Andrew Davies: King's Hall Ilkley Literature Festival date for screenwriter behind Pride and Prejudice, House of Cards, Bridget Jones's Diary
Andrew Davies has written scripts for stand-out British film and television for decades, but has now released a book about himself. He talks to John Blow.
He is a script writer of repute, long known for quality adaptations of literary classics, but Andrew Davies made headlines recently for sharing his fandom of programmes which are not necessarily considered part of television’s golden age.
Davies revealed in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today that he had been watching Made in Chelsea while working on a version of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel, The Watsons.
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"I've gone off Love Island now,” he says, matter-of-factly. “After Moira Higgins, it could never be better than that season, I think. But Made in Chelsea, yes, I still watch it, and people don't believe it, but I find it quite stimulating in terms of ideas for how characters behave and so on. These are real people, of course. Well, they're real people who are getting prodded and pushed to be a little bit more extreme than they would be normally, and I like it.”
At 90 years old, “I don't want to watch grim, earnest things quite as much as I used to,” says the man known for making the likes of War & Peace and Les Misérables fit for television viewers in recent years.
Now he has turned expressly to his own story. He is appearing at Ilkley Literature Festival after the release of his new memoir, An Unsuitable Boy, in which Davies "let a lot more out than I thought I was going to,” he says over the telephone. “But it just seemed to want to come out that way, so it did.”
He adds: "I thought, when I started writing, it was just going to be a collection of stories of interesting and funny experiences involved in the professional life of writing. But the way I chose to do it – I chose to tell it to a friend of mine, Fiona Lindsay, who's also a professional, she's done other people's books – she asked a lot of questions about my life and I found that I wanted to talk a lot about my mother, and I found I want to talk a lot about Diana (Huntley, his late wife).”
His attendance at the festival means he gets to visit his daughter, Anna, and grandchildren, who are based in Shipley. Davies’ son, Bill, lives in Manchester.
Wales-born Davies, who turned 90 this month, lives in Warwickshire with Jessie, an ageing tortoiseshell cat who nominally belonged to his wife, who died in October 2023 after they shared 63 years of marriage.
During their early years, after writing radio pieces, his script for The Wednesday Play – 1967 episode Who’s Going to Take Me On? – was accepted. “I thought, this is it - I'm going to be famous now. I'm going to be the next Dennis Potter. But I didn't sell another television script for five years.”
However, later success on television included A Very Peculiar Practice, inspired by Davies’ time as an English lecturer at the University of Warwick, which earned a cult following after first airing in 1986.
Then, in 1990, came House of Cards, the television show based on the book by Michael Dobbs, his nefarious Francis Urquhart the fictional Chief Whip of the Conservative Party.
The BBC’s former Head of Serials, Michael Wearing, had told Davies to “think Jacobean", which he interpreted as the villain talking to the audience, shadows, darkness and conspiracies.
Davies got an executive producer credit when it was adapted once again and transformed for US politics, in what became one of Netflix’s early behemoths in 2013, but remembering the UK show, he says: “It was thrilling. We had such a lot of luck with that. Just the timing of it. Because at the time when Thatcher was in power, it seemed like she was going to go on forever, but Michael Dobbs, who wrote the book, had a good instinct that she was going to go. But in fact, she did fall from power in between the first episode and the second episode of when it was transmitted. So people thought… these people, did they cause it? We and the series became a bit notorious at that time and it was such a terrific performance by Ian Richardson as the baddie, the baddie hero, as it were. I'm just as much proud of that as I am of Pride and Prejudice, come to think of it.”
It is these adaptations of classics for which he is best known, however, and his version of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for the BBC in 1995 – famously featuring a wet-shirted Colin Firth as Mr Darcy – lives long in the memory.
Does Davies get Christmas cards from Firth? “I do not! I think he feels a bit ambivalent about that being the thing that he's best known for,” says Davies.
With a background in teaching, transforming these works for screen “was like giving a lecture with millions of pounds worth of visual effects,” he says.
Later, he joined Richard Curtis and Morley-born novelist Helen Fielding to adapt her book Bridget Jones’s Diary for the big screen in 2001. “She (Fielding) thought it was more of a comedy about urban life and being with her friends,” he says, “and I thought it really ought to be a proper romantic comedy and that Mark Darcy ought to be more like Mr Darcy. That's really how it finished out. Well, she got both elements in but at the time she kind of disagreed.”
Davies’ desire to write is not diminished by reaching a new decade.
“I'm kind of astonished, in a way, to be 90 because I never took any particular care. I mean, I smoked like a chimney until I was 50 and I'm still a moderate drinker. I drink more than the doctor says I should. But I think it's just luck of the genes, really. My father lived to 95, so possibly, with luck… I said at my party: ‘Thank you for coming and I'll see you again in 10 years’.
“I still feel absolutely full of beans. When I'm sitting down. If I'm walking up a hill, I can feel my age. But I've got lots of ideas to write and I still just want to carry on for as long as I can.”
Andrew Davies: Life in Scripts is at King's Hall for the Ilkley Literature Festival on Friday, October 2 at 7pm. Tickets: ilkleyliteraturefestival.org.uk