ITV? It’s for old and boring people says top TV writer
ITS new Sunday night drama Victoria is trouncing BBC rival Poldark in the ratings war.
But though millions are tuning in to ITV to follow the exploits of Jenna Coleman as the young queen, not everyone is impressed with the broadcaster.
Veteran screenwriter Andrew Davies has launched a stinging attack on ITV, saying its commissioners only want old and boring dramas.
The 79-year-old, who was behind the BBC’s recent adaptation of War and Peace, said his proposals are often rejected by ITV bosses on the grounds they don’t fit their audience – who he called ageing and ‘badly educated’.
Davies said the broadcaster assumes its viewers only want ‘what they have had before’, instead of original content.
Speaking to the Radio Times, he said: ‘I hope it will change, but in recent years when you go to ITV [with a proposal] they say, “We don’t know if this is for our audience”.
‘You can tell that they are referring to people who are old, who are badly educated, who are conservative with a small “c” and who just want what they have had before, and nothing new.’ Davies is thought to have made his comments before Victoria’s success, which has seen it emerge as the unlikely winner in the battle of the prime-time dramas against Poldark for two weeks in a row, and win praise from critics.
As romance blossomed between Victoria and her future husband Albert, played by Tom Hughes, the show’s fourth episode drew an audience of 5.1million on Sunday night.
But over on the BBC, many of the 4.8million who watched the second episode of Poldark were left unimpressed when the bulk of the show was dominated by the ‘tedious’ business of Ross Poldark’s court case instead of his bare chest as seen in previous episodes.
The third episode of Victoria previously gained more than one million more viewers than Poldark’s debut.
Davies, whose best known works include his 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and 1990 version of House of Cards, is currently working on a nonmusical adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables for the BBC.
Discussing the series, he said: ‘Of course [it] might backfire terribly with people expecting all the songs, but we think there’s so much more to the novel that never got into the musical.’