As the fantastic The Line of Beauty comes to a close this coming Wednesday on BBC2, it seems no sooner that Andrew Davies closes off one project, than another is announced to take up the slack. A Room with a View, adapted from the E.M. Forster novel, will be broadcast by ITV1 next year, but my word, hasn’t the poor man got enough to be getting on with?
After the BAFTA triumph of Davies’ Bleak House adaptation, you’d think he might want a holiday, but it seems not. Aside from the Forster adaptation, he has been tasked by the Beeb to give Little Dorrit the Bleak House treatment, alongside a return to comfy Austen territory for Sense and Sensibility. And that’s not to mention tinkering with a riff on the novel Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, and changing period tack to bring the much-missed Channel 4 comedy, The Book Group, to the cinema. And there’s just time to squeeze in the screenplay for a new look at Brideshead Revisited, due sometime in 2008. Phew!
Davies is without doubt one of TV writing’s finest talents, but the 12-year-old me who rushed home to goggle at the fabulously anarchic Educating Marmalade, finds it a shame that he’s chiefly known for his alchemic skills on the work of others (and a tip top job he does of that too.) For me, A Very Peculiar Practice will always stand as his finest piece of work. Original, distinctive, and bleakly dark, its characters were almost Dickensian in their execution, from the malleable blandness of protagonist Dr Stephen Daker to the deliciously moral-free Bob Buzzard (a never better David Troughton). It’s no wonder then that Davies’s deft skill with character should have such an affinity for Dickens, Austen and Waugh, but by rights, he should be a TV auteur of the stature of Poliakoff.
But, when The Line of Beauty comes to a close on Wednesday, leaving us with a long summer of Big Brother and Love Island and no discernible drama of merit on the horizon, I’ll take an Andrew Davies adaptation of somebody else’s work over Heartbeat any day.
I am delighted that Andrew Davies is to adapt more classics for the screen. His work brings to light the exquisite work of authors of the past and brings our imaginations to life. I watch the eleven year old Pride and Prejudice adaptation today and it has not aged at all, i enjoyed Bleak House enourmously. It a crying shame that all that we will be left with over the summer is reality tv. Roll on autumn when the televsion worth staying in for begins.