It was from Brighton, after all, that Lydia Bennet eloped with George Wickham. Anyone who knows their way round the topography of an Austen novel will hear the ringing of alarm bells (which she was much more into than wedding bells). Charlotte wants to go, especially when her father warns her “these seaside resorts can be odd places”.
Mr Parker shows the Heywoods his plans for the hotel, shops, terraces, cliff walk, and assembly rooms where, the following week, Sir Andrew Davies (sorry, he) will be throwing Sanditon’s first ball. And the Heywoods, traditional country folk who make it their principle “never to go more than five miles from home”. In this case Tom and Mary Parker, tunnel-visioned entrepreneurs determined to transform the sleepy fishing village of Sanditon into a modern seaside resort. This is what’s required for a group of people who would never otherwise meet to be thrown together. It begins, as all period dramas ought to, with a coach accident. I still remember, a decade later, reading a hilarious Nancy Banks-Smith review of his (also sexy-seasidey) Sense and Sensibility, which observed that Davies’s name was in larger type than Austen’s in the opening credits.Īs for his Sanditon, it’s good dirty end-of-the-pier fun but about as enduring as an ice-cream cone. Really, though, will it come as a surprise to hear that the swoonsome arrival of Sidney Parker (Downton Abbey’s Theo James) storming up the blowy cliffside in a coach bears the naughty mark of Davies? Or the deer-spotting that turns out to be the bounder Sir Edward Denham rutting with a girl of whom he is ruthlessly taking advantage? Or the requisite ball filled with snatched power-play betwixt claps and curtseys? Of course not! Austen switched places with Davies a quarter of a century ago, approximately 44 minutes into episode four of Pride and Prejudice when Colin Firth emerged wet-shirted from a lake. What happens after this takes place in Davies’s Sanditon, not Austen’s. Say 24 minutes in, as our lively and naive heroine Charlotte Heywood (Rose Williams) admires a pair of slippers in a shop window.
So for once we slip into the ease and comfort of a Sunday night period drama knowing precisely where the author’s words end and the adaptor’s imagination takes flight.
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. 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. I t is a truth recently acknowledged that Andrew Davies, grandfather of the sexed-up British period drama, used all the existing material from Jane Austen’s final novel in the first half hour of his adaptation of Sanditon (ITV).
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