This is about Andrew Davies, screenwriter for Tipping the Velvet (from today's Times).
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-523-1715040,00.htmlTV’s master of bawd draws line at gay sex
Richard Brooks, Arts Editor
HE is known for “sexing up” literary classics such as Vanity Fair and Moll Flanders with bodice-ripping scenes that have verged on the gratuitous. But now Andrew Davies has balked at the idea of portraying gay sex for his latest screenplay.
The writer has omitted homosexual scenes from an adaptation of The Line of Beauty, last year’s Booker prize-winning novel, which follows the fortunes of a gay Tory in the 1980s.
He was put off by a combination of personal distaste and a belief that, despite increasingly liberal attitudes to sex, the public still has a limited appetite for watching men in bed together.
Davies has dodged the challenge by simply writing the instruction “they make love” in the script.
“The gay sex makes me rather queasy,” said Davies, who also adapted Pride and Prejudice for television. “I suspect the television audience also finds it awkward. Anyway, I’m more interested in the emotions of the characters than the sex act. So I’d prefer more soft focus with the camera on the eyes rather than other more intimate parts.”
Davies’s stance on homosexuality has surprised the BBC. The corporation commissioned Davies in part because of his willingness to portray bedroom scenes and to make explicit sex scenes where in the original book there might be only a subtle hint.
Kate Lewis, the drama’s producer, said: “Andrew is, frankly, coy about gay sex.”
The BBC wants its new drama to be erotic and has asked Saul Dibb, the director, to fill in where Davies, 68, has held back. “I know Saul thinks the scenes could be more explicit,” said Davies, adding: “I also don’t think our intention should be to shock.”
In recent years writers have become more willing to portray homosexual sex in dramas such as Queer As Folk, shown on Channel 4 in 1999. In Shameless, a drama currently being shown on the same channel, there is a gay relationship between a shop owner and a younger man.
Lesbian sex has been more widely portrayed. Davies himself relished adapting Tipping the Velvet, a Sapphic costume drama, for the BBC and promoted it as “absolutely filthy” before its broadcast.
Research supports Davies’s view that the viewing public remains cautious about male homosexuality. Opinion polls carried out by the Broadcasting Standards Commission before it was incorporated into Ofcom, the media regulator, in 2003 showed a relaxed attitude to depicting heterosexuality and little disquiet about lesbianism. Disapproval of showing two men in bed was far higher.
The Line of Beauty, written by Alan Hollinghurst, is set in upper-middle-class Tory circles. Its central character, Nick, is a gay man in his early twenties who conducts two affairs, one with a black social worker and the other with a rich Lebanese film maker.
Hollinghurst does not shy away from detailed sex scenes in the book nor from portraying drug taking. The book’s title is a reference both to the shape of the male backside and to lines of cocaine. Filming will begin in September.
Hollinghurst’s first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, which came out in 1988, contained even more graphic gay sex than his latest one. “In The Line of Beauty I quite often ‘closed the bedroom door’ at the end of chapters,” said Hollinghurst.
“Also, since I wrote my first book the issue of gay sex is possibly less interesting and certainly less urgent than then.”
Davies’s work may have suggested him as the ideal candidate to increase the book’s sexual content for the small screen. He concocted lesbian scenes for the adaptation of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders and made the heroine bisexual. In The Way We Live Now, his 2001 adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s novel, Davies invented a sex scene between Felix Carbury and Ruby Ruggles that upset the Trollope Society.
He also introduced smouldering scenes between Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for its screening on the BBC in 1995. He showed Darcy, played by Colin Firth, walking through the grass dripping wet.
Davies offended an audience of gay men at a National Film Theatre discussion when he told them how excited he was about writing the two-woman sex in Tipping the Velvet.
Dibb, who is married with a young child, said that the homosexual scenes were key to The Line of Beauty. “I don’t want the sex to be too polite,” he said. “I also don’t want it to be less open than if it was heterosexual. What’s vital for me is to do it honestly.”
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There's no reason why a straight guy should want to watch a gay sex scene if its not his thing but this sounds nasty and hypocritical. He's very happy to write lesbian sex scenes, Nan being beaten up and almost sexually assaulted, but two men doing naughties in bed makes him queasy?
I liked the quote at the end from Saul Dibb though.
Len
) Out
Although the DVD version was quite different from the book, I preffered the DVD version. But I love the book also. It's just that it's more realistic to see Nan as the more experienced than Flo. Coz in the book, it's Flo who seemed more experienced than Nan. 
