Andrew Davies will probably go down in history as the man who had the epoch-makingly brilliant idea of putting Mr. Darcy into a wet and thus clingily transparent blouse. But the blinding success of his version of Pride and Prejudice aside, he has also written the scripts for many of the great and memorable TV and film adaptations of the past decades: House of Cards, Middlemarch, The Line of Beauty, Bleak House, Tipping the Velvet, Bridget Jones’s Diary and The Tailor of Panama, to name only a few. He spoke to Australian screenwriter Jan Sardi (Shine) about the delicate art of adaptation and what it’s like to be the writer who channels Dickens and Austen for the contemporary world.

The session opened with the screening of a ‘teaser’, in every sense of the word, from the beginning of the BBC’s 2008 Sense and Sensibility (yet to be seen on free-to-air Australian television.) It’s a sexual seduction scene between a young girl and a man whose face isn’t revealed, and needless to say, it’s not a scene that’s written in Austen’s novel (Austen has the seduction happen well and truly offstage.) As an illustration of Davies’ method the clip showed his willingness to stretch, bend, and generally play fast and loose with the material supplied by even a novel as well-known and revered as this, to be a little bit saucy even when adapting Austen, in the interests of making a wonderful novel catch the attention of a television audience with itchy remote control fingers.

Jan Sardi asked just the right questions of Davies, drawing out his views and feelings about the novels he works with, his sense of exactly what his task is as an adaptor, and the cheerful confidence and aplomb with which he seems to make some extraordinarily difficult calls.

Before becoming a writer Davies taught English in schools and universities, and I got the sense that he still unashamedly thinks in terms of an educational mission – the basic value of opening up unfamiliar books for novice readers matters more to him than preserving all the superficially off-putting and remote dignity of books written hundreds of years ago in disused language.

It was extremely refreshing to hear him acknowledge the value of this unfashionable ideal, and he has done more than anyone alive to keep books like Middlemarch and Bleak House in front of readers. He spoke rather delightfully about his efforts to ensure Bleak House would be accessible to children. But, of course, when he talked in more detail about what he’s done with Sense and Sensibility (which I’ve seen on DVD) it grew complicated. He has made the two heroes more heroic and Willoughby more of “a shit”, feeling that without these changes the men are “seriously underwritten” and we don’t understand why the women are interested in them.

I think Davies is right that the novel has serious structural problems, but failure to clearly communicate what Marianne sees in Colonel Brandon isn’t one of them, because the novel says, as clear as crystal, that she doesn’t see much in him at all. This is a case of adapting storytelling to the demands and conditions of a new medium, but it’s also an example of a revision that softens away the radically unromantic quality of the original novel and that’s rather a wrench. The visual and emotional beauty of the series will certainly bring new readers to Sense and Sensibility but will they find the novel they were expecting?

Asked why he does so many classic novel adaptations rather than modern ones, Davies gave an answer I liked: he simply prefers them. The Line of Beauty, which Davies optioned on his own behalf, seems to have struck him as somewhat exceptional among modern novels in terms of having both strong plotting and psychologically interesting characters. In general, he suggested, modern fiction of the prize-winning, book-clubbing kind is thinly plotted, and airport novels have flimsy characters. The classics have both, and that’s why they have stuck around.

The session closed with Andrew Davies describing the delightfully Narnian beginning to the working day that he now enjoys, a recitation that must have struck envy into quite a few hearts of those in the audience. Having bought the Edwardian house adjoining his own to use as an office, to go to work in the morning Davies steps into the built-in wardrobe in the corner of the bedroom, passes through the clothes and through a hole knocked into the wall, and climbs out of the identical wardrobe next door. If a morning of writing goes well, he said, he hops back through the hole and goes back into bed.

Laura Carroll teaches in the English Program at La Trobe University.