Andrew Davies is an incredibly prolific award-winning writer and adapter. He began his career in 1960 writing radio plays, moving into television, stage plays, children’s books, novels, and films. He combined writing with his work as a teacher, then university lecturer, until the age of 50. Both professions inform some of his writing, such as his highly autobiographical Bavarian Night (British Broadcasting Corporation [BBC] Play for Today), which deals with a parent-teacher association evening, and the hugely successful series A Very Peculiar Practice, about general practitioners on a university campus.

Davies has long been recognized as writing good roles for women. He created the character Steph Smith as a vehicle for his “early feminist plays” for radio. Steph was a factory worker aspiring to the life of the sales representative. Davies’s first play for television, Who’s Going to Take Me On? (on Wednesday Play) also featured Steph.

The mainstay of his television work has been for the BBC. Initially, he felt himself in danger of being regarded solely as a writer of BBC naturalistic material and turned to nonnaturalistic writing, such as Fearless Frank Harris, in the early 1970s. His other original television work includes A Very Polish Practice, a one-off sequel on his series, and the pilot for the London Weekend Television series Anna Lee.

Davies is also well known for a great many adaptations and dramatizations that have won him a string of awards. Following dramatizations of R.F. Delderfield’s To Serve Them All My Days and Diana, he has adapted a host of very high-profile dramas for the BBC. After the success of dramatizations of Michael Dobbs’s House of Cards and its sequel, To Play the King (for which he was accused of a left-wing bias), he was commissioned for the much-heralded, expensive and extensive version of George Elliot’s Middlemarch, the BBC’s most costly drama serial to that date. Middlemarch was praised in the trade press as a fast-moving, faithful adaptation of the original.

Having suggested that adapting Jane Austen would be a thankless task since so many viewers know her books word for word, Davies dramatized Pride and Prejudice. This BBC serial was another great popular and critical success despite the fact that it was preceded by strong reactions from tabloid newspapers over the possibility that it might feature nudity.

Davies enjoys adapting other authors’ work, grateful for the existing plot in which to exercise his own humor and explore his preoccupations. There are also those originals he admires to the extent that he wishes solely to do them justice. In this category, he cites Anglo-Saxon Attitudes and The Old Devils. He was involved in a very public struggle to get screen time for Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, attacking ITV’s “flexipool” (or “indecision pool”) in the process. It was then commissioned on the back of discussions regarding “quality.”

As well as writing numerous children’s books, Davies is also an award-winning writer of children’s television. He wrote two original series of Marmalade Atkins for Thames TV and dramatized Alfonso Bonzo as a six-part series from his own children’s novel. he has also written feature film screenplays, including Circle of Friends and Bridget Jones’s Diary.