Hi, it's Nicola Cochlin. Young people have been making history for years, but we don't often hear about them. My brand new series on BBC Sounds sets out to put this right. In history's youngest heroes, I'll be revealing the fascinating stories of 12 young people who've played a major role in history and who've helped shape our world. Like Audrey Hepburn, Nelson Mandela, Louis Braille and Lady Jane Grey, history's youngest heroes with me, Nicola Cochlin.

Listen on BBC Sounds.

Hello, I'm Krista Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2007.

My My castaway this week is the writer Andrew Davis.

He's the king of television adaptation.

Pride and Prejudice, Vanity Fair, Middlemarch, Tipping the Velvet and Daniel Duranda,

are only a few of the period dramas he's brought to our screens.

He finds success comparatively late in life.

Until he was 50, he was a part-time English lecturer.

It was a sort of midlife crisis that sent his career soaring.

Since then, his signature has been stripping down the classics, sexing them up, and serving Austin, Elliot and Dickens

with a large dose of erotica and a relevant contemporary edge.

The sexual imperative, he says, of his historical characters,

is one of the clearest links between us and them.

Is that the key then to any successful adaptation,

finding the links that will make things relevant for a 21st century audience?

Yeah, well, absolutely, because there's no point in doing them unless you can make them enjoyable and relevant for now.

Wanting to get on, falling in love, falling in lust, needing to get money, all the same things.

Sex and greed are the sort of big headlines then?

I guess they are, yes.

...