Intersemiotic Translation: television writer Andrew Davies in interview with Steve Haynes

I catch sight of Andrew Davies’s home through dense bushes, presently see it, presently lose it, presently see it again and turn into a short drive leading to an old-fashioned house. A bell is rung and there’s the distant barking of a dog. Unlike Bleak House , there’s no ‘steaming of the horses’, instead a small grey dog stares balefully through a Victorian bay window. While Andrew Davies does have a ‘handsome, lively quick face full of change and motion,’ he is no John Jarndyce. This is a writer who never stands still; a man who is at the top of his game at 72; whose classic adaptations contain a youthful energy and subversiveness which had one critic recently referring to him as an ‘enfant terrible’.

The interior of his Victorian house perhaps offers a closer reflection of the man. The style is more like a French villa, full of light and simplicity. He is tanned with a shock of white hair and wears casual clothes more suggestive of a Mediterranean climate than the cold claustrophobic setting of a Dickensian novel. The room we talk in is dominated by a large writing desk with a small laptop and full-size keyboard at its centre. There’s a comfortable sofa in the window, recently vacated by the previously mentioned dog. A mixture of photographs and prints fill one wall and strewn around are piles of books — including a collection of annotated Just Williams and copies of his latest adaptation, Little Dorrit. Next to the white marble fireplace is a miniature library of books: amongst others, here are Peter Biskind, Martin Amis, J.G Ballard, plus a copy of “B-Monkey” by a certain Andrew Davies.

Andrew is politeness itself; he makes me coffee and tolerates my messing with various recording devices. The moment he sits in his chair he dominates this space, with each reply carefully considered. His words are often judged in the media circus that surrounds the latest ‘Andrew Davies Adaptation’, his ideas rounded-off into out-of-context soundbites. The reality is a writer who gives deliberative, thoughtful, sometimes guarded replies. And yet, there is always a desire to challenge, to make the risky statement.

To list all of Davies’s dramatisations and published works would take a page in itself. His career spans five decades of television and film. Between 1966 and 2009 lies a body of work that has put him constantly at the forefront of television evolution. Given the nature of the media he works in, Andrew Davies is already developing another Dickens epic, Dombey and Son, and is hoping to develop Trollope’s ‘Palliser’ novels as one of the new generation of executive producers working with a stable of other writers. For the purposes of this interview though, we start rather earlier in his career as a writer.

SH: What drew you into writing? Were you inspired by any particular novelists, playwrights, novels?

AD: I think of myself as having started writing very young and I grew up in a house without a television. When I was a little boy, I was very good at writing and I was just inspired by fame; by the idea of fame, like just being famous in the classroom. I went in for competitions in children’s magazines, and things, and won little prizes sometimes. So that was a kind of spur, because I wasn’t particularly good at football or anything like that. The secondary school I went to, in Wales, was very good because they had an Eisteddfod every year which was a balance to sports day; so that people who were good at singing and writing poetry, and all that, could have their day of fame. So it was really all that kind of thing that got me into it.

In terms of who inspired me, it’s hard to say because I just read loads and loads of stuff; quite old-fashioned children’s books that were around the house. I can remember reading Tom Brown’s Schooldays when I was eight and I had a kind of horrible fantasy that, you know, one day some stagecoach would arrive and cart me off to this school and I’d be roasted over an open fire by Flashman and his pals! I kind of knew in a way that I’d go to Whitchurch’s Grammar School if I passed the eleven-plus, but somehow it was just fucking real to me! Similarly, I used to get nightmares about Treasure Island, so I was reading children’s classics, I guess. Tom Sawyer I liked very much because it had girls in. Traditional literature for boys was all male, but Tom Sawyer was pre-pubertal, but he liked little girls, and I thought, ‘Well, I do as well.’ So that spoke to me.

