All too familiar
IT is a truth recently acknowledged that Andrew Davies, grandfather of the sexedup British period drama, used all the existing material from Jane Austen’s final novel in the first half hour of his adaptation of Sanditon. This — the one most of us haven’t read, and which has never before been adapted for the screen — is the fragment Austen abandoned unfinished in March 1817. She died four months later, leaving behind 11 chapters of a strange fiction about encroaching modernity in the industrial age and, more specifically, a seaside resort on the Sussex coast.
So for once we slip into the ease and
comfort of a period drama knowing precisely where the author’s words end and the adapter’s imagination takes flight — about 24 minutes in.
Davis’ Sanditon is good dirty endofthepier fun but about as enduring as an icecream cone. It begins, as all period dramas ought to, with a coach accident. This is what’s required for a group of people who would never otherwise meet to be thrown together. In this case Tom and Mary Parker, tunnelvisioned entrepreneurs determined to transform the sleepy fishing village of Sanditon into a modern seaside resort. And the Heywoods, traditional country folk who make it their principle ‘‘never to go more than five miles from home’’. Mr Parker shows the Heywoods his plans for the hotel, shops, terraces, cliff walk, and assembly rooms where, the following week Sanditon’s first ball will be held. Charlotte, the Heywood’s daughter and our lively but naive heroine, wants to go, especially when her father warns her ‘‘these seaside resorts can be odd places’’.
The seaside may be morally lax but that makes it the ideal location for Davies’ thematic concerns: all bonnetteasing winds, wildly metaphorical seas, and the opportunity for people to get their kit off. The problem is, in an era of period dramas with extraordinarily high production values such as The Crown, or exquisitely written and envelopepushing ones such as Gentleman Jack,
Sanditon looks a little tired and conventional. Dare I say it of an Andrew Davies Austen adaptation? It’s not very sexy.
Sanditon screens Mondays at 9.30pm on UKTV.