In this podcast, award-winning screenplay writer Andrew Davies, famous for his adaptation of Bleak House, joins Professor Gary Watt, from The University of Warwick’s School of Law, to discuss both the cinematic nature of Charles Dickens novels and the difficulties in turning his classic stories into compelling television.

Andrew takes Professor Gary Watt through the process and challenges involved in adapting Bleak House, one of Charles Dickens’ best loved novels, and also reveals a surprising inspiration and influence for his award-winning BBC series.

He’s a natural because he has a tremendous visual imagination, in fact he can conjure up something like a wonderful cinema scene; you can often see the cuts, you can see the dissolves and get a sense of the camera moving into the shot. So he is very cinematic in that way, in other ways he’s quite difficult to adapt because he structures his stories in a way that’s very unfamiliar to people who are used to television drama now. They take a long time to develop and he takes a very long time getting the different parts to join up.

Andrew Davies