This is a revised version of a paper I gave at the Braddon Conference, held at Birkbeck College, London, on Saturday June 13th 2000, four days before the UK broadcast of my television adaptation of “Lady Audley’s Secret”. I have edited it to remove all the libellous bits.
1857. No sooner has beautiful young governess Lucy Graham accepted a proposal of marriage from rich old widower Sir Michael Audley, than it is made clear that she has a Secret.
Shortly after the wedding, Sir Michael’s nephew Robert Audley brings his old friend George Talboys down for a visit. George is in a bad way, having recently returned from the Australian gold fields to learn that his wife Helen died in his absence.
Down at Audley Court, Lucy avoids actually meeting George. He does, however, see a recent portrait of her… and is struck dumb. Shortly afterwards, he mysteriously disappears. And as Robert sets about trying to find him, he begins to suspect that Lucy is, in fact, his friend’s supposedly-dead wife… and that she disposed of George to protect her bigamous marriage.
Art and opportunism
Most television costume dramas — like the recent BBC Wives and Daughters or the current Channel 4 Anna Karenina — are aimed at the toffs. I was actually rather pleased that Lady Audley’s Secret wound up on commercial television, largely ignored by the more up-market Radio Times, but well previewed in TV Now and Hello magazine. It occurs to me that my experience of adapting Lady Audley for a determinedly popular medium may help cast some light upon the constraints that the marketplace imposes — and point to the combination of conviction and opportunism that, I suspect, defines any writer, or adapter, of popular fiction.
At the time I first read Lady Audley’s Secret, I was the industry’s second-worst nightmare, an unknown writer, furiously generating the industry’s absolute-worst nightmare: speculative — that is to say, uncommissioned — scripts. The trouble with spec scripts is that no-one knows what to do with them. There are untold thousands of them floating around the industry. They have their uses: you can block drafts with them or use them to prop up the legs of rocky tables. The trouble is: to sustain the fiction of an open industry, they have to be read first.
In response to this dreadful fact, the industry has evolved a specific sub-species, often called “development executives” — mostly young women — whose principal function is to say “no” politely and prevent people like me from pestering the middle-aged white males who actually run the industry. (When people proclaim the great strides made by women in the media, what they actually mean is that they are clustered like starlings beneath this glass ceiling.) My problem — as an unknown writer desperately hawking spec scripts round town — was how to get past this structural barrier.
At the time, I was consciously on the look-out for Victorian novels that might be adapted for film or television. I had been touting a version of Wuthering Heights that had aroused a flicker of interest. The problem was that the Brontës were on every film and TV company’s hit list and that, in the end, given a choice between me and a known writer, they would go with track record.
The fundamental problem was that proposed adaptations make doubly dangerous spec scripts. Even if the script is so good that the development executives can’t actually say no, the chances are that the book is currently in development somewhere. For example, early in 1995 I did a preliminary break-down of Anne Brontë’s novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. A month or so later I submitted Lady Audley to the BBC and got a meeting. The first thing I saw on the executive’s desk was… a completed script of The Tenant. And they passed on Lady Audley’s Secret!
When I came across it, back in about 1990, Lady Audley’s Secret looked like the mother lode: a forgotten classic. No-one had ever heard of it. Or if they had, it was as a tired old melodrama, creaking its way round provincial theatres. For purely opportunistic, strategic reasons, I thought I might be on to a winner: an adaptation of a period classic so obscure as to leave an open field…
In my own defence, however, it wasn’t pure opportunism: Lady Audley’s Secret was my sort of book.
I have extreme difficulty in reading authors other than the mid-Victorian usual suspects: Trollope, the Brontës, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins and Mary Braddon. The world they describe is one that I recognise, driven by economics and class. In the end, they don’t question the structural underpinnings — apart from Emily Brontë, none of them ever fumble their way to the logical conclusion that follows from the questions they raise about, for example, marriage. But they know something is wrong and they pull fretfully at the loose ends of the social fabric…
Surely one important characteristic of “sensation” novels is that they are the work of angry writers. I am constantly surprised by the professed addiction of members of the Conservative Party to Trollope — reportedly the favourite novelist of former prime minister John Major. Trollope, who often uses sensational elements, is not so much angry as incandescent about a society that he perceives as rotten to the core. The Palliser novels are a disgruntled meditation upon prostitution — of men and women. In a world entirely dominated by money, what value do you set on the individual? The Way We Live Now revolves around an unscrupulous foreign fraudster pimping his daughter to a dissolute British aristocracy: his money in return for the gloss of respectability.
