“I wanted him to be completely naked”

Remember that audacious moment in Pride and Prejudice when a young brooding Colin Firth stripped down to his white frilly shirt and dove straight in to the lake, only to emerge dripping wet to later startle his budding love interest in a now almost see-through shirt?

Now re-imagine the scene, which propelled Firth to sex-symbol status for over a million women, beginning instead with Firth completely naked. For the 1995 show’s screenwriter Andrew Davies, this was the scene he originally had in mind.

“I wanted him to be completely naked when he dived into the lake, I don’t know why he wasn’t really,” said Davies to the Boar, adding that he was “amazed” at its sexy legacy when he had actually imagined it as “a funny scene about social embarrassment.”

Such scenes have capped Davies’ reputation as an adaptor who clearly keeps his modern audience in mind. Infamous for his penchant for sexing up the Classics, the 73-year-old former Warwick lecturer holds an impressive resume of over sixty shows including numerous BBC adaptations, the movie Brideshead Revisited and the upcoming Hollywood 3D blockbuster The Three Musketeers.

Yet, for someone who reportedly commands at least £200,000 per script, Davies comes across as mild-tempered and self-deprecating, as gifted storyteller as he is as a writer, who speaks of working with big Hollywood names as if it was nothing but a normal everyday occurrence. A self-professed non-Tory supporter, he bears a subversive streak against higher authority, unsurprising given his criticisms of an increasingly big-business embracing the University of Warwick from the 1960s. This setting provided the inspiration for his first major success, the 1986 comedy drama A Very Peculiar Practice, which poked fun at the increasing commercialisation of British higher education.

Now an Honorary Professor in the School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy Studies, Davies’ relationship with the University dates back to the 1971 merger with the Westwood-based Coventry College of Education, where he had been teaching. Remembering his disdain for the direction higher education was taking in those days, Davies remarked: “When we merged with the University I noticed that there was a kind of difference and that the aim of lecturers who were going to places was to do as little teaching as possible; in fact, none!

“In fact, the less teaching they did the more prestigious they were and I noticed people doing things like, actually, they were getting so much out from outside consultations, some of them, so they buy young cheap people to do their teaching for them.

“As time went on I noticed these developments intensifying really, and student halls of residence were getting kind of remodeled into a hotel for businessmen and that went so well that they started building new things that were never intended but as hotels for businessmen,” he said, citing then-Vice Chancellor Jack Butterworth’s policy of aggressively pursuing industrialist funding for the University.

“I thought really, pursuing the logical consequences of that, the aim of the University might be to get rid of the students altogether and just run it as a kind of business!”

Davies eventually left Warwick in between writing the show’s first series and the second, remarking that it had become “a bit awkward” given that “part of it was that I did want to write very rude things about university.

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“You know, I was getting regarded with grave suspicion by the administration and I thought it would be more comfortable for us all if I was out. But it was a wrench because I still enjoyed the teaching very much. On the other hand it was kind of good for me to decide to go full-time, to decide to be a writer rather than, you know, half a writer, half a teacher.”

Although by then a writer for a number of radio plays and adaptations, Davies’ career substantially took off after his departure from teaching. While still a lecturer, his first major breakthrough came with a script for the Wednesday play slot on the BBC, through which he began to forge valuable industry connections.

“An awful lot of getting established is to do with establishing relationships with producers and directors and people you work with, you know because otherwise you’re just some schmuck who’s sent in a script.

Although Davies career includes a mountain of original work, it’s his adaptations of classic works of literature that have brought him public renown, particularly those of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.

Indeed, the wet-shirt scene in Pride and Prejudice has become the stuff of legend and his adaptations continue to bring widespread critical acclaim. To name but a few, Emma, Vanity Fair, Bleak House, Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility and Little Dorrit all bear his stamp, with the latter winning seven Emmy awards last year.

His big screen credits include Middlemarch in 2009, having previously adapted it for TV in 1994, Brideshead Revisited and the Bridget Jones’ Diary movies.

Some claim Davies’ work has led to a revival of interest in classic novels, although they have been used in lieu of the books for GCSE revision by more than one current Warwick

student.

