 When Fay Weldon dramatised Pride and Prejudice for the BBC in 1980, she was
best known as a feminist novelist. But she was also already a TV veteran with
over 30 drama scripts to her name, including the very first episode of the
landmark series Upstairs, Downstairs (ITV, 1971-75), which won her a Writers
Guild award. She would continue to write for the series throughout the 1970s and
contribute to many others, while becoming a well-known face and voice on the
BBC. By 1980, Weldon had become famous enough to be the subject of a South Bank
Show ('Fay Weldon: Writing Woman's Life', ITV, tx. 24/2/1980).
Her comparatively unconventional background had already set the scene for her
life. Born Franklin Birkinshaw on 22 September 1931 in Worcestershire to a
literary family, she spent her childhood in Auckland, New Zealand, returning to
England in her early teens, following her parents' divorce. She was already a
single mother when she married her first, much older husband. The marriage
didn't last, and to support herself and her son she worked as an advertising
copy writer, which included TV commercials such as the famous 'Go to work on an
egg' campaign. She remarried and began writing for radio and television in the
1960s, while bringing up her new family, contributing scripts to series such as
Armchair Theatre (ITV, 1956-74), Plays of Married Life (ITV, 1966) and The
Wednesday Play (BBC, 1964-70). Alongside her novel writing, she continued to be
a prolific scriptwriter throughout the 1980s, usually writing from the female
viewpoint; another of her notable screenplays was the true story of a 15
year-old girl's life imprisonment, Life for Christine (ITV, tx. 2/12/1980).
Always witty, provocative and mischievous, she reinvented herself in late
middle-age as a glamorous blonde - and also seemed to overhaul some of her
thinking on gender issues, enraging many feminists by 'changing sides' and
championing men.
In 1986, her ninth novel - and one of her most popular - was made into a TV
series, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (BBC), although Weldon didn't write
the scripts herself, that task falling to Ted Whitehead. The drama was acclaimed
for its brilliance and outrageousness, especially its acidic commentary on
sexual politics - abandoned ugly wife Ruth wreaks a terrible revenge upon her
erring husband and his beautiful novelist mistress. It was an ironic and very
modern fairy tale. The four-part Heart of the Country (BBC, 1987) was based on
her own experience of life in the country (she had moved to Somerset) as being
inconvenient, a place with no jobs and no husbands. Her heroine, Nathalie (Susan
Penhaligon), a devoted wife and mother of two, bred, said the critic Amy Taubin
"for dependence and domesticity", is abandoned by her husband and left with
months of unpaid taxes, mortgage, school fees and grocery bills. She finds that
in order to survive in her new circumstances she must either live off the state
or live off men. It was Weldon's first original TV serial.
She-Devil (US, 1989) was a Hollywood feature film version of Weldon's novel,
again scripted by another, starring Meryl Streep and Roseanne Barr. In 1992
Weldon turned her hand to a six-part supernatural drama, Growing Rich (ITV), and
tackled science fiction with The Cloning of Joanna May (BBC, 1992). Big Women
(Channel 4, 1998) satirised the feminist publishing house Virago, and the
feature film Puffball (UK/Canada, d. Nicolas Roeg, 2006) was another
supernatural tale, involving rural witchcraft, scripted by Weldon and her son
Dan.
Although Weldon threatened at the end of the 1990s to write a contemporary
version of Pride and Prejudice, in which the Bennet sisters became the
unemployed Bennet brothers, sponging off their middle-class parents in south
London, the series has yet to appear in production. Now living with her third
husband in Dorset and working as a professor of creative writing at Brunel
University, Weldon continues to appear occasionally in the media, most recently
in 2006 to announce a belief in God after a lifetime's atheism.
Janet Moat
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FILM & TV CREDITS
