Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
AUSTEN'S SEASIDE SIZZLER
A spirited young woman finds love by the sea in a raunchy new adaptation of Jane Austen’s final, unfinished novel, Sanditon
He turned British actors Colin Firth and James Norton into international heartthrobs with his TV adaptations of Pride And Prejudice and War And Peace – and now BAFTA award-winning writer Andrew Davies has added his trademark sizzle to a new drama based on Jane Austen’s final novel, Sanditon.
It’s the first major television adaptation of Sanditon, which Austen abandoned after completing 11 chapters a few months before her death in 1817, aged 41. Andrew has taken her 24,000 words and spiced them up into a riveting eight-part ITV series.
The story follows spirited Charlotte Heywood (Rose Williams) as she moves from her Sussex home to a fishing village called Sanditon, which is reinventing itself as a dynamic seaside resort.
While the first hour is largely drawn from Austen’s text, Andrew admits to creative licence with the more racy scenes – including one that sees actors Kris Marshall, Jack Fox and Turlough Convery bathing naked in the sea while the female characters wear modest neck-to-ankle costumes.
‘I really aim to please myself,’ says Andrew, 82. ‘I suppose sexing it up comes naturally. If it’s not there I feel it’s a shame, and put some in. It was the thing in the day that men bathed naked – and there are some illustrations of women bathing naked. In the first
draft I wrote them in, but we settled for costumes because there’s more male nudity these days and a pulling back on female nudity.’
Kris Marshall, who starred as DI Humphrey Goodman in BBC1’s Death In Paradise, plays entrepreneur Tom Parker. He had no problem filming the nude scene. ‘It’s something I embrace,’ he laughs, before admitting he almost got hypothermia, so ‘they wouldn’t let me back in the water’.
As Sanditon tries to transform itself, it relies on the help of the tricky and miserly Lady Denham (Anne Reid) and Parker’s wild and charming brother Sidney (Theo James), who becomes Charlotte’s love interest and whose wealthy friend Miss Lambe creates a stir.
‘Lady Denham is mean, but
she sees Sanditon as an investment and gets very bad- tempered if things are not going her way. They are all after my money and waiting for me to die,’ says Anne, who was BAFTA-nominated for her role as Celia Dawson in Last Tango In Halifax. ‘There’s a scene when I’m ill in bed and say to them, “You’re standing around my bed like bloodhounds waiting for my death rattle and I’ve no intention of dying for a very long time.”’
This is no small- town drama, though, as the plot goes from Sanditon to London to the West Indies.
‘Period stuff can be dour and worthy,’ says Kris. ‘But this is witty, lascivious and naughty. Sanditon is a place where anything goes.’
Sanditon, tomorrow, 9pm, ITV.