It can be hard to make a living as a novelist, even a successful novelist, without independent means or an international bestseller under your belt. Many writers dream of finding a powerful champion who will want to take their story to the screen. For James Hawes that dream has come true.
Andrew Davies, the most influential creative force in British television drama, adaptor of some of the biggest critical and ratings hits of recent years, including the award-winning serialisations of Bleak House and Pride and Prejudice, has decided to bring Hawes's latest novel to television. Davies's decision will transform the fortunes of the 47-year-old author who, since his 1996 debut novel, A White Merc with Fins, has been hailed as a comic genius in France but has yet to find real fame in Britain.
The novel that gripped Davies's imagination is Speak for England, a satire published in 2005. It tells of a disappointed middle-aged hero, Brian Marley, who is a competitor in a reality TV show and accidentally discovers a tiny community still run on the traditional British values of fair play and cold showers. Although the book earned good reviews, it is the kind of risky, contemporary story that BBC commissioning editors would not have seen as a priority without Davies's involvement.
'We presented it to the BBC as a fait accompli really,' said Davies, who is currently putting the finishing touches to his adaptation of Little Dorrit. 'James's book is outrageous and yet has this quiet, sweet, little heart. I think too many modern writers are too humble when they take their work to television people, and that doesn't really work as a strategy. At least I get listened to at the moment and I am not scared of any of them.'
Speak for England will be Davies's next writing project. He plans to start work in October and is eager to give Hawes the profile in this country that he believes he deserves. 'After discovering his work I read every book by him I could find and I thought how very funny they were,' he said. 'It is time for a James Hawes revival.'
Davies, 71, is well known for cavalierly adding to and cutting the texts he works on and, true to form, he plans to take liberties with Speak For England. But this time, as he is dealing with a living author, he also expects some involvement from Hawes himself.
'I don't expect I will be that reverent. I am not usually,' he said. 'And there is one section which will have to be updated, for a start. There are two politicians from Britain who appear on the island seeking publicity and who are clearly based on Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson. I will have fun altering them. It will have to be changed to a more reluctant Gordon Brown figure and a Scottish henchman of some sort.'
Hawes is less sure about the contribution he can make to the screenplay. The writer readily admitted to having already been involved in two critically unsuccessful adaptations of a couple of his earlier books, first Rancid Aluminium, a thriller published in 1997 and adapted as a film in 2000, and then 2000's novel Dead Long Enough, which became a film five years later.
'I have to take all the blame for at least one of these bad versions of my books,' he said. 'I adapted Rancid Aluminium myself and it was a terrible screenplay.'
Hawes and Davies first met at a literary festival and have since become good friends, but the decision to adapt Speak For England is also the result of the final wishes of another powerful creative force in television.
Harry Thompson, the comedy producer, biographer and acclaimed novelist, who died aged 45 two years ago, is believed to have pushed for the project while he was being treated in hospital.
'Harry did not know me and I think his own novel, This Thing of Darkness, is really good, so, if he actually did ask for this drama of my book to be made as a kind of a legacy, which is what I have been told, then it is a most fantastic thing,' Hawes said.
Hawes is adjusting to his growing fame in France, where he has been hailed several times as the new Evelyn Waugh and where he was recently profiled in Le Monde. He is regularly invited to speak at literary festivals there, appearing recently alongside Martin Amis.
And here's the plot ...
As a last-ditch attempt to get his life back on track, Brian, an impoverished and unlovely middle-aged man with a difficult divorce behind him, opts to compete in a TV reality show called Brit Pluck, Green Hell, Two Million.
The TV show, which boasts a £2m cash prize, is a survivalist desert island challenge that has been deliberately designed for 'normal people'. It is also a device deliberately designed by Hawes to allow his depressed hero to stumble across a forgotten society which is still adhering to 1950s scouting values.
Still a fan of the Beano and the Eagle annuals of his early years, Brian is utterly thrilled, and even more so when he is ravished by the community's jolly-hockey-sticks-style blonde beauty.
The novel starts out as part Lord of the Flies, part Lost and part I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!, but then develops into a trenchant political satire.
