Andrew Davies admits to drawing on ‘stimulating’ Made in Chelsea for Jane Austen adaptation

Screenwriter points to parallels between two worlds while academic says some of author’s characters ‘would make perfect reality show contestants’

If Jane Austen’s novels run on closed social worlds, courtship rituals, status anxiety, gossip and relentless scrutiny of who’s coupling with who, it follows that the obvious contemporary equivalent would be reality television.

That’s according to Andrew Davies, the writer who has spent decades modernising British period dramas.