Guest at Kennaway House has also been involved with Bridget Jones’s Diary and Doctor Zhivago.

A scriptwriter who has worked on TV hits such as War and Peace, Pride and Prejudice and House of Cards will be speaking in Sidmouth as part of the Meet The... series.

Andrew Davies will be giving a talk at Kennaway House on Thursday, July 13, from 7.30pm and has promised audiences a truly interesting insight into the creation of his works.

Andrew was born in Cardiff and graduated from the University College London with an English degree in 1957.

As well as teaching in London, at Coventry College and the University of Warwick and having a number of radio and theatre credits, he did not consistently sell full-length TV work until the 1970s.

Andrew had the pleasure of working on BBC’s A Very Peculiar Practice, from 1986 to 1988 - memorable for its one-liners and characters in an all-too-plausible catalogue of higher education mismanagement.

He then moved onto working on the audacious thriller House of Cards and sequels To Play the King and The Final Cut. The popular scriptwriter was then able to join the making of BBC drama Pride and Prejudice in the 1990s.

Andrew has become synonymous with distinctive personal approaches to classic adaptations. His approaches can involve highlighting sexual tensions but he also reshapes or invents scenes where he feels the original novelist was restricted, while honouring the spirit of the original piece.

As well as this, Andrew has also been involved in films such as Bridget Jones’s Diary and Doctor Zhivago, although he prefers working in television.

Selected highlights from his prolific later career demonstrate his impact and include costume dramas such as Moll Flanders, Tipping the Velvet and the confident reworking of Thackeray and Trollope in Vanity Fair and The Way We Live Now.

He also tackled Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils and Take a Girl Like You and wrote a pulsating modern variation on Shakespeare’s Othello and adapted Daniel Deronda and serialised Bleak House into a hugely successful period soap.

His originality and verve produce not simply reinterpretations of literature but truly modern adaptations. Tickets (£12) and include a glass of wine. Doors open at 7pm. Call 01395 515551 to book your place.