When I was in my later teenage years, I was very taken with Welsh writers: Gwyn Thomas, who’s not so well known — who wrote a lot of humorous satirical, political novels — and Dylan Thomas, of course. It was partly because I liked their work and responded to it very much, but also because they’d both gone to ordinary Welsh grammar schools, just like mine, and Dylan Thomas, especially in his short stories, he’d write about a childhood that was just so similar to mine. It’s very much the kind of thing you hear black writers saying, or black singers; I wanted the inspiration of somebody like me who had become successful, because no one in my family had ever been a writer before. My father was a teacher, both my parents were responsive to good writing, but really didn’t think of it as something that anyone could actually do. In fact my father, very sensibly, pointed out that writers, mostly, don’t make any money, so really you ought to have some sort of job that paid the bills — so that you could write in your spare time and not be desperate.

He was right.

He was right.

You’ve had a very long career. It was a long journey.

It was a long journey and I think it wasn’t until around about 1980, I think, by which time I was in my early forties, that I was making enough to be able to, fairly confidently, say I could leave my teaching job.

But I didn’t actually want to leave the teaching job because I enjoyed it so much. So I left it, in fact, until the week I was almost fifty. It was probably saying, ‘What are you? A writer or a teacher?’ It had become too difficult to juggle the two jobs really — so I quite missed the teaching.

Is there a process of learning and education that’s in there with you?

Oh yeah! and I do think of the adaptations that I do as having a lot in common with lectures that I would do on books, in a way. I’d be enthusing about a book, but also saying, ‘Look, it’s like this, this and this and not like that.’ You know, trying to make students realise that Pride and Prejudice is really quite a sexy book in a sense; it is about sex and money and it’s not just a kind of trivial comedy; it’s about real issues, life-changing issues, and it’s about real men and women, you know, with bodies as well as brains. And so an adaptation, in a sense, is like being able to give a lecture with six million quids worth of visual aids.

You’re a very visual writer. Were there any films or TV that inspired you?

I loved going to the cinema. We used to go every week and see two films (an A film and a B film). A lot of them were absolutely terrible but obviously some things stand out, like Bambi and Great Expectations. We didn’t have a telly. I don’t think my parents had a television set right up to the time I left home when I was eighteen.

Dad used to listen to the radio quite a lot and the fifties, as were the forties, were a very good time for radio drama; the rather posh, arty kind. You’d be getting people like Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas writing wonderful radio plays and I used to listen to them. There were a lot of children’s classic adaptations on the radio and they always seemed to be adapted by the guy with the wonderful name: L. du Garde Peach. It was a mark of quality.

Looking at your output you have a career that spans the evolution of modern TV. But when you look back in hindsight there is a time between 1966 and 1976 (a three year gap, then a four year gap between broadcast plays) when you must have been frustrated to see other writers who had also material in the 1966/7 Wednesday Play season (Dennis Potter, Alan Bennett, Simon Gray etc.) become prolific. You’re there and at that point in time it must have been mentally frustrating to see these writers’ careers take-off. What happened? How did you cope?

That’s very perceptive. Yes, I can remember crawling around on my hands and knees, drunk at some party in the early seventies, saying, ‘I’m a good writer! aren’t I? Why can’t I get something on?!’ I think I can tell you the reason for it. It’s all about power and patronage. In those days, I think it was even more difficult for just starting-out writers, but there were a number of producers who were very influential. If you got picked up by one of these producers in a big way, you were fine — probably. So long as their career prospered, yours would.

Ken Trodd was script editor of that first one and it was produced by a camp Australian who went back to Australia. So that was no good. Ken Trodd and I never quite really hit it off, and he put all his eggs into Simon Gray and, indeed, Dennis Potter — and why not!? A very good choice!

The thing was, I seemed to get left out of all that and it wasn’t until Louis Marks, who was script editor on Thirty-Minute Theatre — he did a thing of mine called Is That Your Body There? But the thing was, after that he just stayed in-touch and then he got moved up to producer. These were the days of the anthology plays … let’s have ten plays on sporting themes, let’s have eight plays based on fairy tales. He’d ring me up and say, ‘I’m thinking of doing this — have you got any ideas?’ And not only that, but he was also going around recommending me to other people saying, ‘He’s clever, he’s fast, he’s cheap!’

