Andrew Davies Used Made in Chelsea to Crack Austen's The Watsons

Andrew Davies watched Made in Chelsea while working on an adaptation of Jane Austen's unfinished novel The Watsons.

He spoke on BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Monday, 14 September 2026. He said he watched every episode of the reality series while preparing the script The Guardian.

Davies called Made in Chelsea "stimulating really for relationships and ideas". He said the young men and women in The Watsons are "very analogous" to Made in Chelsea characters. He described his approach to Austen as "bringing out the sex that's inherent in Austen".

Made in Chelsea is a Channel 4 series about the relationships and rivalries of wealthy young people in west London. Davies has made this kind of comparison before. He described his 2019 adaptation of Sanditon as 'Love Island' in Austen's world.

Davies was behind the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth as Mr Darcy coming out of a lake in a wet shirt. He adapted Emma for television in 1996, Northanger Abbey in 2007, and Sense and Sensibility in 2008 The New York Times. He has spent more than four decades adapting novels including Pride and Prejudice and House of Cards for television.

His memoir, An Unsuitable Boy: A Life in Scripts, was out in the week of 14 September 2026. The interview coincided with its publication.

The exchange also touched on a direct staff link between Austen and structured reality, meaning shows with real people in set-up situations. Dolly Alderton, writer and executive producer of Netflix's forthcoming Pride and Prejudice, began as a story producer on Made in Chelsea. Dr Hannah Wilson described 2026 as a bumper year for Jane Austen and Regency adaptations. Joe Bray is a professor of English at the University of Sheffield and a Jane Austen scholar.

The broader context here is the problem of The Watsons. Begun around 1804 and abandoned, probably on the death of Austen's father, it survives as a fragment of around 17,500 words. It centres on the Watson sisters, their limited options for marriage, and the economy of balls and assembly rooms. For an adapter, the missing ending allows invention. Davies has often worked between fidelity and elaboration, adding continuations, sex, and visual shorthand for private thought.

In my view, the Made in Chelsea reference is less flippant than it sounds. Austen's early fiction watches status, coded speech, courtship as negotiation, and small groups observing each other. Structured reality works in a similar way, with confessionals and edited encounters acting like free indirect discourse, Austen's way of folding a character's thoughts into third-person narration. A writer seeking modern equivalents for dances, calls and dinners could study how young elites perform rivalry and reconciliation on camera. Whether that gives viewers Austen or Austen-inflected melodrama will depend on the commission, the cast, and how much of the fragment survives the edit.