This script has been lightly edited for clarity

 

Jace Lacob: I’m Jace Lacob, and you’re listening to MASTERPIECE Studio.

On a calm, quiet evening, seemingly like any other at Paradise Hall, Squire Allworthy recites his prayers before bed. But tonight is not like any other night at all. Much to his surprise, Allworthy—a widower and benevolent gentleman—discovers an abandoned baby in his bed.

 

CLIP

Squire Allworthy Look Deborah, a gift from God.

Mrs. Deborah Wilkins Oh, good heavens. Give the smelly article to me, and I’ll stick it in a basket and leave it at the church door.

Squire Allworthy In the morning you will find my little one a nurse.

Mrs. Deborah Wilkins You’re never going to keep it, sir! What will your sister say?

 

But Allworthy does keep the child, a decision that has consequences for everyone at Paradise Hall and beyond. This foundling grows up to be none other than our loving protagonist, Tom Jones. 

 

CLIP

Mr. Thwackum Tom pays no attention in class. I do my best sir, but I do prefer to teach boys who want to learn.

Squire Allworthy Bear with Tom Mr. Thwackum. He’s not a bad boy, just—well he’s just a child of nature.

 

Screenwriter Gwyneth Hughes adapted Henry Fielding’s massive, 1,000-page novel into this joyous four-part mini-series. Set in 18th century England, the story follows young and innocent Tom Jones and his neighbor Sophia Western as they navigate the impossibility of being together, despite their true love. 

Hughes joins us to discuss love, serendipity, and how she kept her Tom Jones true to the original while adapting this story for a modern audience. 

 

Jace Lacob: And this week we are joined by Tom Jones screenwriter and executive producer Gwyneth Hughes. Welcome.

Gwyneth Hughes: It’s nice to be here.

Jace Lacob: You are no stranger to period drama. You have screenwriting credits on Vanity Fair, Edwin Drood, Miss Austen Regrets among many others. What was it about Henry Fielding’s novel, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling specifically that gave you the itch to adapt it?

Gwyneth Hughes: Well, to begin with, I wasn’t that keen, actually. I’d never read the book. I mean, confession time, I’d never read it. It’s a thousand pages. I’ve now read it three times. So that’s 3000 pages.

I thought it would be, you know that awful word “romp”, 18th century “romp”. And I didn’t fancy it, but I was nagged and cajoled into reading it, and I very quickly realized that it was just a totally fantastic piece of work. It’s just pure sunshine, you know?

It’s a thousand pages of funny laugh-out-loud, also deeply human, interesting relationships. I just loved it, and I loved Henry Fielding, who’s a big presence in the book. He narrates it. So, it was a no-brainer actually. I just thought, well, yeah.

I’ll tell you the other thing as well. I’ve done a lot of very gloomy, miserable, stories. I mean, I do thrillers and true stories that are always really tragic. And my family has been saying to me for years, Gwyn, when are you going to write something cheerful? When are you going to do a romantic comedy? And now I can say, Hey, hello world, here’s my romantic comedy!

Jace Lacob: I’m glad you said that. Coleridge said that Tom Jones contained one of the “…three most perfect plots ever planned”. And as you say, it is regarded as one of the earliest and, and finest of English novels. You’ve been quoted as referring to it as the mother of all rom coms. What did you mean by that? And can you, can you discuss whether that rubric helped you to set the tone of the adaptation?

Gwyneth Hughes: Yes, it is the mother of all rom coms because it was written a very long time ago before that entire idea existed. And also because it does what all romcoms ever since do, I think, which is to take two lovers who should be together, obviously are in love and should be together from the beginning and cast increasingly terrible obstacles in their way until, spoiler alert, happy ending when the two people who should have always been together finally get together. So it’s a big, fat love story and you know, we don’t do much of that on the telly, do we?

I just thought, well, aren’t we really ready for something like this after two years of pandemic and horror and misery? Couldn’t we all do with some sunshine? And that’s really where it came from, I think, the approach.

I mean, that’s what the book’s like, so it wasn’t a big ask to turn a sunny, brilliant, romantic comedy into a sunny, brilliant, romantic comedy. I’ve been pretty faithful to the book. Your point about the perfect plot is very true. It is a perfect plot. It’s like a machine. But let me say that in those thousand pages, it takes him like about the last 180 pages to unfold the workings of that plot. And I didn’t have 180 pages for the whole show.