So, over the seventies, I built a reputation, just within the industry. Nobody had ever heard of me outside it, but as a good writer who could deliver on-time. Then, towards the end of the seventies, I got To Serve Them All My Days and I actually bought myself a term off University and had a taste of the full-time writer’s life. And that was very successful, and also, in terms of the business, I was now somebody who could write a long serial and deliver on time.

1966 to 76 must have been a difficult time.

Well, it was a difficult time. But I was having such a good time in the day job. It was such an exciting time to be in Higher Education. I mean, that was a time when we were all going crazy! I mean, bloody-hell! When I think of some of the things we used to do, it’s a wonder ... I can’t believe we didn’t all get sacked! Anyway, I was really enjoying all that.

So it never occurred to you to walk away from the writing?

No, it didn’t, because I still enjoyed the actual writing. I had loads of ideas and loads of things I wanted to write about. Back in those days, my colleague George and I, we used to write for students quite a bit. We used to put on little shows and we used to do poetry and jazz. So the performing urge was, kind of, satisfied.

Also at this time (I don’t put these things on my CV) I was writing for a lot of really amusing children’s television shows. We were writing comedy material for ‘Freddy and the Dreamers’. They were a pop group, round-about contemporaneous with the ‘Beatles’, and they came from Manchester. When they stopped getting Number One hits they had a comedy music act that went all round the clubs. Anyway, Southern Television gave Freddy a children’s show called Little Big Time, and George and I wrote all the linking material between the acts and things like that. We also wrote for a quiz show and a kind of educational soap for ATV.

I was doing a lot of writing, but — of course — my ‘great works’ were not getting accepted in those days.

Let’s talk about some of your great works. Your first transmitted work was a Wednesday Play, 1966/7 — Who’s Going to take me on? — which features a strong female protagonist who is determined to take control of her life. This seems a major theme in all your work, including your adaptations. Why?

I don’t know. It was just an idea that inspired me, and the actual character was based, to quite an extent, on a student of mine who was a working-class Lancashire girl who would always be very direct and question all the assumptions, and I thought, ‘Well, I don’t want to write about a student in a college.’ Also, at that time, we both moved up to the Midlands and my wife, before she had the kids, worked as a secretary at Massey Ferguson, the big tractor place. She would bring home a lot of interesting stories about the life and culture of the industrial Midlands. I thought that the men in the Midlands were a very thrusting, blokey culture, and I wanted to write about a girl who comes up against this and she’s just a typist. But she wants to be a Rep and have her own car, and she’s a bright girl, because when she was at school she read Death of a Salesman, but she got it all wrong. I mean, she ignored all the tragic bits. She couldn’t see why they’re so miserable. She just thought, ‘I’d love to have a car and just bomb up-and-down the M1 with a suitcase full of knickers!’

Anyway, I wrote this play about all that and sent it off, rather like doing the pools, because I didn’t really know anybody. I’d had a couple of radio plays on but I didn’t know anybody in television, so it was a very nice surprise when it got accepted. And of course I thought, ‘This is it! I’ll be writing two or three of these a year, I expect, from now on...!’

Another theme, sexuality, is something that you’ve openly explored as a major driving force. There’s an adult theme running through A Very Peculiar Practice, Mother Love, The Legend of King Arthur and The Chatterley Affair.

Er, yes. Well, people point it out and all I say is, ‘I’m surprised you don’t find sexuality as interesting as I do.’

In some ways television is a very conservative medium. It’s the box that’s in your living room.

It is, and I agree. Explicit sex is embarrassing on television, unless you’re on your own. When you’re thinking of television as something that gets watched by, sort of, family groups, indeed couples even, certain ways of shooting a sex scene make you feel like a voyeur. Like you’ve stumbled in; you’ve opened the door — you’ve opened the wrong door. Although you can shoot a love-scene on the people’s faces, or mostly on the people’s faces, and that way the viewer is drawn into the scene … identifies with the emotions and so-on. The topic if sex is perfectly fine for telly, but explicit sex is a problem and people talk as if I write ... in fact, I will tend to tactfully stray out at quite an early moment.