“I used to teach these things and one way of seeing it is that it’s almost like giving a lecture, except you’ve got millions of pounds worth of visual aids. You’ve got actors to act out your ideas and you can have all the scenery you want: brilliant.”

He speaks of Austen and Dickens like they are old friends. He describes Austen’s novels as being “beautifully organised”, adding, “She could have written great television serials if she lived now.” Dickens is clearly more of a challenge for Davies: “I found adapting it for a modern audience, rightly or wrongly, I wanted to make it much more like a soap.”

“The axiom of that screenwriting,” he added, “is give them what they want, but not in the way that they were expecting it. You want to satisfy them, but surprise the audience as well.”

Unsurprisingly, Davies has no illusions about who that audience might be for his romantic adaptations: “If you can get men to start watching Pride and Prejudice they’ll quite often stay, but they wouldn’t voluntarily go into a room and switch on the telly and say ‘I’m going to watch that’, because it would make them worry about whether they were gay probably.”

Terrified by the feminists he encountered at Warwick in his university years, Davies’ fascination with gender politics transcends his scripts, which he hints may explain the enduring appeal of nineteenth-century relationships for modern women.

“I think that female audiences respond awfully strongly to these old-fashioned sorts of men, like Darcy, who’s absolutely sure of what he thinks and nothing sort of metrosexual or new man or anything about him.

“And then, on the other hand, women tend not to like very submissive women in the dramas. They like a very old-fashioned type man with a cheeky subversive woman, like Elizabeth and Darcy. It seems to be like a kind of ideal relationship that appeals to just about everyone in the audience.”

Likewise, his ability to appreciate the sensuality behind the classic novels, has led to the “sexing up” claims, but Davies is quite proud of this legacy: “I certainly don’t mind it. But I would also say that I’m showing the classics as they really are deep down, because literary conventions of the time, in the nineteenth century especially, precluded any overt sexuality, but it’s so clear that in Pride and Prejudice or Middlemarch it’s hugely important.”

Yet, for a man who’s enjoyed such wide success on the small screen, Davies was introduced to it at rather a late stage, when he settled down with his wife in Kenilworth to enjoy happy married life with evenings spent relaxing in front of the television.

“I hadn’t grown up with a telly, because I’m that old really. I don’t mean it hadn’t been invented, it just wasn’t ubiquitous in everybody’s house.”

When prodded about his writing process, Davies shrugged off suggestions that he had any particular writer-style inclinations, unlike many of his literary counterparts. “It’s pretty boring actually,” he said, naming his home in Kenilworth as his base. This mundane process, he did admit, included a tendency, familiar to students, to get distracted from his main task.

“I always start my day with the best intentions and get started fairly early and finish work about five or six, but I waste an awful lot of time in between. Emailing people, googling things, playing silly games on the computer, just to rest my brain. But that’s it. I do write pretty much every day.”

His current projects including an adaptation of the 1930s book South Riding, a biopic of Marlene Dietrich and the aforementioned movie The Three Musketeers, the last of which is a collaboration with former Warwick film studies student Paul Anderson, a now-successful director married to supermodel Milla Jovovich, whose movies include Alien vs Predator and the Resident Evil movies.

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“We’ve been writing that together which is great,” he said. “It’s one of the things I’ve always hoped you know, that my students would become successful and employ me in my declining years.”

Recounting how the collaboration came about, Davies described Anderson as a “very bright” student, “very arrogant in a nice way” who loved hard science fiction films and wrote scripts which he found “quite horrific”.

“He would say that all the films I liked were ‘girly shit’ and I threw a lot of love in them and happy endings,” said Davies on the numerous friendly arguments they had. “But he liked ones in which people were always disintegrating into a pile of ash.”

“Well anyway he’s become a film director now and has done extremely well with a series of science fiction-based films, except that after years of doing this – he’s in his early 40s now – he got in touch with me and said, ‘How’d you like to write a script on the three musketeers ‘cos I’m going to do this.’”

“I said, ‘Is it going to be all horrible? Are they going to be all machines and destroy each other?’ ‘No!’ he said, ‘I just want to do a proper one.’

“Because he’s got kids now and he said that he thinks about time that I make a film I could show my kids and say ‘this is daddy’s film’.”