So I took a lot out of the plot, a lot of the machinations of it, in order to get to a position where we could unfurl it in the last 10 minutes of the last episode, rather than taking 180 pages, but it’s still the same plot essentially. Still the same story.

Jace Lacob: There is a lot to work with within this novel. You’ve got religious themes. There is the backdrop of the 1745 Jacobite Rising. But this is ultimately a sort of sweet and bawdy and funny and romantic drama that feels both of its time and timeless. But given that you had this sort of thousand page machine, as you say, to work with, how did you determine then how you’re going to structure this and what you are going to omit from the novel in your adaptation?

Gwyneth Hughes: Well, that’s a big question, what to leave out. That’s always the big question. Some of it was easy. So certainly in the middle of Tom Jones, there’s an awful lot of wandering about. And most of that went because wandering about doesn’t really sell a movie story. And it didn’t advance our story which was, how are Tom and Sophia going to get back together?

In some ways it’s never hard to work out what to leave out. What’s hard is to make what’s left really muscular and really work as a sort of story that is unfolding in one forward direction, which is what we want, isn’t it on the telly? So, although the book is a thousand pages long, it is very bouncy, it just bounces along in this cheerful and confident fashion. And I wanted for it to have that flavor of confident forward motion that the book has.

Jace Lacob: And you accomplished it. I mean, it has such momentum. Fielding used a peripheral narrator in the novel who adds additional commentary and critique along the way. In adapting Fielding’s novel, how did you settle upon using the character of Sophia Western as the narrator and when in the process did that idea come to you?

Gwyneth Hughes: Well, the first thing to happen was that as part of squeezing it into four episodes, we junked Fielding as the narrator. There just wasn’t room for that. It was slightly painful, but not very painful, and an early decision to just not go there. And it wasn’t the case that we thought, let’s use Sophia or indeed, let’s use Tom to do it instead. That wasn’t the case at all. There was just something about Sophia’s voice that began to speak to me, and something about her position and role in the story. There’s something about her energy that drives the book, that drives the story forward and I just started to hear her thoughts about it and she was funny and cute.

I didn’t want to do lots of voiceovers. There were loads of discussions about how much commenting she should do. And I didn’t want you to get the sense that Sophia was commenting from a later position of tranquility, from after the story’s over. I think that would’ve been a bit blah. So I just wanted to hear what she had to say and what her desires were for the next moment. So it’s not the kind of voiceover which she’s describing a story that’s long ago. It’s just some of her thoughts about what we are seeing and experiencing right now in the program. And I hope that people will find that rewarding and enriching.

Jace Lacob: I personally love that, and I find that decision to be fascinating because as you say, so many adaptations of this would’ve either used an omniscient, sort of unseen narrator or had Tom narrate his own story. And it becomes a statement in and of itself that Sophia claims this narrator role, and she takes control over her own story, which is intertwined with Tom’s. Ultimately, was that a statement that you were looking to make?

Gwyneth Hughes: Well, it’s interesting I didn’t start out to make that statement, but that statement arrived. It arrived in the person of Sophia. It’s funny, it’s just that funny thing about writing that you set out to do one thing and find you’ve done something else. So I just found her sitting there, running the show. And you know, I said, okay Sophia, you want to do that? That’s fine.

And I think it’s funny, you know, it’s quite a sexy book famously, obviously, but one of the other things I really noticed about Sophia is that she is the only important woman character in the book who never has sex with anybody. She’s a virgin at the beginning. She’s a virgin at the end. And yet it’s her desire, her desire for Tom that motivates the entire story. She’s giving up everything for this boy who is rubbish. I mean, he isn’t ultimately rubbish.

Jace Lacob: He’s lovable rubbish though. He’s lovable rubbish.

Gwyneth Hughes: He’s so lovable, isn’t he? He’s just gorgeous. He’s full of love, full of kindness and virtue, and he wants to do the right thing. He’s just 20 years old and a bit of an idiot, and has been brought up in this innocent way, and yeah, he makes mistakes.

