Costume war declared on TV

 

Obsession over ratings pits two broadcasting champs

in a bout neither wanted

 

Vanessa Thorpe, Arts Correspondent

 

Sunday November 28, 1999

 

Supper will be a tense time tonight in two rival households. The

country's leading television writers, Alan Bleasdale and Andrew

Davies, are going head to head in a bid to win the larger

audience for expensive new costume serials.

 

Their competing adaptations of two nineteenth-century literary

classics, Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist and Elizabeth Gaskell's

Wives and Daughters, are controversially scheduled to start at

9pm on different channels.

 

A newcomer to the classic serial genre, Bleasdale on ITV will be

swapping Yosser's famous 'Gissa job' from Boys From the

Blackstuff for Oliver's even more celebrated demand 'Please, sir,

I want some more.' Davies, who is already acclaimed for his

work on Pride and Prejudice and Middlemarch, is going out on

the BBC.

 

'We will both be sitting there trembling,' said Davies. 'It is such a

silly situation and we will both suffer no doubt. Out of loyalty I

will have to watch my own programme and record Alan's to see

later.'

 

When he first heard of the clash, Davies railed against the ITV

schedulers, arguing they had nothing but audience ratings on

their minds. Now he has reconsidered.

 

'I was very, very annoyed. I thought ITV was the villain of the

piece, but now I am not sure I was right,' he said.

 

'Oliver Twist was obviously going to be shown around the end of

the year and I myself did not find out at what time Wives and

Daughters would be shown until quite recently, so it is hard to

know which side is really to blame. They are all the same kind

of people, anyway, these executives. Quite often they have

worked for the BBC themselves in the past.'

 

Bleasdale is still defending his own team, however. 'I am not

saying that ITV is always as pure as the driven snow,' he said.

'But I do know that at the deadline at the end of '98 we all knew

that Oliver Twist would be going out the last four Sundays before

Christmas.

 

'I am sure Andrew feels the same as me. I am upset because

one of the attractions for me of working with ITV was that I

wanted to try to reach a bigger audience. It is going to bruise

both of us.'

 

BBC insiders claim that ITV deliberately announced its schedule

late and favoured a clash as a way to boost the bonuses they

earn if ITV claims a 39 per cent peak-time market share of the

audience.

 

The audience, cast, crew and writers on the two productions will

all now be the losers, according to Bleasdale.

 

'People have been messed around by this and it is not just the

writers, of course. There are hundreds of people who have been

working on Oliver for a year or more who will be affected. We all

wanted it to be seen by as many as possible - after all, around

£6 million has been invested.'

 

For Davies, the share of the audience tonight should be an

irrelevance. 'I still think this obsession with ratings is juvenile.

Getting good ratings is not one of my highest priorities. What is

more important is doing something that those who do watch can

really enjoy.'

 

This modern battle between popular writers mirrors the

relationship between the two Victorian authors. While Dickens

initially championed Gaskell's work, their styles were compared

and contrasted. Both wrote in serial form and Dickens once said

he felt Gaskell's instalments often ended without a sufficiently

gripping cliff-hanger. She responded by saying she saw that as

far too 'Dickensy' an approach.

 

Like Gaskell and Dickens, Davies and Bleasdale admire each

other's work.

 

'Alan is a great writer and I am fascinated to see what he has

done with Oliver Twist. But his extra writing around the story

sounds like too much hard work.'

 

In fact, both the new small screen treatments take a leisurely

approach to the original text. Whichever channel you watch,

tonight's first episode will be long and the writers have each

added bits of their own. Gaskell died before she had completed

Wives and Daughters and so Davies has worked from the notes

she left. Bleasdale, in turn, has extemporised around the sad

story of Oliver's mother, Agnes, and his father, Edwin.

 

'I was terrified of getting into the big boys' playground with

Dickens,' said Bleasdale. 'But then I thought, well, he was only

24 years old and he was more or less tossing this stuff over his

shoulder as he wrote it to deadline. If he was starting again now

I think this is what he would have done. It has all been done to

help the author I love.'

 

It would be a fitting irony, Bleasdale adds, if the snooker on

BBC2 won the most viewers in the end.

 

Davies is also capable of philosophical detachment. 'This

morning I thought of a better way of looking at it. The fact is the

fuss around these two productions shows a real interest in the

classics, very far from evidence that TV is dumbing down.'

 

The Beeb's bodice-ripper

 

Wives and Daughters

By Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865).

Her last novel, it appeared in instalments in the Cornhill

Magazine. Gaskell died before she finished it.

Adapted by Andrew Davies (pedigree: Vanity Fair, Game On).

Produced by Sue Birtwistle, who also worked with Davies on

Middlemarch and Pride and Prejudice.

Length: Four episodes of an hour and a quarter.

Filmed: Marshfield near Bath, which doubles for Hollingford.

Big names: Francesca Annis, Michael Gambon, Penelope

Wilton, Bill Paterson, Ian Carmichael, Barbara Leigh Hunt, Iain

Glenn

Bright hopes: Tom Hollander, Anthony Howell, Justine Waddell