Mary Braddon — caught in a socially very compromised position, living with a man to whom she was not married and whose first wife was confined in a lunatic asylum — finds herself caught between a potentially explosive resentment against the world and a very conservative desire not to offend. Lady Audley’s Secret starts conservatively — with a proposal of marriage — and ends conservatively and in accordance with Oscar Wilde’s definition of fiction: the good (Robert Audley and George Talboys) end well and the bad (Lucy Graham) badly. In between, all hell breaks loose.
Lady Audley’s Secret is about a woman who is born into poverty. Not unreasonably, she doesn’t like this. Living in a world made by and for men, where women are mainly valued for their decorative and procreative qualities, she takes advantage of her beauty and marries George Talboys for his money. When, after his father cuts him off, he fails to come up with the goods, she gives him a justifiably hard time.
Like most men, George doesn’t like being made to look bad. So he takes advantage of the freedom of movement he enjoys and does a runner. His deserted wife is left with a child on her hands, to survive as best she can. When opportunity knocks, she grasps it with both hands. And, having clawed her way to the position of comfort to which she has always aspired, she defends it instinctively and by any means necessary.
Lady Audley’s Secret is rooted in economics. Lucy doesn’t have money. So she sets about getting and holding it. The only way open to her is marriage. Everything else follows from that. In the resulting mayhem, Braddon raises — and then, it has to be acknowledged, rigorously ducks — a whole series of questions about gender and class.
Most of the time I was working on Lady Audley’s Secret, I was living in some degree of poverty. I could identify with Lucy’s desire to live in comfort. This was my sort of book.
Fidelity
Any adaptation is bound to raise hackles among those who know and love the book. The problem is that the perfect adaptation plays in each reader’s head every time he or she reads it.
The dominant style of television period adaptations leans towards a very selective “fidelity” — towards the plot and visual appearance of the original. The adaptation is expected to cover most, if not all, of the book’s major plot points. It must recreate the period with pinpoint accuracy and the cast should be chosen, costumed and made up to resemble, as closely as possible, the descriptions of the characters in the book. Endless shots of carriages rolling up at the gates of vast stately homes are considered de rigueur.
What we get, as a result, is a series of heritage re-creations of classics. Everything on the “fidelity” hit list is there — with the additional option of explicit sex. But somehow, everything that actually makes these novels great has been bled out of them. They have been, as the jargon has it, thoroughly “recuperated”.
And anyway, in the case of Lady Audley’s Secret, what is one to be faithful to? This is a sloppy, repetitive, ludicrously over-determined novel whose author was trying to eat her cake and have it. To simplify grossly, I would speculate that Braddon was confused and angry about her compromised, illegitimate position within Victorian society, but lacked the courage — or recklessness — to brazen it out. Hence, in particular, the uncomfortable dissonance in the novel between her apparent sympathy with Lucy’s predicament, on the one hand, and her increasingly strident moral fulminations against her heroine, on the other.
But it is one of those novels that give the game away. What particularly attracted me were its subversive central character who belies her stereotyped delicacy and beauty by desperately bludgeoning and burning her way through the minor aristocracy; and its extraordinarily modern recognition of detection as an erotic obsession — a process of symbolic penetration and occupation — by a hero who turns out to be a monster.
I set out to be faithful to what I saw as the most interesting and important of Braddon’s contradictory intentions. Compared with trying to preserve this thematic core, I was prepared to throw anything else out of the window.
Starting the script
Digging around on my hard disk, I find that my first treatment for Lady Audley’s Secret dates from April 1991. I pushed that around a bit, then decided to go for a full script, a first draft of which I finished in late 1993. This followed the novel fairly closely. Basically, I nipped, tucked and simplified. It wasn’t very good.
The first major innovation was forced by an old friend: Chris Bidmead, a former Dr Who scriptwriter and editor. One day I recited the story to him:
“So hang on,” he asked, halfway through, “what actually happened to George?”
“He went down the well.”
“Do we see that? We have to, you know…”
I wasn’t convinced at first. But Bidmead was insistent: we have to see Lucy whack George. Visually, it’s too good to pass up and it raises the ante. George apparently dead is infinitely stronger than George merely missing.
This may seem crude; but, compared with the novel, film is a crude medium. A script can sustain only one major narrative or thematic thread, to which a limited number of subplots must be subsidiary. As a literary form, the script is terrifyingly unforgiving. As fellow-admirers of Trollope will surely concede, a novel can survive entire dud chapters. A script can lose it in a couple of lines.
Teresa Grimes
By 1996, I was several further drafts down the line. My agent at that time, Elizabeth Dench, introduced me to another of her clients, a director called Teresa Grimes who had made a very successful Channel 4 documentary series on twentieth century woman painters and an award-winning short film, Ebb Tide. We talked about several projects and settled on Lady Audley’s Secret.