You also wrote plays for theatre, Rose and Prin, with teacher protagonists. This must have been problematic for a “visual” writer.

Yeah ... I’ve got other problems with the theatre as well. Theatres tend to make me claustrophobic: literally. Especially the traditional ones. I don’t like the idea you’re trapped there in the middle of a row and you can’t just get up and go out because it would be so rude and disruptive. I worry if I’m going to cough, or I get anxious about the actors, or I get anxious about myself in the audience and I think, you know, if I could just force a laugh out it would encourage other people to laugh, because you know they like it, but ... On very rare occasions one feels completely taken care of. The performance is just so good, you don’t notice anything about yourself at all. You’re just swept away. It is, of course, the wonderful theatre experience that all actors keep on talking about. I’m afraid nobody enjoys the theatre much except the actors!

A radio producer called Anthony Cornish kind of taught me or encouraged me into writing plays. He’d been directing some radio plays of mine. There was one called The Filthy Friar and the Woman of Maturer Years which is about a sex-mad sixth-former, and he’d be saying, ‘You ought to write a stage play’, and I’m saying, ‘Oh I couldn’t write one of them. People have to come on and have a conversation for twenty fucking minutes and I can never think of a good way of getting them off the stage, except saying — “I’ve got to have a pee!”’

And he said that plays didn’t have to be like that any more, that they can be more like radio plays with little bits of scenes. He suggested we adapt Filthy Friar. So he put it on at the Orange Tree, Richmond, which is a theatre in-the-round, in an upstairs room. And it was a bit of a revelation really, because it was the kind of thing where the leading character comes on stage. It’s a very easy, ‘lazy man’s’ way of writing a play, because you don’t have to have exposition; he just comes on and tells you. He just says, ‘Hello, my name’s Francis and I’m a sex-mad sixth-former.’

I thought, I can write something like this. So I wrote one or two more. But it was always with him. It’s much better if you know what theatre you’re writing for, and if you know the people.

I worked up the cheek to go to the director of a small production at the Belgrade Studio Theatre in Coventry, and say, ‘Listen, I can write a better play than this for four people.’ So he said, ‘Do it.’ I mean, he wasn’t going to pay me any money to commission me, but I’d aroused his interest. In fact I wrote the play that became Rose. I called it Diary of a Desperate Woman and based it on the background of my wife’s experience as an infant school teacher. I set it in an infant school and I thought, ‘It will run in this tiny theatre for four weeks to full houses because all the infant teachers in Coventry will come and see their lives celebrated.’ I mean, they don’t all have it off with the school inspector, but anyway ... They did come.

Then, to my surprise, a rather small-time London producer came up to see it and said could he have a go at putting this on in the West End, and I said, ‘By all means.’ He sent it to Glenda Jackson, who didn’t know him from Adam, and to his amazement, and mine, she said, ‘Yeah, I’ll be in that,’ and so it went.

You’ve often used teacher protagonists in the past.

Well, quite often … what else do I know?

You wrote a TV play Inappropriate Behaviour in 1987 with Charlotte Coleman. It had a very disturbing ending. Here you had a wonderful female protagonist, who was a school-girl, who takes on the world. And at the end of it ...

Yes, well, it was obviously a great ending because it was such a shock, but sometimes you don’t realise how powerful things are going to be when you write them.

B-Monkey was a novel by you, with a teacher protagonist, that had all the above themes and was made into a film. But not adapted by you. Why? Was it for commercial reasons or your choice?

It certainly wasn’t my choice, no. I wanted to do it myself and, indeed, I did do two drafts, and the usual thing … Got dumped, and eventually the director and his girlfriend wrote the final script. It was terrible! God, it was terrible.

I remember that you did some ‘script-doctor’ work on a film called Consuming Passions.

