Ooh, but he’s cheeky. The man who put burlesque into bonnets, and a sopping
shirt over Mr Darcy’s manly frame, has returned, with Jane Austen on his arm
once again, to sex up our new year. Andrew Davies, whose Midas touch with
television adaptations of Trollope, Eliot and even the mighty Dickens has
introduced millions to the weighty classics, is back fiddling with his
favourite lady, with whose delicate Georgian comedies he has had such
success in the past.
Having brought a previously unscripted eroticism to the jaunts of Lizzie
Bennet and Mr Darcy in the BBC’s 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, he
is hoping to pull off much the same trick with Austen’s earlier novel Sense
and Sensibility, which he has translated into a three-part series.
From the first frame, there is really no doubt as to which of the two authors
credited in the series has the upper hand. Even before the action begins on
the tale of the two Dashwood sisters and their travails in finding a beau,
snowy white chemises are being undone before some most unchaste kissing, and
silken stockings are being rolled down. There is much heavy breathing and
even more heavy petting. “Blimey!” one thinks. “I don’t remember all this
carnal activity in the novel.”
“Yeah, it’s in the book,” Davies says, sitting up straight, his forget-me-not
eyes twinkling alarmingly. “People just forget about it.” Really? Are you
telling me Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility starts with two people taking
their clothes off and getting it on? I don’t remember this in my English
A-level. “Well, it’s not actually right there at the start,” he admits. “And
it is just told as a story. But I am straightening out the chronology!
“What you want me to say, I guess, is that it’s a very cheeky and interesting
way of starting an Austen book that people think they know very well.
Because they will have seen the movie.” He is referring to Ang Lee’s 1995
feature, starring Kate Winslet and Emma Thompson, which garnered one Academy
Award plus six further Oscar nominations.
“In the book there is a seduction of a schoolgirl,” Davies says. “She gets
abandoned, pregnant; she has a baby. Two guys fight a duel about it. And
nobody seems to remember that. This is a television show. If you are going
to have a seduction, let’s see it. If you are going to have a fight between
two blokes, let’s see it. If you are going to have a girl getting pregnant,
let’s see the baby and invent her as a character so people can feel for her.”
Ah, yes, the famously impudent manner in which Davies invents minor characters
to “round out the plot” of the sacred Austen canon, and to make it work
better as a screen dramatisation. He does the same by adding sequences that
he hopes will give body and motive to the story. These are, of course, the
bits that everyone remembers.
Perhaps his former career as an English teacher and university lecturer (at
Warwick University) has given him the authority to rewrite Austen, as if she
were one of his undergraduates whose work needed sprucing up. Davies, who is
a snowy-haired 71 (but acts with the enthusiasm and brio of a man about 40
years younger), admits this is the case.
“I think Jane Austen should have written another draft of Sense and
Sensibility. There are quite a few odd little things in it, and I think she
published it before she needed to. She left all sorts of 18th-century stuff
in it, which shouldn’t be in there. And left lots of things out. So I
thought, ‘Let’s put these things in’.”
Does he think Austen would even recognise her own work? “Oh yes, she’d say,
‘Somebody has stolen my book and embellished it with unnecessary flourishes
of his own.’ She’d probably sue me, if I was trying to get away with it as
an original work.”
The point, however, is that Davies clearly believes his “unnecessary
flourishes” are not at all redundant. And to back him up, he has the stamp
of approval from the self-appointed bearers of the Austen flame. “Jane
Austen academics and the Jane Austen Society are usually very sympathetic
about my reversioning. They always say, ‘We might not agree with what he’s
done, but we can see why he’s done it’.”
In particular, he likes giving the men in Austen a bit more verve. “It’s all
about how to write men so that they are interesting and sexually
attractive.” He muses on this a little, and then pronounces: “The general
consensus is that you don’t give anything away: you keep the girls waiting;
you keep them in the dark. And then you go off and do manly and interesting
things. It drives the girls crazy. Apparently.” He sighs, a little. “I’ve
been doing it wrong all my life.”
It’s a good line, but Davies, who was born and bred in Cardiff (where he
attended Whitchurch grammar school) but has lived in Warwickshire for most
of his life, clearly doesn’t mean it. He has been married to his wife,
Diana, for nearly 50 years (and they have a son and daughter). Nevertheless,
although his domestic life is remarkably constant, the lives of his heroes
are brimming with suggestions of turbulent carnality.