And I’m kind of hoping the audience will go not, Tom’s a bit of a bad lad, but, oh, no, Tom, no, not again, what are you doing? You know nothing about this woman. Obviously it’s flattering to be asked. He is always asked. I mean, he’s pursued by women, as he’s in the book and I always think he’s too much of a gentleman to say no.

Jace Lacob: That’s what gets him into trouble. It’s that politeness. Sophie Wilde plays Sophia Western, who is here, the Black daughter of a freed slave. She travels to England to live with a grandfather she’s never met. How did you look to use Sophia’s race as a means of making her like the foundling Tom, an outsider in this very rigid society?

Gwyneth Hughes: Yes, just that changes a lot from the book. In personality she’s just like Sophia in the book. Sophia in the book is surprisingly, you would go, oh, how amazing that she’s not all pink and fluffy and silly, that she’s this really sort of strong, independent, interesting young woman.

But she is also, in the book, entirely spoiled, privileged, lived a life of absolute luxury and enjoyment and secure in the love of her family. The minute you make her this incomer from Jamaica who arrives as a six-year-old with no idea what she’s coming to, that puts a different cast on it and it does give her an outsider status that is very similar to Tom’s, whereas in the book, they’re not, they’re straightforwardly lower class and upper class.

But I really like that because I think class is more complex than even we in Britain who obsess about it, it is complex and it’s a journey and it’s a journey for both of them. So she is able to throw everything up and walk off into the night with her horse and her maid because she feels invulnerable and indomitable because she’s had this lovely upbringing, but actually she is neither of those things.

I wanted there to be a reason for it to be historically plausible and accurate that someone like Sophia could exist. And I did a lot of research, and it was completely possible for someone like Sophia to have been a Black girl, completely possible.

And so, someone like Sophia absolutely could have existed and I love that that’s her backstory. That combination of entire security in that she’s wealthy, but she wasn’t. She knows she didn’t come from that and that it could be taken away from her at any point.

Jace Lacob: Honour, her lady’s maid, is described as the only person in London who knows what to do with Sophia’s hair. Those seem to be deliberate considerations in order to give Sophia this more lived in sense of reality that indicates and compliments what would have been the experience for Black or mixed-race women of this time.

Gwyneth Hughes: There’s a sequence where Sophia is put into pale makeup because white women whitened their already white faces in those days. So, to be a posh lady who might get married off to an aristocrat, she needs to be whiter, which she rejects, obviously she doesn’t want to do that. She says, I’d rather look like me.

MIDROLL

Jace Lacob: Sophia is virtuous and determined. Tom, on the other hand, has been called an unheroic hero, and even an anti-hero by some literary critics who are perhaps maybe perturbed by his sort of playboy morality. As the central character in your adaptation, how do you view Tom Jones in those terms? Do you see him as an unheroic hero?

Gwyneth Hughes: I think he becomes heroic. Again, he’s very young. The whole story is about some people finding out who they are and growing up in the process. He’s always virtuous. He is a good person. He’s kind, he’s loving. He wants to be nice, he wants to do the right thing. He just gets sidetracked because he’s 20. He is the Tom from the book. Tom in the book is a child of nature. It’s a very 18th century idea. The child of nature, the person who is completely in tune with their own environment, in tune with their own body, loving, virtuous, you know, a nice person. And that’s who Fielding’s Tom is. And it’s also who my Tom is. There’s no cruelty in him. There’s no nastiness at all. He just needs to grow up a bit.

I think people who paint him as an unheroic hero are probably a bit jealous of his success. If you don’t like Tom Jones, you probably just don’t like big, tall, handsome men who get a lot of success with women. And I don’t blame people for not liking him for that. But I don’t care about that, I think he’s absolutely adorable. If he were my grandson, I’d be worried for him, but also very proud of him for his kindness and sweetness. He’s lovely.

Jace Lacob: So, to misuse an aphorism, if you are tired of Tom Jones, you’re tired of life. Is that what you’re saying?

Gwyneth Hughes: Well, as a born Londoner, I would say that. Yeah, absolutely.

Jace Lacob: I think he does perhaps represent a type of heroic figure that maybe is more akin to our modern heroes, these sort of flawed heroes who undergo transformation and emerge stronger than perhaps to classical heroes.

I am curious, Tom Jones has been adapted before, Albert Finney, Nick Henson, Max Beasley have played the titular role. How do you feel Solly McLeod stacks up to his predecessors? Does he embody the sort of easy swagger of Tom while remaining charmingly likable?

