Sanditon review – every period drama box is ticked

It is a truth recently acknowledged that Andrew Davies, grandfather of the sexed-up British period drama, used all the existing material from Jane Austen’s final novel in the first half hour of his adaptation of Sanditon (ITV). This – the one most of us haven’t read, and which has never before been adapted for the screen – is the fragment Austen abandoned unfinished in March 1817. She died four months later, leaving behind 11 chapters of a strange fiction about encroaching modernity in the industrial age and, more specifically, a seaside resort on the Sussex coast.

So for once we slip into the ease and comfort of a Sunday night period drama knowing precisely where the author’s words end and the adaptor’s imagination takes flight. Say 24 minutes in, as our lively and naive heroine Charlotte Heywood (Rose Williams) admires a pair of slippers in a shop window. What happens after this takes place in Davies’s Sanditon, not Austen’s. Really, though, will it come as a surprise to hear that the swoonsome arrival of Sidney Parker (Downton Abbey’s Theo James) storming up the blowy cliffside in a coach bears the naughty mark of Davies? Or the deer-spotting that turns out to be the bounder Sir Edward Denham rutting with a girl of whom he is ruthlessly taking advantage? Or the requisite ball filled with snatched power-play betwixt claps and curtseys? Of course not! Austen switched places with Davies a quarter of a century ago, approximately 44 minutes into episode four of Pride and Prejudice when Colin Firth emerged wet-shirted from a lake. I still remember, a decade later, reading a hilarious Nancy Banks-Smith review of his (also sexy-seasidey) Sense and Sensibility, which observed that Davies’s name was in larger type than Austen’s in the opening credits.

As for his Sanditon, it’s good dirty end-of-the-pier fun but about as enduring as an ice-cream cone. It begins, as all period dramas ought to, with a coach accident. This is what’s required for a group of people who would never otherwise meet to be thrown together. In this case Tom and Mary Parker, tunnel-visioned entrepreneurs determined to transform the sleepy fishing village of Sanditon into a modern seaside resort. And the Heywoods, traditional country folk who make it their principle “never to go more than five miles from home”. Mr Parker shows the Heywoods his plans for the hotel, shops, terraces, cliff walk, and assembly rooms where, the following week, Sir Andrew Davies (sorry, he) will be throwing Sanditon’s first ball. Charlotte wants to go, especially when her father warns her “these seaside resorts can be odd places”. Anyone who knows their way round the topography of an Austen novel will hear the ringing of alarm bells (which she was much more into than wedding bells). It was from Brighton, after all, that Lydia Bennet eloped with George Wickham. “I think you’ll come to regret ever setting foot in Sanditon,” warns Esther Denham, who is so dodgy she’s the only one dressed in black at the ball.

The seaside may be morally lax but that makes it the ideal location for Davies’s thematic concerns: all bonnet-teasing winds, wildly metaphorical seas, and the opportunity for people to get their kit off. Which the men do, racing for the water bare-bummed, free, and terribly English. This is Davies’s 2019 update: to redress the gender balance by undressing the men. The women, meanwhile, retire to bathing machines where they struggle into red caps and bathing smocks that look like they’ve come off the set of The Handmaid’s Tale and then get rolled into the sea. None of this stops Sir Edward Denham purring to Charlotte of “the ocean bearing itself up as you give yourself to it freely” or “the gentle play of the currents over your naked limbs”. This comes in the first half hour, incidentally, but I’d wager not from Austen’s pen.

The rest is exactly as you feel it will be in your waters. Every box is ticked off to great satisfaction or dull predictability depending on where you stand on the period drama tolerance scale. The top-notch ensemble cast including Anne Reid as Lady Denham, the curmudgeonly grande dame presiding over a fortune that her relatives are desperate to get their hands on. The stunning locations, all craggy clifftops and Regency elegance, and similarly chiselled and reserved hero. The problem is, in an era of period dramas with extraordinarily high production values such as The Crown, or exquisitely written and envelope-pushing ones such as Gentleman Jack, Sanditon looks a little tired and conventional. Dare I say it of an Andrew Davies Austen adaptation? It’s not very sexy.

And another thing … stumbled upon Jamie Oliver: The Naked Chef Bares All (C4) and although it was a sycophantic tribute dressed up as a documentary it also made me realise … I kind of love him.