Davies has been quoted as being slightly grumpy that he was not asked to write
the movie, which won Emma Thompson an Oscar for her adapted screenplay. Is
his television series an elegant riposte? “I was joking! I said once that I
never asked to play the female lead in Howards End, so what’s Emma Thompson
doing stealing my work? No, it was a joke. I think she did a terrific
script. I just think the men ... ” What? The men weren’t sexy enough? “Well,
there were no scenes where you thought, ‘Ooh, that’s the bloke’.”
Darcy coming out of the lake was Davies’s most famous sexing-up moment; in
this latest Austen adaptation, he has the rather weedy Edward Ferrars
(played by Dan Stevens) feverishly chopping wood in shirtsleeves and a
downpour. It’s a bit like a Georgian Abercrombie & Fitch advert.
Does he hope drenched period beefcake will once more get the ratings soaring?
Of course, though he claims some of the more eye-popping moments happen by
accident – the firm axe coming down on the pliable wood, and so on. And in
the rain, for goodness’ sake. “I never thought about it as a Freudian
metaphor,” he says. Oh come on! “I’m shocked,” he says, delighted. “It just
happened to be pouring with rain.” Just as the wet-shirt scene with Darcy
just “happened”? “That wasn’t deliberate either.” What? “I didn’t think he
would keep his shirt on. I never thought a wet-shirt scene would be such a
turn-on.”
Happily for Davies and for Colin Firth, who played Darcy - and for the BBC -
it was. “There was a period, which went on for a long time, when you would
go to parties and whenever you went into the kitchen there would be a
picture of Mr Darcy and his wet shirt, tacked up over the dishwasher. I’m
very proud of that,” Davies says, twinkling more than ever.
Isn’t it a bit of a drag, though, always having to think about adding in
moments that will have a large percentage of the audience going, “Phwooar”?
It’s what we have come to expect from a Davies adaptation, after all. “Is it
a millstone?” Davies says. “No. I would say it’s done me nothing but good,
really.” Is it in his contract? I wonder if his paymasters ever toy with
legal requirements for sex, along the lines of: “Andrew Davies will rewrite
X, a novel by Jane Austen, for television serialisation, and will forthwith
insert at least one seduction, one major kiss (with tongues) and one
wet-shirt scene with a hunk.” He laughs, a lot. “No - it’s in the
chronology. It’s important that I brought it to people’s attention.”
Does he get impatient that Austen never does? “I think she is perfect how she
is,” Davies says, as if discussing the work of a beloved friend. “When I was
a teacher, I used to try to bring these books to life for kids and say, ‘No,
they are not boring. Look, this book is about this and this and this. Wake
up: this book is about life. It’s about people like you and me’.”
Of course, now he’s on the televisual A-list, everything is much more fun.
“Now I have millions of pounds’ worth of actors and scenery to play with.”
Yet Davies has clearly never stopped being a teacher. It’s as if he has a
mission to remind us about the human life and truth that pulsate through
these great novels, and will convey it to us as directly as he can. Even if
it means pulling the work about a bit. In return, we submit willingly to his
seductive didacticism: an Andrew Davies adaptation rarely fails in the
ratings and furthermore usually has a volcanic effect on book sales. His
next project is an adaptation of Dickens’s Little Dorrit, which despite its
lesser familiarity he hopes will have as successful a television run as his
triumphant Bleak House.
Meanwhile he hopes his version of Sense and Sensibility, which has always been
seen as a bit of a woman’s read, will attract both men and women. As he
explains, the chaps have the soft porn of the opening seduction scene, while
we girls have rain-soaked wood-chopping and hunks in tight breeches to
salivate over.
And then there is Colonel Brandon, the older, wiser chap, played like an
austere sex god by David Morrissey. “Oh, I know,” Davies says with relish.
“We required him to do piercing glances, and be stern but glamorous, and he
was. I think he is the true hero of the story.”
Ladies, prepare for a new hunk to adorn that spot on the kitchen wall above
your dishwasher.
Sense and Sensibility starts on New Year’s Day at 9.10pm on BBC1
