Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the writer Andrew Davies. He is the king of television adaptation; Pride and Prejudice, Vanity Fair, Middlemarch and Tipping the Velvet are just a few of the dramas he has brought to our screens.

Until he was 50, he was an English lecturer and wrote in his spare time - it was a sort of mid-life crisis that sent his career soaring. Since then, his signature has been stripping down the classics, sexing them up and serving Austen, Eliot and Dickens to appreciative audiences. The trick is to make sure the stories remain relevant to viewers today - and that, he says, is straightforward because the main motivators remain the same - sex, love, money and power.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Hiawatha Rag by Chris Barber Band Box