Women In Love: Adapting DH Lawrence's famous novels

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William Ivory William Ivory | 12:03 UK time, Thursday, 24 March 2011

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This is what I call squeaky bum time. A few days to go before transmission of the first instalment of my two-part version of DH Lawrence's Women In Love.

Some press coverage has started to emerge and plenty more will be lined up behind it. Not to mention the opinions of numerous academics and Lawrence experts the world over.

Squeaky bum? This is full on fear.

Rosamund Pike as Gudrun Brangwen in Women In Love

It's always like this as a production nears its airing, but my emotions around Women In Love seem particularly raw.

I think it's partly the time it's taken to write - a tad over six years by my reckoning - and partly the fact that it's my first adaptation, so I feel I need to be nervous for both me and dear old Bertie.

Above all, though, I'm anxious because I'm as proud of this production as I am of anything I've ever written. And I want people to engage with it.

Not because of a terrible and unedifying need for attention either (though clearly that is there) but because I want people to go back to DH Lawrence and read his books again.

And to do that, I need the audience to watch these films and realise that Lawrence is so much more than his popular image, which is of a man who was obsessed with sex and anti-women and... and that's about it really.

Because, the truth is, he's a brilliant writer who tackled many complex issues, who put women at the very core of so much of what he wrote, and who examined sex in detail.

Not because he was Dirty Bertie, as he has been dubbed, but precisely because he wanted to get away from the prurient arched-eyebrow approach to sex and the human body which so characterised (does it still?) the tutting English.

Rachel Stiring as Ursula Brangwen, Rory Kinnear as Rupert Birkin and Joseph Mawle as Gerald Crich

For Lawrence, all life should be an attempt to live outside the mind and the consciousness. He wanted people to find a way to transcend, to be truly free.

He suspected that death and the orgasm were the two occasions when this happened. So, naturally, much of his work focuses in on these two themes.

But it is not the sum total of his output. Far from it. And I hope you'll watch these two films and realise that is true.

One final thing, though. Don't sit there with a tattered copy of The Rainbow or Women In Love in front of you.

Everything which is in the books is in my films. But it's in there differently.

William Ivory is the screenwriter of Women In Love.

Women In Love is on BBC Four at 9pm on Thursday, 24 March. For further programme times, please visit the upcoming episodes page.

Listen to William Ivory discuss adapting Women In Love on Radio 4's Front Row.

Comments made by writers on the BBC TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

The Bible's Buried Secrets

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Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou | 12:42 UK time, Tuesday, 22 March 2011

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I was approached by the BBC's Religion and Ethics department back in 2009. They explained they were looking to work with a specialist on Bible's Buried Secrets, a documentary series about the Bible and archaeology, and that I'd been recommended to them.

Now, I know I'm a bit of a geek, but I'm always amazed at how many of my students say at the end of a lecture they had no idea the Bible was so cool and exciting.

But it really is. And I was so pleased that the BBC thought so too.

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I was also delighted at the prospect of joining the BBC's team of religion presenters.

Over the next few months, we discussed possible topics for each episode.

One of the things we all agreed on was the importance of showing that biblical scholarship often asks very different questions of the Bible than people might expect.

It's not motivated by confessional concerns, but it deals with the Bible as a collection of ancient writings from ancient cultures - much like the Odyssey or the Iliad.

So scholars approach the Bible in ways similar to those they'd use in dealing with any ancient literature: who wrote this and why?

Is it a reliable source of history? If not, why not? How can archaeology be used to piece together a more reliable view of the past?

This is what's so exciting about studying the Bible, and this was one of the things I was keen to show with the topics we selected: David's empire, God's wife, and the Garden of Eden.

I've published work on all three topics, and I regularly lecture on them, so it was then a question of figuring out how to make the scholarship accessible, exciting and visually engaging.

I was brought up in a secular household and I'm not a believer, but I've always been fascinated by ancient religion.

My passion for the Bible springs directly from the fact that it's such a fantastic and diverse collection of texts that can tell us something about the beliefs, concerns and cultures of the people who wrote them.

But that doesn't mean that these people's views are representative of an entire society.

Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou in Tel Es Safi, Israel

In fact, many scholars agree that the Bible was written by small groups of elites, whose views were likely to be very different from the other people in their own societies.

It's this diversity that I enjoy exploring in my research, and this is what I wanted to focus on in the series.

The other thing I wanted each programme to do was highlight the cultural richness of the worlds from which the biblical literature came.

The Bible itself contains many different versions of the past it seeks to describe, and some of these are often the stories that are more commonly overlooked.

So the legitimate nature of the worship of the goddess Asherah was an obvious story to tell in the documentary series, as was the alternative view of the Garden of Eden presented in biblical books beyond Genesis.

Obviously, I know that not everyone will like the series. Some people might find it challenging to their faith or their own understanding of the Bible's cultural legacy.

But I hope that the series will be of interest, especially to those people who might think the Bible is boring or irrelevant. I hope they will watch the series and be intrigued.

Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou is a senior lecturer in the Hebrew Bible and the presenter of Bible's Buried Secrets.

Bible's Buried Secrets is on BBC Two and BBC HD on Tuesdays at 9pm. The series is available in iPlayer until Tuesday, 5 April.

For further programme times, please visit the upcoming episodes page.

For reasons of sensitivity, comments on this blog post will be pre-moderated. What's pre-moderation?

