Pornographer-in-Chief

Like Black Rod and the Poet Laureate, screenwriter Andrew Davies occupies one of the most colourful and arcane offices in public life. He is Pornographer-in-Chief, a title that was first bestowed by the journalist Paul Johnson on the boss of Channel 4, Sir Michael Grade. Davies has assumed the mantle by virtue (or vice) of sexing up cherished texts from the literary canon for the gratification of television producers. His adaptation of War and Peace has taken critical grapeshot for including incestuous romps that do not strictly feature in the novel. Simon Schama, who bashfully admits he has made his way to the end of the book only eight times, claims to have detected no evidence of a sexual relationship between siblings Anatole and Helene.

Davies’s oystery eyes glimmer — but is it with mischief? Or ennui? ‘I think he’s read it eight times and never noticed it. After my first reading, I hadn’t noticed it,’ he says. ‘Tolstoy did put one little scene in where Anatole is kissing Helene’s neck and shoulders, and Pierre (her husband) comes upon them and is alarmed. You think, that’s not your average brother and sister, is it? I felt quite happy in making a bit more of a scene of it. Quite often, sex is the motivating power in 19th-century books, for instance Middlemarch. The writers couldn’t write those scenes in their time but I can in ours.’

Davies, who is 79, says he had been putting off reading War and Peace until the BBC came calling. ‘I was frightened it would be disappointingly dull but I was electrified by how fresh and modern it felt.’ The snowy-haired screenwriter is sitting in the kind of deckchair that film directors used to have their names stencilled on to. We are in his Narnia-like writing den at the top of his Tudorbethan home in Kenilworth: the Davieses bought the house next door and knocked through, so the writer’s commute entails stepping through his bedroom cupboard into the corresponding fixture next door, and from there across a short stretch of floor to his desk.