the times | Tuesday July 21 2020 2GM 3
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ter. Nair has also taken credit for insist-
ing that characters who would have
spoken in Urdu and Hindustani used
those languages on screen.
A Suitable Boy features an all-Indian
cast led by the newcomer Tanya Man-
iktala, 23, who plays Lata, a free-spirit-
ed student who resists an arranged
marriage. Star names include the Bolly-wood actress Tabu, 49, and the 24-year-
old heartthrob Ishaan Khatter.
Nair has nicknamed it “The Crown in
Brown”.
Seth’s novel about the intertwined
lives of four families in post-independ-
ence 1950s India was first published in
1993, but previous attempts to adapt the
book for television foundered.
The Indian author said that he had
ignored approaches from the BBC and
the production company Lookout
Point for several months as he was
engrossed in writing the long-awaited
sequel. “I just thought it would be one of
those innumerable projects that never
see the light of day. For me, as a writer,
it would simply be time-wasting, dis-
tracting noise,” he told Radio Times.
“Almost 30 years after writing A Suita-
ble Boy, I was now immersed in A Suita-
ble Girl. I was not going to let Boy stran-
gle Girl.”
After reluctantly agreeing to a meet-
ing, he was impressed by the producers’
seriousness and enthusiasm.
“Once I talked to them, I realised that
even without my involvement, they
had in fact lined up lots and lots of
ducks in a row. There were only two or
three ducks missing — the largest miss-
ing duck, of course, was me.”It was filmed on location in villages
and palaces across northern India, at a
reported cost of £15 million. The official
BBC trailer has already been viewed
more than 2.5 million times since its re-
lease last week, attracting praise for its
cinematic production values.
However, several commentators on
the subcontinent have questioned why
the Indian cast speak English with such
contrived Indian accents. Several posts
on YouTube compared their voices to
Apu, the stereotypical Indian shop-
keeper in the US cartoon series The
Simpsons.
Davies was the brains behind Colin
Firth’s wet shirt moment as Mr Darcy in
the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and
Prejudice, and has boasted about insert-
ing a bath scene in every drama he has
written. This would have been a little
racy for Seth’s novel, however. “Did I
put one into A Suitable Boy? Not quite,
no,” he said.
Despite its doorstop size and
600,000-word length, A Suitable Boy
proved a global bestseller, at more than
three million copies.
The first episode will be broadcast at
9pm on BBC One this Sunday. Indian
audiences will be able to stream the
series on Netflix.Ken Bruce, the Radio 2 presenter, has
called for a “cull of managers” at the
BBC, saying that bosses should be
forced to justify their existence to
remain on the payroll.
Bruce, whose mid-morning show is
the most popular programme on Brit-
ish radio, said he loved the national
broadcaster but believed it was over-
managed.
The veteran DJ complained that
licence fee money that should be spent
on programming was wasted on office
bureaucrats and luxuries such as the di-
rector-general’s chauffeur-driven car.
Bruce, 69, said the corporation was a
Maan, played by Ishaan Khatter, and Saeeda Bai, by Tabu, in Andrew Davies’s adaptation; the screenwriter was given free rein by the author, Vikram Seth, belowA Suitable Boy comes of age for TV
Matthew Moore Media Correspondent
TAHA AHMAD/BBC; FRANCESCO GUIDICINI/THE SUNDAY TIMESStretching to nearly 1,400 pages, A Suit-
able Boy is one of the longest novels in
the English language. So it was perhaps
unavoidable that a six-part TV adapta-
tion would require a few tweaks.
Vikram Seth has revealed that he
gave permission for the BBC’s rework-
ing of his sprawling family saga — say-
ing he felt “teflonised” to changes
because so much time had passed.
The script has been written by
Andrew Davies, the period drama spe-
cialist best known for his “sexed up” ad-
aptations of Pride and Prejudice and
War and Peace. Davies, 83, who inserted
a gay love story into his BBC adaptation
of Les Misérables, had free rein to alter
secondary plot lines and characters
providing he retained the “essence” of
the novel, Seth, 68, said.
Not all novelists have been so accom-
modating. JD Salinger refused to let
Hollywood anywhere near The Catcher
in the Rye, claiming his teen angst clas-
sic was “unactable”, while Stephen King
is known to have loathed Stanley
Kubrick’s take on The Shining — “a
Cadillac with no engine in it”, he de-
clared — after the director ignored the
screenplay he had prepared.