The main idea that emerged from our conversations was that we should try to develop and market this, not as period drama, but as a thriller. In particular, we would come clean at the outset about the fact that Lucy, now married to Sir Michael Audley, is George’s mislaid wife. By foregrounding Lucy’s hidden past, we would emphasise the fact that she is our central character. The audience would (hopefully) be persuaded to identify with her, to experience her dilemma — and her fear. This would generate suspense and lay the foundation for the big pay-off: the fact that her secret is not that she is a bigamist and a murderer — but that she has lived her entire life in terror of hereditary insanity.
By the summer of 1997, I had been round the block with a revised script. I had got a few good meetings out of it; but no takers.
An Irish producer friend told me that the script was eminently “makeable” — but only without Teresa. An entirely unknown writer and a director with only (!) a documentary series and a short to her name were one strike too many against the project. This brutal reality was underlined when another company simply refused to read any script with a director (apart, obviously, from Quentin Tarantino) attached.
Very generously, Teresa offered to stand aside if it would improve the chances of getting the project made. I was very unhappy about this; but from a purely practical point of view, I knew it made sense. I ducked making a decision for a while. In the end, however, it came down to economics: I’d been knocking round the industry for ten years with only a couple of small development deals to show for it. I desperately needed something to “go”. I took Teresa up on her offer.
Makeability
And at this point something magical happened to the script: it suddenly become “makeable”.
Writing for film or television has little to do with art, integrity, morality — or, indeed, with anything half decent. It is all down to “makeability”. I suppose this can be defined as the ability of a script to attract finance. Among other things, this means that, for television:
- it must fit into an existing category (in this case, costume drama) and into a “slot” in the schedules;
- it must have the potential to attract the number of viewers demanded by sponsors and advertisers (remember: in commercial television, programmes are just the filling between the important things — the ads);
- it must convince producers that it is going to make them a fast buck.
It must, in other words, match the market. Critical reactions only matter insofar as they affect audience. Bums on seats — sustained past the first advertising break — are what count.
Warner Sisters
I had first sent an early draft of the script to Warner Sisters as long ago as July 1994. I got a meeting with Anne-Marie Casey, who said she had enjoyed it, but had problems with the bleakness of the ending and with Lucy’s long confession scene.
Teresa and I resubmitted the revised version to Warner Sisters around May 1997. Several months later, after Teresa’s withdrawal, I had heard nothing. When I phoned them, it turned out that they had lost the script. I sent them another copy and they came back very quickly.
I had scripted Lady Audley’s Secret as 2-hour a feature film. Anne-Marie, however, saw ITV as the natural home for the project. She proposed pitching it to the Network Centre (the organisation that commissioned programmes to be broadcast over the national Independent Television network) as a single, 2-hour drama.
Once advertising breaks and start and end credits have been taken out, an ITV two hours came down to 100 minutes at a standard industry calculation of a minute per A4 page. (This is astonishingly accurate, which is why the industry continues to insist upon a rigid format, with a non-proportional “typewriter” font.) So the first thing I had to do was start chopping.
Initially, Warner Sisters’ main problem was that, by coming clean about Lucy’s identity early on, I had lost the “whodunit” element. They therefore proposed reverting to the novel’s original structure. We would defer confirmation that Lucy was George’s wife until she is forced to confess; and we wouldn’t see George go down the well — he simply goes missing. I argued successfully against these changes. And, rather to my surprise, Warner Sisters were happy to hang on to the economic underpinning and the gender politics.
Sex
One thing I was asked to deliver, however, was the “sexiness” that ITV would be looking for. This didn’t necessarily mean that Robert had to sleep with Lucy — a decision we agreed to defer. But since the film was intended to go out after the 9pm “watershed”, an intensification of the erotic tension between Robert and Lucy was required.
Should he actually go to bed with her? I always felt not. Lucy’s love for Sir Michael may be cupboard love, but it none the less sincere for that; and she is clever enough to realise that the fantasy of sleeping with her is a more powerful lever on Robert than the fulfilment of that wish. The recognition that Lucy’s marriage to Sir Michael is a good one did, however, inevitably lead to the likelihood that she would produce an heir — a prospect that Robert would fear and resent as damaging to his prospects. I played up this angle and added a scene (not in the novel) in which Sir Michael and Robert discuss his inheritance.
