic."
When Davies first read Tipping the Velvet, one moment stood out. "There was one scene in which Nan [the heroine] is dressed in a little red guardsman's jacket and boots, wearing nothing else but a dildo, while standing in a room lined with mirrors, and I thought I'd really like to see that on TV." But what's in it for lesbians? "I think it is very good to show lesbianism on screen and some of them have said so already. We sympathise completely with the heroine and young girls who have inclinations that way will think it's good."
Why is Davies so drawn to strong, or at least satisfyingly complex, women characters - Elizabeth Bennet, Moll Flanders, Dorothea Brooke, and now a new trio - Nan Astley, Lara Antipova and Gwendolen Harleth? "I'm very interested in women and I can remember when I was a boy I spent quite a lot of time reading women's magazines. My mother wanted a daughter and never had one. It wasn't that I was turning into a girl to please my mother, but I was very interested in women from an early age.
"I don't know. Perhaps I'm deeply repressed and am really a gay man, but you would think it would have come out before I became 66."
As he drives me around the Warwickshire countryside in his air-conditioned Lexus, I say: "You're enjoying all this, aren't you?" "Of course. I dreamed of being a writer and now I am - writing for a medium where they don't fuck with your work, and leading a life I enjoy." He winks knowingly at me: "I can see I'm laying this on a bit thick. You know, I didn't see a banana until I was seven. I've suffered."
Perhaps, but not that much. Davies was born in Cardiff to two schoolteachers, and after graduating from University College London was a teacher, then a teacher trainer at Coventry College of Further Education. He became a lecturer when the college was subsumed by Warwick University.
He wrote in his spare time - novels, plays, poems. When he and his wife got a television in the 60s he saw an episode of the Wednesday Play, and he thought he could write one. So he did, and they put it on. By the 70s he was an established TV writer, but only gave up the day job in 1986 when his campus satire A Very Peculiar Practice proved a hit. Since then he's adapted Michael Dobbs' political thriller House of Cards, Vanity Fair and Othello, written a sitcom called Game On, and worked with Robert Altman on an abortive Rossini biopic. He's done more than heritage adaptations, but it's these that have become his trademark. Reputedly, he commands £200,000 for a six-part adaptation but, more importantly, he believes he is in tune with the temper of TV commissioners. "Many of the people who commission my work are women, and strong women at that. If the women in my dramas aren't strong, they regularly tell me to beef them up."
How did he approach the adaptation of Eliot's difficult, profoundly intellectual and unexpectedly Zionist novel Daniel Deronda? The critic FR Leavis suggested that the book should have been chopped in half, the storyline about Jewish identity should be ditched, Deronda himself airbrushed and the book renamed Gwendolen Harleth after the novel's alluring yet unsettling heroine. Did that option occur to Davies?
"Oh, I can really understand Leavis, but, no, I didn't want to get rid of the Jewish storyline. I wanted to stop it being boring and didactic, and keep in the character who finds he's Jewish and starts to fight for a Jewish homeland. I guess Zionism isn't very popular nowadays but I would have ruined the novel if I'd taken all that out."
Are there any novels he doesn't think he could adapt? How about Kenilworth by Walter Scott? Davies shakes his head. "I read it and it's a load of old cobblers, lots of gadzookery. It has one or two moments but not enough to make a TV series."
But Davies doesn't have to struggle for ideas. People keep sending them to him. Take the Boudicca biopic. "I didn't really know much about Emperor Nero, so I asked a researcher who told me: 'He's young, dumb, and full of come.' He was all that, and he was sleeping with his mother.
"What interests me about it is that because there are very few historical records it gives us opportunities to develop the story in a plausible direction. You can take more liberties with impunity. The other aspect I like is the parallel between the Romans in Britain and the Americans imposing their civilisation."
What's the Boudicca story going to be like? "It'll be a mixture of Braveheart, I Claudius and Carry on Camping - only joking about the last bit. But there's not a tremendous lot of sex in it, which is unusual for me, though there'll be lots of violence - murders, rapes, slayings, beheadings."
There's a book of essays by the critic and cultural writer Richard Hoggart on Davies's coffee table. Why is he reading that? "Oh, because he was one of the witnesses at the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial, and there's an essay in there about it." Why does that interest him? "I've just got this germ of an idea about two jury members at the trial who read the novel and get inspired by Lawrence's prose if you know what I mean. Only an idea." Clearly Davies hasn't had enough of TV sex just yet.
· Tipping the Velvet begins on BBC2 on October 9 at 9pm.
