'Sanditon is actually pretty old-fashioned': Rose Williams and Kai Brigden in Season 3 Photo: Rob Youngson < p >Andrew Davis' new adaptation is a major television event. However, this summer is the last work of a screenwriter who has released everything from House of Cards to Warfare on our screens. Mir debuted at a local theater near his home in Kenilworth, Warwickshire with an amateur cast. It was a stage version of Pride and Prejudice, and as Davis told me over dinner, one scene is non-negotiable. “Everyone kept asking, 'Are you going to have a wet shirt scene?' I thought: yes, this is an integral part of Pride and Prejudice. He chuckles. “Although Jane Austen didn’t know this…”
The production featured “a very sleazy Darcy. He's in IT sales or something like that. Although I don't think his heart is in IT sales …” Maybe an alternative career awaits him in the style of Colin Firth? Firth must express his eternal gratitude to Davies for turning him into the heartthrob of the nation when his white-shirted Darcy emerged from the lake in the 1995 BBC film adaptation. “Well, yes and no,” Davis says. “Because it has become and remains what he is known for. And he likes to feel like he has a little range.” Davis had to be persuaded to choose Firth in the first place; he doubted the actor was thoughtful enough. “I said, 'But he's a little red.' Not Duke of Sussex's ginger, but prone to it.” After one dark paint and one smoldering performance, Davis forgot his fears. “He was beautiful, just beautiful.”
Dinner with Davis is a pleasure, and not just because it comes with a large glass of wine. He has such a mischievous streak and loves to share opinions about his rival writers' efforts that others would be too nervous to give. When I ask him what he thinks of the latest BBC series Great Expectations, which focuses on the drug-addicted Miss Havisham, he replies in no uncertain terms: “I hated it.” Davies says it's pointless to turn Dickens' novels into dark, hard-boiled thrillers, but “they keep doing it, losing sight of the humor. It's Dickens, folks! He's a very funny writer and his humor makes it all more human.”
He also dismisses “A Spy Among Friends”, Kim Philby's sober ITV drama, as a “boring, boring show” while Bridgerton: “I watched it with my wife and at first I thought it was funny.” However, “then we both kind of gave up and thought it was ridiculous but fun.”
Davis is more responsible than any other screenwriter for taking the classic texts you may have studied in school – Middlemarch, Bleak House, Feeling and Consciousness. Sensuality and Little Dorrit are among them – and make them feel fresh, sexy and, well, fun. When he watched Bridgerton, did he catch himself thinking that he had started all this? Davis looks momentarily shy. “I didn't quite think so… but in a way it's true.”
The famous adaptation of the novel “Pride and Prejudice” by Andrew Davis in 1995. Photo: AJ Pics/Alamy Stock Photo
He returns to television next month with the third and final series of Sanditon, a period drama based on Austen's latest unfinished novel set in an English seaside town. ITV canceled it after the first series, but revived it after a campaign by a group of dedicated fans calling themselves the “Sanditon Sisterhood”. Many of them are American, and the show was produced by the American broadcaster PBS.
Davis loves the drama and its young cast, which includes Rose Williams as the main character, Charlotte Haywood and Crystal Clarke as the heiress Georgiana Lambe . Indeed, he loves to write young characters. “You may look like a shaggy old buffer, but inside, you see, you can remember what it was like to be young,” he says.
In the style of Andrew Davis, he included a risqué sex scene in the first episode of the first series. He is trying to convince me that Austin hinted at this in her text: “Read, and there is something very ambiguous going on,” he insists. “The thing is, this has happened before. What Jane Austen usually does is keep them off the stage.”
Andrew Davies, 86, at home in Kenilworth. Photo: Andrew Crowley
He tried to have fun with this new series, but the American producers curbed him. “There is a regiment of soldiers in Sanditon, so we thought that there would be two brothels in the city, one for officers and one for another man. And there will be two madams who will be great characters. After that on the PBS channel: “No brothels.” Is it because American audiences are more conservative? “I think PBS misunderstands its viewers,” he says. “I think the audience is probably a lot more sophisticated than they realize.”
He wonders if the historical drama dials have changed now: after all, compared to shows with tattered bodices spewing slang and pop soundtracks like Bridgerton, Sanditon is “pretty old-fashioned actually.” He says The Favourite, the quirky 2018 film for which Olivia Colman won an Oscar for playing the troubled Queen Anne, “shook me a little because I thought, 'This is so good, but it's more extreme than I used to be when or thought.” . Should I be like this now? To make sure Davis stays part of the zeitgeist, just check out the new Barbie movie. It includes a scene in which Depressed Barbie eats sweets all day long while watching Pride and Prejudice in circles.
