Costume drama king Andrew Davies – who scripted the TV adaptations of everything from Pride & Prejudice and Bleak House to Middlemarch and War & Peace – found inspiration for his new Jane Austen series by watching all 32 seasons of the E4 reality show Made in Chelsea.
Made in Chelsea, which launched the careers of posh celebrities including Jamie Laing, Zara McDermott, Spencer Matthews and Sam Thompson, is “analogous” to the dramas and dynamics of Austen’s characters in her unfinished novel The Watsons, Davies has claimed.
“It’s stimulating, really, for relationships and ideas,” Davies told Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday (14 September). “These young men and women in The Watsons, for example, are very analogous to Made in Chelsea.”
Speaking to The Times last week, though, Davies admitted that he wasn’t exactly proud of his latest TV obsession.
“I must stop this watching of Made in Chelsea,” he said. “It’s disgraceful.” But this was only after admitting that he considered the show an irresistible proposition all about “very good-looking young people [having] a bloody good time”.
In fairness to the 89-year-old, who famously sexed up Pride & Prejudice by inventing the scene in which Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy steps out of a lake with his white shirt clinging to his chest, he has often spoken about finding inspiration in contemporary reality shows that depict dramatic relationships.
In 2019, he said that his adaptation of Austen’s unfinished 1817 novel Sanditon was “a bit like Love Island”, and in an interview used some of that show’s lingo to describe the dynamic between the characters of heroine Charlotte and her handsome paramour Sidney. “I mean, is she just friend-zoning him?” Davies asked, rhetorically. “Or is there a fanny flutter?” He added: “I confess I am a fan of Love Island.”
Davies, whose memoir An Unsuitable Boy: A Life in Scripts has been released this week, is currently adapting Austen’s The Watsons for television, which is no easy task as Austen had abandoned it long before her death in 1817.
The Watsons, about sisters seeking husbands in advance of their father’s impending death, was mysteriously halted by Austen in 1805. It was later completed and published in 1850 by her niece Catherine Hubback, based on a plot description that Austen shared with her family years earlier. Three further alternative continuations of Austen’s manuscript were later published, as well as numerous books and plays taking inspiration from it.
Made in Chelsea, meanwhile, has been an E4 mainstay since its debut in 2011, revolving around rich twentysomethings living in London’s affluent neighbourhoods of Kensington, Belgravia and Chelsea. It was one of a number of series launched in the early 2010’s that were termed “constructed reality shows”, meaning the depicted relationships and dramas were largely factual but shaped and lightly exaggerated by the show’s producers.
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