Davies' dramas: the highlights
Othello (2001) Davies' update of the classic tragedy saw John Othello (Eammon Walker) as the first black commissioner of the Met spiralling towards disaster thanks to his conniving friend and underling Jago (Christopher Eccleston). Considered a success by drama bosses at ITV.
The Way We Live Now (2001) David Suchet won plaudits and awards for his portrayal of the Robert Maxwell-ish Melmotte, the moral black hole at the centre of Trollope's universe which Davies managed to make as much a comment on contemporary Britain as the story of deceit, speculation and societal change in the 1800s.
Vanity Fair (1998) Natasha Little's portrayal of Becky Sharpe as light-fingered, manipulative minx riled some fans of the novel and Davies' version of this bildungsroman didn't score well among the critics - but this is perhaps the most underrated of his adaptations.
Moll Flanders (1996) Alex Kingston was bustin' out all over in this bodice-ripping adaptation which brought her to the attention of ER producers. Heaving bosoms, saucy talk and buckets of sex, this bawdy Moll drew audiences not normally attracted by your average period drama.
Pride and Prejudice (1995) "Oh, Mr Darcy!" cried legions of female fans - and some blokes - as the luscious Colin Firth emerged from a lake in his sodden, skintight undergarments. While Jennifer Ehle's Elizabeth Bennet went crimson, the country went P&P crazy.
House of Cards (1990) At a time when the Tories were in turmoil, dumping Thatcher and descending into internecine war, the tale of the murdering, scheming and completely charismatic MP Francis Urquhart (Ian Richardson) was deliciously plausible and utterly watchable.
A Very Peculiar Practice (1986) The tale of young GP Stephen Daker (Peter Davison) at Lowlands University was not only a surreal romp with a cast of miscreants including radical feminist Rose Marie (Barbara Flynn) but it was also a wonderfully weird expose of contemporary academia.
Gareth McLean
The BBC has not yet decided where to schedule Daniel Deronda.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
Doctor Zhivago
If you've seen a literary adaptation on TV in the past 10 years, the chances are it was written by Andrew Davies. With his tale of a Victorian lesbian prostitute starting next week, Britain's most successful small-screen writer talks to Stuart Jeffries about strong women, the classics and rampant sex
Stuart Jeffries
Wednesday October 2, 2002
The Guardian
There's a scene in Andrew Davies's forthcoming adaptation of Doctor Zhivago in which the heroine Lara comes across her lover's dog snuffling at a bedroom door. "He's a badly behaved bulldog," explains Davies, "and in the scene I've written he's excited by the sounds and smells of sex coming from the other side of the door. Then I wrote this stage direction that the dog should turn round and look at Lara with this lecherous grin." Some stage direction, right up there with, "Exit, pursued by a bear." "Well, yes, but they managed to find the dog who could do that."
The dog with the lecherous grin, one suspects, is going to become yet another exhibit in the prosecution case against Davies. It will be shown, with other things - like the hard-on Davies claimed Mr Darcy got when he thought about Miss Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, or the lustful looks exchanged between Rosamund and Dr Lydgate that went unimagined in George Eliot's original version of Middlemarch, or the leather dildo in his adaptation of Tipping the Velvet (of which more later) - to support the charges that Davies is sex-obsessed, and too eager to write explicit scenes for the tastes of those who prefer oblique suggestion.
Recently, Davies was asked to sum up in one sentence why the readers of a lads' mag should watch his new TV adaptation of Sarah Water's novel, Tipping the Velvet. "Two women fucking," he replied, "each other!" He recounts the story with a certain glee, but denies the charges of prurience and monomania. "I am a writer who's interested in the dramatic potential of the novels I read. The sex is secondary," he says as he sits in the office of his delightful Tudorbethan home. He lives in Kenilworth, a sedate Warwickshire town that couldn't be more middle England if it tried, and has been there since he was a lecturer at Warwick University in the 60s.
He has just returned, blue eyes sparkling, from the gym where Kevin has been putting him through his paces. Why do you have a personal trainer? "Everybody posh has one these days." As if to prove the point, he tells me that, two years ago, he had enough money to buy the house next door and knock through, thus providing, among other things, a space for his wife Diana to exhibit her paintings. Now that's posh, in Kenilworth terms.
Davies, wearing tracksuit bottoms, sweatshirt and slippers, doesn't look like a member of high society, but he is feted and in demand. Bafta awards ring his workspace, and everything he writes there seems destined to appear on a small screen near you. His adaptation of the lesbian sex romp Tipping the Velvet will be shown on BBC2 this month, and next month his versions of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (BBC1) and Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (ITV1), in an insane scheduling clash, go head to head for three Sundays. The safe money says romantic Zhivago will wipe the floor with difficult Deronda. There's also a Sunday night South Bank Show about Davies on its way, for those who aren't heartily sick of him.