Comments made by writers on the BBC TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

Comic Relief's 24 Hour Panel People: We did it!

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Andy Brereton Andy Brereton | 14:30 UK time, Friday, 18 March 2011

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One of the joys of developing television shows is the freedom to write a stupidly ambitious idea on two sides of A4, safe in the knowledge that it probably won't happen.

However, in this instance, BBC Three and Comic Relief had other ideas and on 2 January 2011 we decided, with less than two months to go, to create the BBC's first ever 24-hour online panel show marathon - and 24 Hour Panel People was born.

David Walliams on Celebrity Juice with Jedward and Keith Lemon.

The next step was relatively straightforward. All we needed to do was bring the biggest comedy talent in the UK to BBC Television Centre on the same day and convince them to perform live to the world, without the protection of being edited.

We'd then build a set that could transform into 20 different sets, show the inner workings of making a TV show, broadcast it on the web, and do all this while still protecting the BBC's reputation - easy.

With Comic Relief at our side, our production team began contacting every production company that owned the most iconic panel and comedy entertainment shows across radio and TV.

From Angst (who make Mock The Week) to Zeppotron (8 Out 10 Cats), they all agreed to help and without their blessing this show would not have got off the ground.

For us, it was important to be as faithful as we could to these iconic shows.

The final piece of the puzzle was to find a comedian who was willing to front the entire 24-hour broadcast and put their comedy name on the line - step forward Mr David Walliams.

It's hard enough preparing for one panel show recording. David had to prepare for 20 or more.

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It's no mean feat having to be as quick-witted as Paul O'Grady in Blankety Blank, as intelligent as Stephen Fry in QI, and then make up hilarious improvised comedy with the original Whose Line Is It Anyway? team, all in quick succession.


But he did it, and remained charming and, more importantly, funny throughout. Well done David.

While the production team were in full flow, the BBC's online team and editorial policy were busy re-writing the rulebook left right and centre. This kind of online event had never been done before by the BBC.

They had their work cut out deciphering how to make the live stream available to as many people across the globe as possible whilst managing the large amounts of viewer interaction through tweets and emails.

And, crucially, what measures could we put in place to have adult content available at two o'clock in the afternoon?

As with everyone on this production, they rose to the challenge and, whatever we asked for, they figured out a way to do it.

And finally, logistics (hurray). There's really not enough time or need to explain the ridiculous logistics of putting on a 24-hour event.

For me, a symbol of just how organic and changeable this event was is best summed up by the board in our production office.

The board in 24 Hour Panel People's production office

The production team would refer to "the board" with the same hushed reverence the Toy Story aliens referred to "the claw". That board would change every minute of every day.

In our office you would constantly hear phrases like, "If Sir David Frost says yes, but Keith Lemon says no, then let's move Jedward to Blankety Blank and then get David Tennant to play Give Us A Clue and see if Stephen Fry will hang around for Just A Minute. Has anyone spoken to Clive Anderson, Christopher Biggins or Jimmy Carr?"

I'll never be really clear whether we controlled the board or the board controlled us - it was one of the most organic shows I've ever been involved in.

Five weeks later, and through everyone's hard work, on 5 March at midday, we began our live 24-hour broadcast on the web.

Throughout the day we broke online records across the board for views and tweets.

We also discovered that the online audience loved seeing the behind the scenes of the production so we tried to adapt accordingly.

I only really got a sense of how the whole machine was working together at around 3am while eating a beef lasagne (I know).

I wandered into the stream team's online area and saw the world reacting to what we were putting out. Who'd have thought Nicholas Parsons would be a global sensation?

Here's David Tennant in one of our backstage pictures - you can see the whole set on BBC Comedy's Flickr account. I hope they convey a little of the sense of the day.

David Tennant backstage at Comic Relief's 24 Hour Panel People

Twenty four hours later, it was over, and this incredible team from the runners, the art department, to the studio crew and our own production team had done it. They were, as my series producer would say, "amaze-bags".

Then, after little sleep, it was straight off to the edit with the unenviable task of trying to make the whole 24-hour experience fit into five half hour shows for BBC Three and a little over a week to do it.

It's almost impossible to sum up an event like this in five half hours of TV because it was so much more.

It was an incredible one-off broadcast that featured so many talented people behind and in front of the camera with several factions of the BBC working together in coffee-fuelled harmony.

If you watch the cut-down shows on BBC One on Friday, in iPlayer then I hope they raise a smile and make you donate.

If you watched all 24 hours, then thank you, you were part of a ridiculous and magnificent thing.

But please remember there was only one real reason we all did this - to raise as much money as possible for Comic Relief.

Update: I have just discovered a note in my back pocket that was handed to me at 3am during the broadcast. It reads, "The marching band cannot return tomorrow but we still have the motorised bed on standby." Brilliant.

Andy Brereton is the executive producer of Comic Relief's 24 Hour Panel People.

Half hour episodes, first shown on BBC Three, are currently available in iPlayer.

Find out how David Walliams got on in part three of Comic Relief on BBC One at 11.05pm on Friday, 18 March.

A compilation of episodes of 24 Hour Panel People is on BBC One on Friday, 25 March.

For further programme times, please visit the upcoming episodes page.

For more information on Comic Relief please visit the BBC's Red Nose Day site.

Comments made by writers on the BBC TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

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