Supposed to be one of the worst films of all time.

Who is the author in those circumstances? What is your motivation for doing it?

I actually hardly ever do any script-doctoring because I don’t really like having my own work messed around with; I don’t do it with other people’s. I suppose authorship doesn’t come into it. It’s always a job for money or it seemed like fun at the time.

You once had a reputation as a children’s writer for the novel Conrad’s War and the Marmalade Atkins series. Why did you go down this route? What was your driving force?

It was entirely to do with having children. Having to read pre-school books to them, some of which are delightful and very good, but most of which are so fucking tedious. So I just thought, you know, well I can write better books than that. I’d sort of be making things up to amuse my kids and just worked them up into stories.

Conrad’s War was for your son.

Yeah, and the character was very closely based on him. When he was little, he went through a period where he was just obsessed with the army, and war, and killing, and tanks, and guns — just like Conrad — and he wanted me to build him all these go-cart tanks and things. And he wanted a real airgun so he could blast people.

We used to have these long tedious arguments which actually when written down seemed very funny. (From the outside.) So I had this idea that we’d take a boy and put him in a war that was a mixture of a real war and the war as portrayed in comics and popular entertainment. And I thought, ‘If I’m putting him through it, it’s only fair to put his Dad through it as well ... and the dog!’ The dog was very much based on the dog we had then. I used to sit here actually and do it, and he’d be standing behind me saying, ‘Right. Do this, do that!’

I’d like to talk about your adaptations now. I’m sure you’ve seen the film ‘Adaptation’?

Yes. It was a terrific film. It was great seeing the great Robert McKee being played on films because I’d been to one of his famous seminars.

There are many hurdles and prejudices facing an adaptor. One of them is the question of fidelity, and fidelity to what? In research for this I came across reviews that begin with ‘… for me the best adaptation was ...’ or exhibit a loyalty to their own reading of a text or assumptions about what the novelist originally wrote. Ronan Jakobson [linguist] referred to adaptation as ‘Intersemiotic Translation’, in which the translator is an interpreter of verbal signs by means of non-verbal sign systems [On Linguistic Aspects of Translation, 1966]. Can you talk about your approach to this generally, and your attitude to fidelity?

It’s quite hard talking about fidelity. First of all, a television serial is a different thing from a novel. It’s a collection of sounds and images; it really is a different medium. Having said that, it has certain elements in common with the novel, like the sequence of events, the plot, which one might change in small ways, or occasionally big ways if it seems likely to produce a better show.

I think there’s a sliding scale of fidelity and homage and so-on, depending on who you’re adapting. If you’re adapting Jane Austen, I am one of the many admirers who think that Jane Austen, by-and-large, is fine as she is. Let’s use as much of her dialogue as possible, let’s keep her plots down to the smallest detail, because they just ... work. With Dickens, often he leaves great gaps in the plot which are going to annoy people watching television who want everything to work out properly, and will criticise you if it doesn’t.

So you have to sometimes — which is good fun — fill in the plot to try and work out exactly what must’ve happened, and make it work!

Your breakthrough adaptation was The Signal Man in 1976 (although there had been The Imp of the Perverse from Poe). This is described by the BFI as a ‘Key Television Programme’. You made changes in order to make it work. What and why?

I can remember the opening. It just struck me very vividly the way he makes you see that deep railway cutting and the whole thing. I also turned the woman on the train into a bride and had her jump, or pushed, from the train. I changed things because we were going to see both of these men. If the narrator was just somebody who turned up and was talked to, it’s just much less interesting. It works in Dickens’s stories, but I wanted to make more of a character out of the narrator, make him more interesting.

Because the adaptation is a visual thing you want to make as many of the main events visual things. It’s always best when it’s not a line of dialogue.

You play with endings — e.g. the great ending of Wives and Daughters — and take risks — e.g. the framing device of A Room With A View. You’re doing more than interpretation here; you’re bringing yourself to the table. What are you saying? Why are you doing this?

