BEHIND THE SCENES AT BLEAK HOUSE

Professor Jon Mee interviews screenwriter Andrew Davies

Andrew Davies is well known for his work adapting classic novels for television. His passion for Charles Dickens is clear - the BBC has screened his adaptations of Bleak House and Little Dorrit. In this four-part video, Davies reveals the processes behind the making of Bleak House and talks about why Dickens' vividly realised plots and characters inspire him.

Jon Mee: How far back does your relationship with Dickens go?

Andrew Davies: I read children’s versions of the novels when I was about eight, but then not really for a long time. I don’t remember studying any at school. At university I read English but Dickens was very unfashionable in those years, the middle 1950s. I came rather late to him in a big way in my middle 30s to middle 40s. I discovered things like Little Dorrit and Dombey and Son, the less fashionable, often the darker Dickens, and I just thought they were wonderful and started teaching them to my students.

JM: Did the idea of doing two new adaptations come from you?

AD: No, I’d always rather fancied having a go at Dickens but Bleak House was suggested to me by Jane Tranter who was head of drama at the BBC and at first I was a bit wary about taking it on because there was a very good adaptation in the 1980s that I’d tremendously enjoyed… and I thought I couldn’t do better than that; but then I watched it again and I thought, actually, there are things that I’d like to do that they didn’t manage to do then.

JM: Did you know from the beginning you were going to do a pair?

AD: No, I didn’t. Bleak House in a way was a bit of a gamble because… it was a long time since the BBC had done an adaptation of anything like that length - eight hours… they didn’t know whether it was going to work or not. There was always the feeling that if it did work we would press on.

JM: A tremendous number of people with Dickens claim ownership of the text… what about that aspect of Dickens heritage, what dare you touch?

AD: I have been through all that with Jane Austen where the adherents, I think, are even more passionate. With Dickens my general attitude was "He was a huge popular success in his own day, let’s try and make him a huge popular success now". I was really thinking of the people I wanted to hook; people who had never read the books.

JM: Bleak House has a very famous opening, fog up and down the river, and you made a decision not to do with that as the opening… can you tell us about that?

AD: There were two reasons for that, one artistic, one practical. The artistic one was that Dickens takes a very long time to get the main stories going. He keeps introducing a group of characters at some length, you get to know them, then you are switched to another group of characters. A modern reader is going to think "When is this story going to start?" So I wanted to start the story straight away and I thought the centre of it was these three young people who wanted to know who they were and what was their place in life… I wanted to tell the audience, these are the stars of the show, even though they’re very young and powerless. I got Richard and Ada into court and also bundled Esther along as quick as I could so she would also be right in the story in the first episode. The practical bit is, believe it or not, with all the huge resources of the BBC, I couldn’t do the fog! They kept saying “Well it’s all blowing away”. It was very, very difficult.

JM: What about changes to the character of Esther?

AD: This is one of the things where Dickens purists and Dickens scholars, and so on, would take issue with me because I took the decision that if I had Esther as she was in the book the audience would get really fed up with her. This was a personal thing, it might be my mistake, but I find her creepy, self-regarding, sickening really in a lot of ways… so I just took the bits of Esther that I liked, which were her determination, her steadfastness and her keen, waspish intelligence, the way she seems to be able to see through phonies, and emphasised those things.

JM: The other thing that perhaps gained most attention in the media was the serialisation technique… I’d like to hear your take on that.

AD: Jane Tranter very early on challenged us to come up with a different way of doing classic adaptation… one thing that I had in mind, thinking of my childhood and how I loved easily digestible versions of Dickens, that it would go out after EastEnders, which has a lot of children watching it, and I wanted to do a version of Bleak House that children could enjoy even if they didn’t appreciate all the finer points… EastEnders has a lot of strengths and the way it comes up with a cliffhanger at the end of every episode I thought was a great thing, and Dickens is somebody who can almost always find a good cliffhanger to end on.

JM: The casting in the adaptation is very interesting… there are a lot of comic actors in it. How much was that a conscious part of casting?

AD: I do have a bit of a say in casting but so do a lot of other people… certainly Jane Tranter wanted to make Bleak House very popular, so as far as possible she wanted to get stars from other genres of drama, even comedy… I suppose Johnny Vegas is the most extreme example of this.

JM: Johnny Vegas is a very interesting case. He almost makes you forget that in the novel Krook is actually thin...

AD: You get a wonderful sense that his body might be combustible like Christmas pudding, so that spontaneous combustion could really happen.

JM: One of the things that is very distinctive about the adaptation is jump cutting. How far was moving rapidly between different plot lines in the writing?

AD: I certainly wanted to move the story along very quickly and also to enable the audience to guess the connections between things. I remember very much thinking that in the first episode we want a sense of sweeping across the country from one place to another and somehow making it all part of the same story. And so it was full of quite abrupt cuts which the director emphasised by having this rather strange ‘swoosh’ with a noise like that in it.

JM: The viewing figures showed that Bleak House and Little Dorrit were able to appeal to a mass TV audience. What do you have to say about Dickens’ legacy now?

AD: Dickens feels very much alive to me in his books - his fierce social concern and feelings about injustice, and also the way he writes about the eternal things like love, jealousy, betrayal, hope and ambition, and what I think these adaptations show is that he can speak to people today. I’m very pleased also that sales of the books went up hugely afterwards. I think it’s often quite difficult for modern readers to get into Dickens. I’m talking about the average reader, but the adaptations help them to get in. They know there’s this terrific story full of very vivid characters and it makes it easier to read the whole book and thereby get much more out of it than I was able to get into the adaptation.

For more indepth interviews and comment, see the University's Celebrating Dickens website.

Jon Mee is Professor of Romanticism Studies in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies. He came to Warwick in 2007 after over a decade in the English Faculty at Oxford. His published works include The Cambridge Introduction to Charles Dickens (Cambridge University Press, 2010). His book Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community, 1762-1832 (Oxford University Press, 2011) has been nominated for the Louis Gottschalk Prize.

Andrew Davies is a screenwriter best known for adapting novels such as Bleak House, Vanity Fair and Tipping the Velvet for television. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including an Emmy, several BAFTA awards, three Writers Guild awards, three Broadcasting Press awards, and a Monte Carlo Television Festival award.

By Penelope Jenkins