This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that no television adaptation of Jane Austen can match the BBC’s 1995 version of Pride and Prejudice starring Colin Firth. Complete with Mr Darcy doing manly things that never appeared in the novel: fencing, having a bath, jumping into a lake only to emerge in a soaking-wet shirt and sodden breeches.
So, with Netflix set to screen a new Pride and Prejudice later this year, written by 30-something Sunday Times agony aunt Dolly Alderton, how is the screenwriter who originally sexed up Austen preparing himself for the shock of the new?
“Actually, Dolly and I had lunch yesterday,” says Andrew Davies, the period drama king who wrote himself into British TV history with his multiple masterful adaptations of English literature’s classics – and who, now 90, has just published a bracingly honest and moving memoir of his life.
“Dolly’s lovely,” he continues, “but I do have a sneaking longing for the critics to say, ‘Yes, her Pride and Prejudice is very good but not as good as the 1995 version.’”
View oEmbed on the source websiteWhether Davies likes what he sees on screen may be open to question. But what’s in no doubt is that when the two writers met, the older (by 52 years) insisted on ordering wine. “I’m running a one-man campaign to keep the long lunch going in the TV industry. I’ll say, ‘We’ve got to have a proper lunch with wine.’ Everybody likes it.”
Including the abstemious younger generation? “They’re a bit shocked by daytime drinking. But why be superstitious about the time of day? You can nod off for an hour or two if you feel sleepy in the afternoon. Nothing wrong with that. A lot of good work gets done during those lunches. People loosen up. They say what they think. You get new ideas, plot twists and insights. I’m not trying to turn everyone into alcoholics. But drink lubricates the creative process.”
So speaks a man who once collapsed in a restaurant under Kingsley Amis after a bibulous lunch to discuss his adaptation of The Old Devils.
Davies is talking to me from the home he shared with Diana, his wife of 63 years who died in October 2023 aged 87. They bought the house in Kenilworth when he still taught English at Warwick University, and made it their family home, bringing up two children.
Their daughter, Anna, was the first to read the Pride and Prejudice script “that would remodel our lives”, and that has come to define him ever since. “I don’t mind being the man who sexed up Jane Austen,” he says, “but it’s not true. There’s lots of sex in Jane Austen. It’s just not explicit.
“I’m thrilled my version inspired such a longing in women. Actually, I sort of fancied him [Firth/Darcy] when I met him trying on his costume for the first time. I thought, ‘He’s like a beautiful animal. Like a horse or something.’ I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I should emphasise that I don’t mean I wanted to have sex with him.”
Currently, Davies is adapting an unfinished Austen story called The Watsons. “When I’m dramatising a novel, I find it more appealing to write lines for people who are younger than me, especially when they’re women. If you’re a man, you can be worried about ‘girly’ feelings. But I embrace them.”
Throughout his career – from his 1980s breakthrough drama A Very Peculiar Practice, through adaptations of Middlemarch, Bleak House, Sanditon and War and Peace – he has been praised for his female characters.
“It’s probably because I spent such a lot of time wondering what the hell was the matter with my mother,” he says candidly. “I was everything she wanted until I was about 10, when I started to like other people. She couldn’t cope and we ended up quarrelling. She was so jealous of my relationships. It’s ridiculous, I’m still having it out with my mother. It was kind of Oedipal.”
Which brings us back to sex. In middle age he was advised to “put sex on the spine of every story”, to remarkable effect. And in his personal life, love affairs – not just his with various women, but also Diana’s 20-year romance with his one-time writing partner – threatened to unravel their marriage. Any regrets?
“We could have had a different sort of marriage, but honestly, no. We allowed each other to be ourselves and we never stopped liking each other. We never spoke about splitting up. And when I think about Diana when she was 19, I was lucky to know her. I’d still be crazy about her.”
Three years on from her death he says he keeps thinking of things he’d like to ask her. But in other ways he’s embracing his tenth decade. “Age is not a straight line downhill. Yes, at times you feel your age. But when I’m sitting down writing, I feel just the same as I did when I was 40.”
An Unsuitable Boy: A Life in Scripts by Andrew Davies is available to buy now.
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