Open to persuasion
A series based on Jane Austen’s incomplete final story returns after being brought back from the brink by fan-power.
SANDITON, UKTV (Sky), Mondays, 9.30pm, from April 11
For some time, it looked as if Andrew Davies’ screen adaptation of the famously unfinished Jane Austen novel Sanditon had met a similar fate to the book itself.
After the first season in the UK drew warm reviews but only middling audiences in 2019, ITV announced that while it would have “loved”
Sanditon to return, “unfortunately we just didn’t get the audience that would make that possible for us, which is heartbreaking for everybody involved in this wonderful adaptation”.
The cancellation happened at a particularly awkward plot point: barely had Sidney Parker (Theo James) confessed his feelings for Charlotte Heywood (Rose Williams) than he made the decision to marry wealthy heiress Eliza Campion (Ruth Kearney) to save his family from financial ruin. The season finale ended with a tearful Charlotte departing Sanditon in a carriage, leaving behind the seaside, the friends she’d made and the love she had apparently lost. As Austen probably wouldn’t have said, it was a major bummer.
Then the fans from both sides of the Atlantic got to work. An online petition to bring back the show drew tens of thousands of signatures and the #SaveSanditon campaign group even found the money to commission a giant portrait, by outdoor artist Simon Beck, of the romantic protagonists, Charlotte and Sidney, on a Bristol beach. Fans from all over the world chimed in and Deadpool star Ryan Reynolds became a thoroughly unlikely celebrity champion.
Eventually, ITV relented, and eight months on in the story, Charlotte is back in Sanditon by the sea, having apparently gained a new confidence in her time away. But any hope of a rekindling of the romance with Sidney is emphatically dashed in the new season’s opening moments. (Strictly speaking, this isn’t a surprise – James announced last year that, unlike everyone else, he liked the ending of season one and his work on Sanditon was done.)
Yet there are new things afoot in the beach town – not least the arrival of a whole troupe of soldiers for the summer. Will Charlotte be able to hold to her disavowal of all future romance in a town crawling with handsome officers? Especially when they’re getting their kit off ? Georgiana (Crystal Clark), meanwhile, undaunted that ill has befallen her guardian, Sidney, is trying to get up a sugar boycott as a protest against slavery.
If it all sounds a bit contemporary, Sanditon was Austen’s most modern story. Georgiana was her creation – the only person of colour in her works. The town itself presages the leisure industry of the 20th century. But we’ll never know where she might have taken things and it is very much Davies’ story now. In that light,
Sanditon does battle a bit in the shadow of Bridgerton, an entirely contemporary creation whose writers feel able to take more dramatic liberties with their storytelling.
But if Sanditon is necessarily less dazzling than its contemporary cousin, there’s plenty to be going on with in this new season. We have a villain, Sir Edward Denham ( Jack Fox), who clearly has designs on his aunt’s money. Charlotte has, shockingly, a job. Sidney was a bit of a downer anyway. And there are more than enough handsome soldiers to go around. ▮
Sanditon does battle a bit in the shadow of Bridgerton.