Gwyneth Hughes: I think he does all those things. I think he’s also very young. Tom is 20, Solly was 20 at the time. The extreme youth is very, very important to me in how this character is going to develop.

All these old books, all of them, all these classic books, they’re all about somebody very young becoming an adult. And Tom’s behavior really, if he was knocking 30, you’d be going, oh, please stop it. Why are you behaving like this? But because he’s 20 and just straight out in the world and doesn’t know who he is and is vulnerable himself, I don’t feel that way about him.

I have to say that in a thousand pages, he has sex with three women, which I don’t think is that bad. And all of those relationships mean something to him. He really isn’t a sort of lecher. There’s no lechery in him. There’s just the desire for a good time. And very importantly, he’s a gentleman. He doesn’t want to say no to a lady. I think that’s a completely important part of his character.

I think that my Tom, Solly’s Tom, is 100% the Tom from the book. And I’d defend him on that basis. That’s Fielding’s Tom that you’re seeing in all his innocence and sweetness and also warmth and sexiness. That’s Tom Jones.

Jace Lacob: You mentioned that innocence. I do think there is an innocence to Tom and Molly’s dynamic in keeping with the pastoral setting of Somerset. When Tom learns that Molly’s pregnant, he does try to do the right thing.

 

CLIP

Allworthy: Oh Tom. Have I not tried to teach you prudence, restraint, common sense?

Tom: I try every day, to become more like you.

Allworthy: Well then you must learn to become a man and not a boy.

Tom: I will, I promise. Only, forgive me father, please. I cannot bear to disappoint you.

 

Jace Lacob: How conflicted is Tom between his desire to do what Allworthy told him to do and his desire to continue seeing Molly as a 20-year-old?

Gwyneth Hughes: Yeah, this is a difficult one, isn’t it? Tom values duty and honor very highly. Tom is an 18th century boy and his duty to the father who raised him and loves him overcomes everything else for Tom. This is a very difficult one for us to get our heads around as 21st century people. We tend to think, you know, parents, whatever. When Tom says, I have to obey my father, he is my father, my adoptive father, and honor and duty require me to obey him, to an 18th century audience, that’s entirely understandable. Whereas we might be going, Hmm, but you’ve just got this girl pregnant.

It’s a difficult one. It’s one of the moments in the story where you have to put your 18th century hat on and just see that this is a huge deal for him.

Jace Lacob: I feel like he is very torn between personal desire and sort of his duty, as you say, to Allworthy. He’s a ward, he’s in a very precarious position, but he also does have this sense of morality that is in contrast to Blifil, who is sort of almost puritanical and sexless. But Tom wants to do the right thing.

 

CLIP

Tom: I promised my father.

Molly: You promised me!

Tom: Molly, I have nothing. No money, no parents, no standing. All I have that’s worth anything to me is the love of my father.

Molly: Come on, where’s the harm? You can’t get me pregnant twice.

Tom: I’m sorry.

 

Jace Lacob: This is one of the moments I feel in Tom’s journey where he struggles, but ultimately, tries to do the right thing, and it’s that trying that ultimately sets him on a path towards nobility.

Gwyneth Hughes: Yes, I totally agree, and I think that is key to his character. He wants to do the right thing and bit by bit, he works out how to do the right thing, and by the end, he’s someone who does the right thing. And he’s reached the bottom, he comes back and he does what Fielding has had in mind for him all along is he goes from being a boy to a man. And for Fielding, what that means is, give up all this daftness, find the right girl, grab her close, and be happy for the rest of your life with her.

Jace Lacob: I am curious about Blifil. I mean, Blifil is determined to rise above Tom in station and morality, even though he’s spiteful, cruel, and as we see, pretty vindictive. To me, that’s best seen in this first episode when he reveals that it was Black George who gave Tom the gun to shoot Squire Western’s pheasants.

What spurs Blifil to push for his uncle Allworthy to charge Black George? Is it jealousy or are we seeing a sort of deeper character defect here?

Gwyneth Hughes: I think he is profoundly jealous of Tom. He senses that he is not preferred, that he is unloved compared to this idiot bastard interloper. And I think that doesn’t just give rise to jealousy, but it gives rise to a really toxic disappointment with his lot in life, toxically disappointed with his mother who he believes favors Tom over him. She does, you know, she really does favor Tom.