And there's more to come. He and collaborator Richard Curtis have finished the sequel to Bridget Jones's Diary. Another Trollope adaptation (He Knew He Was Right) looms to follow The Way We Live Now. Davies has also written a drama about Queen Boudicca and her war with the Romans. He's also working with his daughter, Anna, on a TV version of Elizabeth Jane Howard's novel Falling.
Recently he was called the busiest working writer in the British Isles. "I'm not so sure I write much more than other people. Most writers write a lot, it's just that I'm lucky enough to get it on telly." Why? Because sex sells? "No. Sex isn't the important thing. What I'm interested in when I write a love story isn't so much the sex as the dramatic question of 'Why not?'"
What does that mean? "Well, it's something that I got from Robert McKee's book on screenwriting. It's the unresolved 'Why don't Romeo and Juliet?' Because of their families. 'Why don't Lara and Yuri?' Because she's married." And why, one might ask, didn't Darcy and Bennet in the book? Because she was not yet Mrs Darcy.
This summer, Davies met some American women from the Republic of Pemberley, a sort of self-help group made up of people who couldn't stop watching his adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, especially that scene in which Colin Firth's Darcy climbs damp-shirted from his lake. "They were all most insistent on the point that it is unresolved sexual tension that makes for a romantic drama."
But the sexual tension in Tipping the Velvet is anything but unresolved. It's the tale of an oyster girl from Whitstable and her sexual adventures with a string of women set against the music-hall milieu of late-Victorian London. After falling for a male impersonator, the heroine becomes, by turns, the sex slave of a vicious dominatrix and a woman disguised as a man who plies her trade as a rent boy. That last incarnation interested Davies particularly. "There were only certain sex acts she could do. We thought it could be a bit of a problem."
What was it about young, nubile lesbians engaging in scenes of unbridled passion that attracted this heterosexual writer? For a moment a wistful expression passes over Davies that resembles the one that seizes hold of Joey's face in Friends when he daydreams about two chicks getting it on. But there is of course more to Davies's keenness to adapt Sarah Waters' cult novel than lewd fantasies.
"It reminded me rather of Moll Flanders [which he also adapted] in that it's a first-person narrative of a woman, a picaresque narrative. The book is a wonderful page turner. I had no trouble identifying with a girl who was a lesbian - Sarah makes her utterly sympathetic."
When Davies first read Tipping the Velvet, one moment stood out. "There was one scene in which Nan [the heroine] is dressed in a little red guardsman's jacket and boots, wearing nothing else but a dildo, while standing in a room lined with mirrors, and I thought I'd really like to see that on TV." But what's in it for lesbians? "I think it is very good to show lesbianism on screen and some of them have said so already. We sympathise completely with the heroine and young girls who have inclinations that way will think it's good."
Why is Davies so drawn to strong, or at least satisfyingly complex, women characters - Elizabeth Bennet, Moll Flanders, Dorothea Brooke, and now a new trio - Nan Astley, Lara Antipova and Gwendolen Harleth? "I'm very interested in women and I can remember when I was a boy I spent quite a lot of time reading women's magazines. My mother wanted a daughter and never had one. It wasn't that I was turning into a girl to please my mother, but I was very interested in women from an early age.
"I don't know. Perhaps I'm deeply repressed and am really a gay man, but you would think it would have come out before I became 66."
As he drives me around the Warwickshire countryside in his air-conditioned Lexus, I say: "You're enjoying all this, aren't you?" "Of course. I dreamed of being a writer and now I am - writing for a medium where they don't fuck with your work, and leading a life I enjoy." He winks knowingly at me: "I can see I'm laying this on a bit thick. You know, I didn't see a banana until I was seven. I've suffered."
Perhaps, but not that much. Davies was born in Cardiff to two schoolteachers, and after graduating from University College London was a teacher, then a teacher trainer at Coventry College of Further Education. He became a lecturer when the college was subsumed by Warwick University.
