Writer's Luck by David Lodge

Author:David Lodge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

11

In late 1984 I found myself in the enviable position of being wooed by producers in BBC Television and the ITV company Granada, each of whom wanted to option the rights to make a drama serial out of Small World. I met people from both organisations and listened to their ideas about adapting the novel. I was (and still am) a great admirer of BBC drama and detest the intrusion of commercial breaks in television programmes, especially dramatic ones, but I decided in favour of Granada. The BBC producer did not seem to have the sense of humour that I thought was requisite for the task, and when I questioned whether BBC2 (the channel for which it was proposed) could provide a budget that would be adequate for the variety of locations in the story, his plans to reduce their number did not reassure me. The executive producer at Granada, Mike Cox, convinced me that they had the means and the will to represent the international scope of the novel, and conveyed a personal enthusiasm for the project, so I favoured them. Charles Elton, who had taken over this aspect of my affairs at Curtis Brown, was in agreement, and negotiated an option contract with Granada.

Some famous names were approached to write the script, but declined in spite of their admiration for the book, one saying that he couldn’t see how he could add anything to it. When I was asked if I had any ideas, I suggested Andrew Davies. Andrew had been an undergraduate in the English Department at UCL a year or two after me. He knew who I was then, but we had no contact and I didn’t know him. After graduating from UCL Andrew became a schoolteacher and later moved into teacher training, where he introduced creative writing into the curriculum. We met for the first time in the mid-sixties when he invited me to give a reading to his students in a course of this kind at Coventry College of Education. It was the first time I had been asked to read to an audience and I was sufficiently intrigued and flattered to accept. He told me in the same letter that he had a television play coming on soon, called Bavarian Night, that I might find interesting – as I did, and wrote to tell him so. It was about tensions in a marriage between a couple who had met at university, set against a Parent–Teacher Association party with entertainment from a pseudo-Bavarian band. In a poignant domestic scene the husband reminds his wife of how he used to sit behind her at ‘old Emslie’s lectures, and try to will you to turn your head and look at me.’ That was a reference to MacDonald Emslie, the lecturer in the English Department of UCL who had supervised my MA thesis, as I described in QAGTTBB. I imagined Emslie, who had since moved to Edinburgh and was reputed to be an alcoholic, idly watching his

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