So, I mean, there are situations in which a child can be just un unattractive, unrewarding. People don’t like him. What a terrible, terrible fate. I mean, for Fielding Blifil is just horrible. He’s just a horrible, nasty piece of work. But you don’t want to give an actor just horrible, nasty piece of work. So I wanted to find this vulnerability in Blifil, which is around his sense of being unloved from childhood. He senses that he’s unloved and his mother doesn’t love him as much as she loves Tom. And that’s horrible, isn’t it, for a child? So I think that’s the engine to his awfulness. He’s awful, isn’t he? Poor old Sophia, nobody would want to marry him.

Jace Lacob: Oh God, no. I mean, he’s terrible. Honour warns her mistress about Tom, but Sophia believes Tom sees her for who she is and not the color of her skin or what she represents or indeed her fortune.

 

CLIP

Honour: Well he’s pretty enough, he’s got good teeth I’ll grant you. But miss, I don’t trust him.

Sophia: I found myself telling him all sorts of things I never talk about, never even think about.

Honour: Miss, you ought to know that it’s common knowledge that there’s a village girl with a child by him.

Sophia: Mere gossip from the servants hall. Shame on you, Honour, for repeating it.

Honour: You don’t want to be giving your heart to a bad boy, Miss.

Sophia: He doesn’t seem at all bad to me. He seems kind. And unlike everyone else around here, he doesn’t look at me as though I’m some kind of exotic flower.

 

Jace Lacob: Is that ultimately what seals the deal for Sophia, the way that he sees her as just like him in a way?

Gwyneth Hughes: The thing about Tom that everybody responds to is his authenticity. So she feels that he sees her, that he takes her for what she is, that she doesn’t have to pretend around him or dress up around him.

So yeah, she thinks that he looks into her and sees her, sees past the frippery and the unimportant stuff. And bear in mind that they knew each other as little children, that they have that ‘two kids in a garden’ thing still going on, you know, when they meet again.

Jace Lacob: Unlike in modern rom coms, they don’t flirt vacuously. There isn’t this sort of hate ‘turns to love’, Benedict and Beatrice sort of rapport between them. Their scenes sort of radiate this seriousness of deep affection for each other. How would you define their rapport in this first episode? How did you sort of approach the way that they speak to one another?

Gwyneth Hughes: Oh, good question. How did I do that? So, obviously I wanted to show that they were right from the first off falling in love with each other, that you know that they’re going to fall in love with each other and that they are meant for each other.

My director Georgia Paris is very keen on dance, and we talked a lot about how they dance together. Sometimes they actually dance, but mostly they dance around each other. They don’t flirt in a kind of worldly-wise, Beatrice and Benedict way at all, because they’re not old enough to do that. Their attraction for each other is direct and instant and powerful and romantic, you know, purely romantic.

Jace Lacob: We learned it wasn’t Tom who got Molly pregnant, nor is he the only man she’s ever loved as he catches her with Thwackum. Does this revelation go a long way towards restoring Tom’s virtue, the first of several scenarios where Tom is mistaken, which is a trope that repeats itself down the line?

Gwyneth Hughes: Yes. I mean, that’s very Fielding. It’s very much part of a sort of 18th century farcical, “oh wow. I was wrong!” kind of reveals. Fielding was a theatrical impresario and playwright before he was a novelist. He only turned to novels because of the censorship in the theater, which in his lifetime got ridiculous. I know the Thwackum scene is corny, but honestly it made me laugh out loud when I first read it. It’s just hilarious, daft and hilarious.

We are very suspicious of coincidences in the modern storytelling world. But then they loved coincidence. They thought coincidence was like the unfolding of God’s purpose. It’s fate, it’s destiny, and they loved it. They thought it was a great storytelling device, which gives us modern screenwriters and adapters quite a lot of difficulty whenever you approach a story like this, that what was accepted as really good storytelling in those days is now regarded as a bit difficult.

Jace Lacob: I am curious about the humor because I feel like we’ve come to expect humor in a certain way when it comes to period drama, whether it’s an arched eyebrow and the sort of witty repartee of a Jane Austen. But we don’t necessarily expect the bawdy humor of Tom Jones, which is different than most of the period dramas we see adapted for tv. How did you approach this inherent humor of Fielding, and how freeing is it to actually include humorous elements in a period drama?