Such well-worn relationships with his former students were forged from a time of Red Warwick radicalism, where Davies taught for twenty years. These were, for him, “really in a way quite wow-times,” he said.

“You got things like students deciding that, I don’t know, that examinations were competitive and elitist and you got things like a whole year of students would walk out of the exam when they got their paper and have a kind of teaching outside and uni– no not unilaterally, together you know, work out and agree to the questions and they’d all go in and write the same thing.”

His creative writing lessons were anything but conventional, memories of which had led him to tell the magazine Horizon Review in a 2009 interview that “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.

“I just used to teach it with a lot of games, and a bit like sort of encounter group techniques,” he told the Boar, clarifying his words. “I guess the farthest out I went was a writing session we had in the swimming pool in which we were writing on each others’ bodies with you know, indelible ink, writing poems about being under absurd [conditions] which I hope stimulated some creativity.”

Feminist Marxist scholars at that time also had a prominent presence in Warwick’s teaching departments, according to Davies, which added to the then-spectrum of “extreme views.”

He admitted, “In fact I met the most frightening women, I did get very frightened.

“I got invited to a very funny workshop/seminar that happened every year called the Development of University English Teaching, which kind of took all sorts of really interesting and creative approaches to teaching, and I suppose what it was, was that it attracted unusual and extreme kinds of people in the university staff from all over England,” he said.

“Very much one of the signs of that was some of the women who really scared the shit out of me. Awful things like you’d go to a bar after a lecture and I’d say can I buy you a drink and they’d say: ‘Are you insulting me?! Are you implying that a woman can’t buy her own drink?’” He chuckled at the anecdote.

“I get the feeling that now, I may be wrong, that universities are all a bit sort of bland in that kind of way,” said Davies. “I think I was lucky being there.”

Yet although Warwick presently lives in much different times with a much less politicised student population, the problems it then faced along with other higher education institutes, have not yet gone away. The message of A Very Peculiar Practice, though by now a show perhaps seen by most as belonging to our parents’ generation, appears to still ring true today.

“Everything seems to be fairly much as it was portrayed then, only more so probably,” he noted.

“More ridiculous overcrowding, student numbers et cetera, student poverty and student debt. And yes I think the Bob Buzzards have really risen to the top.”

### Andrew Wynford Davies

#### Origins
Born in Rhiwbina, Cardiff on 20th September 1936 to two schoolteachers.

#### Education
Whitchurch Grammer School, Cardiff and University College London, where he graduated in 1957 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature.

#### Family
Married Diana Lennox Huntley in 1960. They have one son and one daughter

#### Warwick
Taught English and Creative Writing from the University’s inception until his departure in 1987. He still lives in nearby Kenilworth.

#### Career
Began writing professionally since 1960 whilst teaching at schools and universities. He eventually gave up teaching in 1987, aged 50, to pursue writing full-time.

#### Awards
Four Baftas, an Emmy and five Writers’ Guild Awards

#### Films

**A Very Peculiar Practice** _(1986)_ – A comedy-drama series that follows young doctor Stephen Daker’s time at Lowlands University’s medical centre. The staff include Bob Buzzard (left) who personifies the ‘greed-is-good’ ethos.

**Pride and Prejudice** _(1995)_ – This Austen adaptation starred Colin Firth and won several awards, including an Emmy for costume design and a BAFTA Television Award for Jennifer Ehle for Best Actress in the role of Elizabeth.

**Bridget Jones’s Diary** _(2001, 2004)_ – Davies collaborated with the series’ author Helen Fielding to adapt the books, which chronicled the life of Bridget Jones as a thirty-something single woman in London, for the big screen.

**Bleak House** _(2005)_ – The Dickens fifteen-part adaptation reportedly cost around £8 million to produce and won the Best Drama Serial Category at the 2006 British Academy Television Awards.

**Sense and Sensibility** _(2008)_ – Another Austen adaptation, it chronicles the story of two sisters on a journey of romantic discovery. The drama memorably opens with a seduction scene which drew criticisms of “sexing up” from Austen fans.

**Little Dorrit** _(2008)_ – Adapted from the Dickens novel of the same name, the rags-to-riches story follows the vacillating fortunes of the Dorrit family. The series won seven Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Miniseries.