He wrote in his spare time - novels, plays, poems. When he and his wife got a television in the 60s he saw an episode of the Wednesday Play, and he thought he could write one. So he did, and they put it on. By the 70s he was an established TV writer, but only gave up the day job in 1986 when his campus satire A Very Peculiar Practice proved a hit. Since then he's adapted Michael Dobbs' political thriller House of Cards, Vanity Fair and Othello, written a sitcom called Game On, and worked with Robert Altman on an abortive Rossini biopic. He's done more than heritage adaptations, but it's these that have become his trademark. Reputedly, he commands £200,000 for a six-part adaptation but, more importantly, he believes he is in tune with the temper of TV commissioners. "Many of the people who commission my work are women, and strong women at that. If the women in my dramas aren't strong, they regularly tell me to beef them up."
How did he approach the adaptation of Eliot's difficult, profoundly intellectual and unexpectedly Zionist novel Daniel Deronda? The critic FR Leavis suggested that the book should have been chopped in half, the storyline about Jewish identity should be ditched, Deronda himself airbrushed and the book renamed Gwendolen Harleth after the novel's alluring yet unsettling heroine. Did that option occur to Davies?
"Oh, I can really understand Leavis, but, no, I didn't want to get rid of the Jewish storyline. I wanted to stop it being boring and didactic, and keep in the character who finds he's Jewish and starts to fight for a Jewish homeland. I guess Zionism isn't very popular nowadays but I would have ruined the novel if I'd taken all that out."
Are there any novels he doesn't think he could adapt? How about Kenilworth by Walter Scott? Davies shakes his head. "I read it and it's a load of old cobblers, lots of gadzookery. It has one or two moments but not enough to make a TV series."
But Davies doesn't have to struggle for ideas. People keep sending them to him. Take the Boudicca biopic. "I didn't really know much about Emperor Nero, so I asked a researcher who told me: 'He's young, dumb, and full of come.' He was all that, and he was sleeping with his mother.
"What interests me about it is that because there are very few historical records it gives us opportunities to develop the story in a plausible direction. You can take more liberties with impunity. The other aspect I like is the parallel between the Romans in Britain and the Americans imposing their civilisation."
What's the Boudicca story going to be like? "It'll be a mixture of Braveheart, I Claudius and Carry on Camping - only joking about the last bit. But there's not a tremendous lot of sex in it, which is unusual for me, though there'll be lots of violence - murders, rapes, slayings, beheadings."
There's a book of essays by the critic and cultural writer Richard Hoggart on Davies's coffee table. Why is he reading that? "Oh, because he was one of the witnesses at the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial, and there's an essay in there about it." Why does that interest him? "I've just got this germ of an idea about two jury members at the trial who read the novel and get inspired by Lawrence's prose if you know what I mean. Only an idea." Clearly Davies hasn't had enough of TV sex just yet.
· Tipping the Velvet begins on BBC2 on October 9 at 9pm.
Davies' dramas: the highlights
Othello (2001) Davies' update of the classic tragedy saw John Othello (Eammon Walker) as the first black commissioner of the Met spiralling towards disaster thanks to his conniving friend and underling Jago (Christopher Eccleston). Considered a success by drama bosses at ITV.
The Way We Live Now (2001) David Suchet won plaudits and awards for his portrayal of the Robert Maxwell-ish Melmotte, the moral black hole at the centre of Trollope's universe which Davies managed to make as much a comment on contemporary Britain as the story of deceit, speculation and societal change in the 1800s.
Vanity Fair (1998) Natasha Little's portrayal of Becky Sharpe as light-fingered, manipulative minx riled some fans of the novel and Davies' version of this bildungsroman didn't score well among the critics - but this is perhaps the most underrated of his adaptations.
Moll Flanders (1996) Alex Kingston was bustin' out all over in this bodice-ripping adaptation which brought her to the attention of ER producers. Heaving bosoms, saucy talk and buckets of sex, this bawdy Moll drew audiences not normally attracted by your average period drama.
Pride and Prejudice (1995) "Oh, Mr Darcy!" cried legions of female fans - and some blokes - as the luscious Colin Firth emerged from a lake in his sodden, skintight undergarments. While Jennifer Ehle's Elizabeth Bennet went crimson, the country went P&P crazy.
House of Cards (1990) At a time when the Tories were in turmoil, dumping Thatcher and descending into internecine war, the tale of the murdering, scheming and completely charismatic MP Francis Urquhart (Ian Richardson) was deliciously plausible and utterly watchable.
A Very Peculiar Practice (1986) The tale of young GP Stephen Daker (Peter Davison) at Lowlands University was not only a surreal romp with a cast of miscreants including radical feminist Rose Marie (Barbara Flynn) but it was also a wonderfully weird expose of contemporary academia.
Gareth McLean
The BBC has not yet decided where to schedule Daniel Deronda.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002