To compensate for Robert and Lucy’s admirable self-restraint, we tried out a scene in which two minor characters, Luke and Phoebe, have steamy sex, but dropped it. Later on, we tried Lucy luring Robert into bed in a last desperate attempt to get him off the scent — not with any great conviction, but simply because we felt that we had at least to try it on for size. It didn’t fit and we dropped it at once.
Duffield
Our real problem, however, was the first segment of the script, down to the first advertising break.
The overwhelming terror, when it comes to commercial television drama, is that as soon as the ads kick in, people will start zapping — and they won’t zap back! So we had to come up with a cliff-hanger that would encourage people to stay with us. We agreed, quite early on, that this should be the moment when the lightning flashes on George’s face, staring in sick horror at Lucy’s portrait.
The absolute maximum length of an ITV first act is 25 minutes. We had a lot to get through: Lucy’s marriage; Robert’s infatuation with her; George’s return; her visit to Southampton; the apparent death of George’s lost wife; his reaction and subsequent visit to Audley Court; Lucy’s evasive action; and George and Robert’s fatal penetration of her apartment…
In order to simplify Robert and George’s back story, we had them meet for the first time in Australia. From Lucy accepting Sir Michael’s proposal, we would cut to Robert, in the gold fields with his new friend George, dismayed by a letter announcing his uncle’s marriage to a mere governess. They decide to cash in and head back to England. Cut to Robert rolling up at Audley Court, where he announces that he’s taken the liberty of inviting his new chum George Talboys down. Insert Lucy looking queasy…
Warner Sisters certainly couldn’t afford to fly everyone out to Australia. Worse, they couldn’t even afford to trot out and attempt to make a Welsh quarry look like Australia. So in the next draft, we cut from Lucy accepting Sir Michael’s proposal to Robert and George swaggering into a London banking hall. They barge past an astonished attendant — don’t forget the attendant — and empty a bagful of banknotes on to the counter. Cut to Robert and George swaggering out of the bank and going their temporary separate ways — George to find his mislaid wife, Robert to check out his new aunt.
That worked. Warner Sisters organised the locations… and then, ten days before shooting, the banking hall became unavailable. There was a lot of frantic scrambling around, but they couldn’t find a suitable replacement. So I had to come up with one scene outside what would pass for a bank. Robert and George emerge, the latter now stuffing banknotes into his pocket…
But (and this is the bit I love) an actor had already been cast as the attendant inside the bank. And he had a line: “Why, Mr Audley!” The contract had been signed. So this actor now becomes a pedestrian, the mysterious Duffield, absent from the novel, who collides with the lads on the bank steps and recognises Robert, thus helpfully identifying him for the audience.
So, curiously enough, we’re back where Robert and George meet up in the novel: outside a bank. But, along the way, we’ve acquired this mysterious pedestrian whose only function is to get in the way…
Reality
By mid July, we had gone through some 15 redrafts at Warner Sisters. The major structural issues had been sorted out. The total budget was a little over £1.5m — very tight for 100 minutes of period drama. (you’ll see the joins and some very cheap, inappropriate library footage!).
At this stage, the pressures on the script were mainly financial. I was having to cut scenes that we simply couldn’t afford. These included a number of transitions — for example, scenes in railway stations — that clarified the characters’ movements. We lost a ball scene in which Lucy encounters local resentment of a mere governess made good. And I had to cut back the Christmas house party at which Sir Harry Towers proposes to Alicia. The snow was the first thing to go; then we pruned back the entertainments from hunting (far too troublesome and expensive) to archery — and finally, when this also proved too expensive, to mere interiors.
There was also a problem with casting — one that provoked the wrath of many Braddon fans.
The script always specified that Lucy should look as in the novel (“Her face, framed by a mass of golden curls, has the porcelain perfection of a doll’s”). Neve McIntosh was one of a number of actesses who were tested. I wasn’t involved, but apparently it came down to a choice. They could cast one of the candidates who resembled Braddon’s Lucy but who simpered like the standard-issue British heritage TV heroine. Or they could go with Neve, dark and distinctly un-doll like, but who gave the most impressive reading.
Finally…
…a member of the Braddon internet list who watched the American broadcast suggested that Mrs Braddon would not have approved. It’s a question I often asked myself. I see adaptations as acts of literary criticism rather than literal transpositions. Perhaps Mrs Braddon would have been secretly pleased that the adaptation tries to bring to the surface themes that she felt obliged, for the sake of decency and discretion, to leave buried in the text. Perhaps she would have been embarrassed at seeing the game given away.
A hack writer can be defined as any writer who doesn’t enjoy a private income. In the end, the only thing that really counted was getting enough people to watch Lady Audley’s Secret — and stick with it through the advertisements. I think Mrs Braddon could have got her head round that.
Donald Hounam 