At 86, Davis, who has been married to Diana for over 60 years, has two children and five grandchildren, continues to work hard. In addition to Sanditon, he adapted Simon Sebag Montefiore's books about Russia and worked on several projects that have yet to be picked up, including a drama called Downing Street “about a Labor Party prime minister who was much sexier than Keir Starmer.” and an epic about the last empress of China.
He also tried to put on a show about Guy Burgess (he admits his dislike of A Spy Among Friends was “a bit of a bitterness” because it dulled his appetite for another Cambridge Spy drama). “I wrote the script for it, and it's about the time Burgess was in America, on a rampage all day, doing outrageous antics on everyone, including Anthony Eden. Just an extraordinary comic story about this unruly gay man. He adds with a spark, “Russell won't like this.” This is a reference to screenwriter Russell T Davies, who said of his own BBC drama It's a Sin that gay characters should be played – and written? – gay.
The rejection that most disappoints Davis comes from his adaptation of John Updike's Rabbit novels, a tetralogy about the life of salesman Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, written between 1960 and 1990. Davis announced his plan to turn them into a television series in 2018. , with an attached manufacturing company. But the books have been criticized for their misogyny, and TV executives seem too nervous to tackle them in these post-#MeToo times.
Gillian Anderson in Bleak House (2005)
“It looks like it's going to be very hard to sell because poor John Updike is somehow… a little cancelled.” The project was featured in various publications “and they got interested and then they thought, 'Oh, maybe not.' who are now rich and powerful [are]; there must be a few billionaires whose lives have been shaped by Rabbit. He's a great American character — I mean, he is by no means a figurehead, he is a very imperfect person – but he is certainly representative.” However, Davis is not giving up and is still hoping that someone will find the courage to say yes.
I wonder aloud if all drama should now be female-oriented. “Well, I don’t want to be unfriendly to women!” he objects. But he agrees that modern historical dramas tend to feature only one type of female character. “The audience for the drama is, of course, mostly women. And then, quite rightly, over the years it has become that the directors who control the drama are also mostly women. They would say that the heroine must be a strong woman. And I said: “Can't we have a fragile, tender, slightly sentimental?” “No, definitely not.”
Olivia Colman in Andrew Davis' Les Misérables
However, don't mistake Davis for a dumbass. He believes that “some of the best TV shows are uncomfortable and challenging” and is full of praise for, for example, Mikaela Koel's groundbreaking rape revenge drama I Can Destroy You. He's also “addicted” to Love Island and something called “Below Deck,” which he describes as “Up, down on a luxury yacht!” He thinks such reality shows have replaced drama for many viewers, including himself. He was fascinated by the Love Island episode in which the contestants' parents come to visit because he found it so frank about human nature: “Some of the most boyish guys are mommy boys.”
He does not like other developments on television. There's a sense, he says, that “now everything has to be in a genre, and in a big genre,” meaning that executives want scripts to fall squarely into one category, whether it's a costume drama, a true crime, or a high-octane thriller. He doubts anything more difficult to categorize, such as “A Very Peculiar Practice” he wrote for BBC Two in 1986, can be made today. “They were trying to combine a university romance and a television series about doctors. I remember when I was doing this, the producer said, “Well, what is it, Andrew?” I said, “Well, it's a bit satirical and funny, but also serious.”
Lily James and James Norton in the movie Andrew Davies “War and Life” World
The campus element was inspired by Davies' time in academia: he was a lecturer at Coventry Teachers College which then merged with the University of Warwick before becoming a full-time writer. He snorts at the idea that modern students “do not use the platform” for speakers they disagree with, arguing that they “do not feel safe” as an excuse for doing so. “Well, you shouldn't feel safe, you're at the university! You must feel the challenge. But many students now see themselves as clients.”
After lunch, Davis goes to work on another project he has sworn to keep secret: the script has been ordered, but he has not yet found his owner. Sometimes he goes to talk about these things in person, but he doesn't always get invited, he says. “Perhaps the producers are thinking, 'We shouldn't expose them to Andrew.' He might say the wrong thing,” he chuckles. They don't have to worry. The full version of Andrew is incredibly fun.
Sanditon on ITVX from August 17
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