Seth, however, was keen for Davies to
pen the screenplay, having enjoyed his
reimaginings of Victor Hugo’s French
revolutionary epic and Leo Tolstoy’s
War and Peace.
The novelist only put his foot down
on matters of historical accuracy, and
says that he is delighted with the Welsh
screenwriter’s innovations.
“If something in the script did not
ring true in the context of early post-
independence India — and how could
Andrew possibly have known every
detail of that? — I pointed it out, and he
took it on board,” he said. “As for plot
cuts and changes: it had been a
long time since I wrote A Suita-
ble Boy, so I was somewhat
teflonised against what hap-
pened to every minor incident
or character.
“I would not compro-
mise with the essence,
the core of the book,
but I was less both-
ered about the
periphery. There
were several oc-
casions where I
thought: ‘That’s
brilliant, An-
drew. It really
works. It may
not be what I
wrote, but it’s
true to the spirit of
the book and the
characters’.”
The television
version cuts out
many of the book’s peri-
pheral figures, though it
still boasts a cast of 110.
On the advice of Mira Nair,
the director, Davies also gave
greater prominence to certain
characters including Mrs
Mahesh Kapoor, the devout
wife of a government minis-Novel approaches
A Very British Coup
Channel 4 made several
changes in its 1988
adaptation of Chris
Mullin’s novel. The book
describes the toppling
of Harry Perkins,
a radical socialist
prime minister. “The
TV people thought I
had allowed Perkins
to cave in and
resign too easily,”
Mullin said.
“The adaptation
shows him
fighting
back.”The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood’s 1985
dystopian novel was set
in the all-white society
of Gilead; the text hints
that black people have
been forcibly resettled
to camps in the
Midwest. This was
deemed unacceptable
for television so the
drama was cast with
several black and Asian
actors. Some
campaigners have
accused producers of
including race without
depicting racism.House of Cards
The original BBC
version of the political
thriller by Michael
Dobbs introduced the
world to the
Machiavellian chief
whip Francis Urquhart.
It also popularised his
catchphrase “You might
very well think that; I
couldn’t possibly
comment”. However,
this line never appeared
in the book; it was
coined by the
screenwriter Andrew
Davies.tion plans to strip free TV licences for
millions of over-75s who are not in re-
ceipt of pension credit. The broadcaster
is also laying off thousands of staff as it
seeks to stem £125 million in corona-
virus-related losses on top of its previ-
ous £800 million-a-year savings target.
Bruce earned £280,000 from the BBC
last year, less than Radio 2 colleagues
including Jeremy Vine (£290,000), ZoeKen Bruce
lamented seeing
the BBC “shooting
itself in the foot”Justify your existence or be culled, Ken Bruce tells BBC bosses
“frustrating place to work” and it some-
times felt there was a department
devoted to keeping creative ideas off
the air.
“I do sometimes think a cull of man-
agers would be no bad thing,” he told
the Radio Moments Conversations pod-
cast, hosted by David Lloyd. “Every so
often they say ‘we are doing that, we are
going to cut the management layers’.
And somehow, even if they do, they
come back within a few years.”
Bruce challenged BBC staff who
were not directly involved in
programme-making to “justify your ex-
istence”.
He said: “Unfortunately, part of our
slice of the licence fee has to pay for thedirector-general’s car, things like that,
and a policy unit. How much does
Radio 2 need a policy unit dealing with
government?”
He added: “The basic thing is the
programmes and once you start forget-
ting about them, you’re in trouble.”
Bruce is Radio 2’s longest-serving DJ,
having hosted the mid-morning slot
since 1992. Last year his show passed
The Zoe Ball Breakfast Show on Radio 2
to become the most listened-to pro-
gramme on British radio, with an aver-
age weekly audience of almost 8.5 mil-
lion, many tuning in for the daily Pop-
Master quiz.
His accusations of BBC profligacy
could prove incendiary, as the corpora-Ball (£370,000) and Steve Wright
(£465,000). Lord Hall of Birkenhead,
the director-general, is entitled to a car
and driver worth £30,000 a year, on top
of his £450,000 annual salary. His suc-
cessor Tim Davie starts in September.
Bruce told the podcast: “It was always
said there was a famous part of the BBC
called the programme prevention de-
partment, which existed purely to stop
you getting your ideas on air. I’m afraid
sometimes it can seem like that at the
BBC. I’m a huge admirer of the organi-
sation. But you can scratch your head
sometimes and see itself shooting itself
in the foot. And you think ‘please,
please don’t do that to an organisation
we all love’.”Matthew Moore