Pity the lot of the poor souls who adapt novels for the screen

When it comes to adapting the classics, I'd much rather rely on novelists such as David Nicholls to honour the spirit of the original literature

I’m all in favour of readers falling in love with a book, but it makes for a hard time for screenwriters and directors – and this month they have been coming in for stick left, right and centre.

It’s not just in Wolf Hall (candle budget: £20,000), where the director, Peter Kosminsky, has been in trouble for making Tudor England too gloomy and Jane Seymour too pretty. Sam Taylor-Johnson, who directed the film of Fifty Shades of Grey, says that she had “proper on-set barneys” with E L James, the author of the novel, when she tried to make changes to the plot and character development. For instance, by giving it a plot and some character development.

Meanwhile, Sarah Phelps has been working on the television adaptation of J K Rowling’s first novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy, and it doesn’t sound as though it has been a barrel of laughs. “I’ve adapted dead writers which is great because they can’t come and annoy you by email,” said Phelps, “but [Rowling] is used to the process of adaptation….” Rowling says that she is “delighted” with Phelps’s version, which has “a different ending” and adds a “redemptive moment” to make it a bit less relentlessly “grim”. To put this unendurable grimness into some context, Ms Phelps was the screenwriter on more than 50 episodes of EastEnders.

Some of the best contemporary adaptors of novels for the screen are also novelists themselves. Deborah Moggach has adapted several of her own books, as well as writing the screenplay for the 2005, Keira Knightley version of Pride & Prejudice. David Nicholls, as well as turning some of his own novels into films, is the only man I’d ever trust to get his hands on Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

When it comes to adapting the classics, I’d much rather rely on novelists such as Nicholls and Moggach to honour the spirit of the original literature. Leave it to Hollywood, and we’d have happy endings to all of Hardy’s novels – in which Angel Clare hammers on the back wall of the prison to interrupt Tess’s hanging with a vital piece of evidence, scoops her off the scaffold in his manly arms (shaved, oiled and topless) and renews their wedding vows right there, with an orchestra... in snow. Hand it to an EastEnders scriptwriter and we’d have a more realistic update of A Christmas Carol in which Ebenezer Scrooge hides all his money in a Swiss bank account and becomes a donor to the Tory party, therefore getting him off the moral hook of helping Tiny Tim and culminating in a Black & White Christmas ball where the ghosts of all the Christmases agree to appoint Atos to assess the Cratchits for cuts to their disability living allowance....

On the other hand, I’m happy to let any old klutz loose on Fifty Shades and its fifty thousand copycats, as adaptation could only be an improvement. Especially if it makes it shorter.

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