Taking it it

The paradoxical challenge of bringing books to the screen is summed up succinctly by The Imaginarium Studios’ Jonathan Cavendish. “All my career, I have done adaptations like Bridget Jones’s Diary ,” says the producer, “reinventing a very well-known book by totally transforming it but keeping it the same.”

By Michael Pickard

Yet in a world of ‘too much TV,’ when broadcasters look for name recognition to bring eyeballs to a new series, it’s no surprise adaptations remain a key source of small-screen storytelling. And though there are now more sources of inspiration than ever – graphic novels and magazine articles as well as real-life stories –books undoubtedly remain the biggest draw.

“When you read a book that instantly presents itself to you as something that would translate to the screen, it’s just too great a temptation not to do it,” says Claire Mundell, creative director of Synchronicity Films ( The Cry ). “Some books just absolutely get inside your heart and your head, and you feel inspired by them and inspired to tell that story on a different canvas, on a screen, whether it’s the small screen or the big screen.”

With an adaptation of Andrew O’Hagan’s Mayflies in post-production for the BBC, Synchronicity is also dramatising Heather Morris novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz for Sky, while Shankari Chandran’s Song of the Sun God is getting the TV treatment too. “First