In A Room With a View, it was partly a pressure to make ourselves different in some way, but it was also that ... Forster wrote this novel in about 1908/09 or something. We know about half the young men of that generation got killed in the war. So it was a nice idea to have her come back, and you thought she would be coming back to remember those happy days.

Where Wives and Daughter is concerned, I just thought it was a great ending. In fact Gaskell had written some notes about … I mean we knew they were going to finish up together, but Gaskell was going to put us through another loop of waiting while he went off, and I just thought we couldn’t have that. It just seemed the right sort of ending.

There’s something else which … This strong woman theme. I’ve obviously liked to write these sorts of characters for ages, but there’s such a lot of pressure at the BBC to write strong women because BBC Drama is run by strong women!

Women like Jane Tranter?

Exactly. They want to see themselves reflected in the heroines. It was very popular with Jane Tranter … that ending where she’s thrashing about on safari.

Pride and Prejudice [1995] seems a very different beast from Middlemarch [1994] — far more filmic and a world away from the 1980’s Fay Weldon studio-bound version. Is this a watershed moment because of your writing or through the collaboration process? Why do you think Pride and Prejudice explodes onto the scene?

It was a deliberate reaction to all previous Pride and Prejudices, which had been all buttoned-up to the neck and making polite conversation. I wanted to make it into a very physical one. And in fact it was of course helped by the fact we were doing it all on film and we explicitly wanted as much out-of-doors as possible. In fact there’s a lot of outdoor scenes in the book: climbing up the Derbyshire Peaks, trudging over muddy fields.

At the time, I was passionately attached to my Pride and Prejudice and putting it across the way I wanted to. An awful lot was to do with the terrific cast, and perhaps especially for me, Colin Firth’s performance was just outstanding.

It was a deliberately pro-Darcy adaptation because, when you read the book, it’s not till you get practically to the end that you realise what a good guy Darcy is. I wanted to give the audience a chance to see more of Darcy; see more into him. So I took the liberty that Jane Austen would never allow herself to take, of following Darcy on his own, go into his back-story with Georgiana and Wickham, and show in fact that he’s much maligned. It takes away some of the surprise that you get in the novel, but I wanted to do it that way. I’m delighted that it still stands-up.

You are now an incredibly prolific writer. You are involved in a form of TV writing that is highly demanding in terms of research, translation, collaboration and commercial deadlines. Could you take us through your chosen process of writing?

I’ll take the example of Little Dorrit. Now this was very much a follow-up to Bleak House in terms of the size of the adaptation, the working method, everything. So we hammered out a working method for Bleak House and I, in effect, taught it to the production team on Little Dorrit, who are a completely different set of people.

First of all, this was a year last January [2007]. I went to Antigua. I was going there anyway, on holiday, and left aside the afternoons when it was too hot to go on the beach — and we had a nice air-conditioned little villa — to hammer-out a skeleton outline of what I could do with Little Dorrit. Roughly, I divided it into half, and then sixteen parts, and then was very pleased with myself because I came back with about a very bare four lines on each of the sixteen half-hours. Then, with the producer and the script editor, we set about fleshing out all these half-hours, one at a time — when we’d agreed on a few basic things.

There were some big questions that we needed to talk about, like whose story is it really and I, sort-of, imposed my will I guess, but erm ... ‘cos I knew I was right! The book’s called Little Dorrit and I wanted to put her at the centre of every episode, if I could, and have at least one really good scene with her in every episode. And I wanted to put her right at the front of the story to start-off with it.

Dickens, infuriatingly, takes about seventy pages, before he gets Little Dorrit started. So I was used to that, in a way, with Bleak House.

Right at the start, the first image is Esther Summerson getting in a coach … kapow! away!

Yeah, so same sort-of-thing; I wanted to erm ... we have a tiny little prelude which is going back to her birth in the Marshalsea and then, yes, the first period is Little Dorrit coming out of the Marshalsea prison, going to work. So, having decided all that, that she’s the main character and what was in different episodes, we batted the outlines back and forth, two or three times, until I was happy to start writing. Then I wrote the first draft. So I’d write the first episode, then usually ... I can’t remember when we did the re-writes, not straight-away. I wrote several before we started.