Gwyneth Hughes: Oh, it’s brilliant. It’s just charming. You make yourself laugh writing these silly gags. It’s great to see the actors pick them up and run with them. Yes, it’s quite physical comedy again, it’s quite theatrical. Fielding, you’ll see that he’ll lay out a great funny fight scene or a sort of funny reveal of someone hiding in the cupboard. He’ll tell you exactly what happens in what order and where, because that’s how he used to do it in the theater.

So it’s all there. The question is, have you got the time and money to shoot it? Because these are some really big complex scenes, some of them. Now I really enjoyed that. There’s a lot of visual humor in it. The humor is a big part of this story. It’s a big part of it in the book, and I wanted it to be like it is in the book. It’s rollicking, it’s visual, it’s physical. People do say funny things, but they don’t do witty repartee because they’re not those kinds of people. They’re country people who have misunderstandings, who tell each other off.

Very little of the dialogue came from the book because there are great long dialogue scenes in the book, which produce almost nothing for the screen because they’re too long.

Jace Lacob: You’re not only a skilled screenwriter, but you’re also a documentary director with a specialtiy in sort of history and true crime, which we touched on earlier. Which is more challenging for you, adapting or creating a fictional world or recreating in documentaries, true crime or historical events?

Gwyneth Hughes: I kind of think at the heart of it, it’s no different really. You’re still telling a story and you’re still trying to wrestle really intractable, difficult material into an oblong shiny screen in the corner of somebody’s room. It’s just about stories. I do a lot of dramas based on true stories, really big, enormous, difficult, true stories where nothing obeys the rules of the fictional universe and everything is really difficult to tell, and adaptations of huge thousand word novels, stuff of my own that I’ve made up from beginning to end, doesn’t make much difference. It doesn’t make as much difference as you might imagine. It’s still trying to work out how to mine this material for a story. The book exists. People’s real lives that I might be doing exist, but they don’t tell that story. You’ve got to. That’s where the skill comes of the storytellers to work out what’s important and what order it should go in.

Jace Lacob: To me, you seem to move so easily from contemporary pieces like Five Days, which is one of my all-time favorite miniseries, I have to just squeeze in there, to period fare like Tom Jones or The Girl or Ms. Austen Regrets. And ultimately what you’re saying is that these are just stories—that all stories, regardless of time or construction, are sort of made of the same rock, that you just have to dig and find the story. But ultimately, you don’t really feel a difference between period drama or contemporary drama between fact or fiction, you’re just ultimately sort of after that capital S story?

Gwyneth Hughes: Yeah, I think that’s right. You know, there’s this thing that people say, don’t write about what you don’t know. I think the rule is, if you don’t know, go find out. So for something like Tom Jones, I read the book multiple times. I did a lot of historical research. I thought a lot about life in those days. And then I wrote the story.

I want to know this world intimately. And then if you know it intimately, you’ve asked all the right people all the right questions, and if those people are dead, or a long time ago, like Tom and Sophia, I’m still asking them questions. And I’m questioning them and questioning their motivations. And I’m working out how to tell their story. And that’s the same process whether they’re in a book, dead, alive, victims of some told misjustice, or I just made them up in my head just now. I still have to interrogate them. I still have to work out what they’re up to and I tell their story. It’s like I’m working with them to tell their story.

Jace Lacob: Gwyneth Hughes, thank you so very much.

Gwyneth Hughes: It’s been a pleasure. Thank you.

 

Next time, as Tom Jones attempts to find his own way in the world, heiress Sophia Western strikes out on her own. 

 

CLIP

Sophia: Honour, I refuse this marriage so I must leave this house tonight. Will you come with me?

Honour: But miss, two females riding away at night all alone at the mercy of highwaymen, murderers, farmers?

Sophia: A sensible choice for traveling, yes?

Honour: Where will we go?

Sophia: I have other aunts, in London.

Honour: London?

Sophia: Yes, Aunt Harriet and Lady Bellaston.

Honour: Right away Miss.

 

Actor Sophie Wilde joins us next week to discuss Sophia and Tom’s star-crossed romance.