Do you write the whole thing in one go?

When I was doing Bleak House, we allowed me two weeks an episode, two weeks for an half-hour episode, and I found out I could actually do one in a week. So I was writing Little Dorrit at one episode a week, leaving some gaps here and there to go on holiday and so on.

That’s a lot of pressure.

Yes, but I knew it was fairly flexible, that if I fell behind a bit it wouldn’t matter. So it wasn’t that kind of pressure, but we had a good plan. There was no reason for it to not go well. Things only take a long time when you don’t really know what you’re doing.

So, it was just extremely enjoyable and I had a very good producer and script editor, Lisa Osborne and Surian Fletcher-Jones. You know, you say there’s a lot of research goes into it. In fact, I don’t really do much research. There’s a wonderful woman called Jenny Uglow who’s a very distinguished writer in her own right; she writes a lot of biographies and she’s just got an encyclopaedic knowledge of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If I’ve got any queries, I just ask her usually. And she also has the job of going through all the scripts, checking for anachronisms and making suggestions. Because Dickens is infuriatingly vague on things. There’s a character called Daniel Doyce who’s an inventor but we never learn exactly what he invented, so we got Jenny Uglow to help out with that.

As you go along, you get other people from the BBC, higher-up, also bunging in their notes. But with Little Dorrit I don’t remember any hitches or big arguments. What seemed to take an awful long time was the choosing of directors.

It was a tight schedule and they wanted to be able to put it out in October. It wasn’t possible to have one director directing the whole lot, and they thought they would do it with two. Bleak House had two. This one’s had three. Terribly difficult for the producer, because sometimes they were all working at the same time on different things. So you’d be getting scenes from all over the book being shot at the same time, and in different locations. But it all seems to have worked out very well.

Casting was another terribly lengthy business, but again that wasn’t something that I was directly involved in, I didn’t have to go there. I get consulted about it and have fairly passionate views about who should — or shouldn’t — be given the part! But one of the nice things about casting is, with a lot of these things — Dickens, Jane Austen, any of them — often the leading character is very young and the BBC are very good about this. If it were a movie, you’d have to have somebody famous who’s already been in movies. It would have to be Keira Knightley or somebody. Whereas the BBC will let us cast somebody straight out of drama school. It’s really delightful to see them going on up. Keira Knightly is an example herself because she was in Dr Zhivago when she was seventeen.

The core things to remember when writing an adaptation is to make the story clear. Make sure the audience is in touch with the heroine and the principal characters. Put them at the front. Don’t go away and leave them for long.

The commercial and technical pressures for film adaptation are intense. You are planning to, or are, adapting Middlemarch for a production slated to be directed by Sam Mendes. How does your writing survive this?

I’ve no idea how my writing will survive it because, so far as I know I’m still the only writer on that project. One has to be quite relaxed about all that. I mean, there’s no sense worrying about anything you can’t do anything about. It is a very big ask, really, to try and make a two hour, or even a two-and-a-half hour film, out of Middlemarch. What happens is that it becomes a much more personal story about a group of characters and Middlemarch itself tends to get squeezed out a bit.

Northanger Abbey was originally a telly script that got briefly taken up by Mirimax as a film. But they abandoned that, so we got it back.

But eight years went by. There must be other things you’ve written that have never seen the light of day. Will they ever?

Oh yeah. But these things are not in the lap of the gods, but are certainly not in mine.

In a way, you write a movie script, it belongs to someone else. It’s their property, you know, they call it a property. It might surface at some later date, probably won’t, but you just don’t know.

There are other television adaptations on the horizon.

I’m going to do an adaptation of Trollope’s ‘Palliser’ novels for the BBC and I’m going to do Dombey and Son. And those two between them are going to account for quite a lot of time.

Andrew Davies, thank you.