WRITER Andrew Davies is being mischievious again. "Shall I tell you?," he wonders, then supplies the answer himself: "Yes, I will". The juicy titbit of information concerns a planned film version of George Eliot's novel Daniel Deronda for which he was seeking finance.

He reveals that a French production company offered to put up $1m if Davies's screenplay rewrote the story so that Daniel had sex with the object of his love Gwendolen. Davies is clearly amused by this proposal to commit an act of sacrilege on a classic of English literature.

This bit of tittle-tattle is unlikely to rebound on him like his comment that his recent BBC2 lesbian drama Tipping The Velvet was "absolutely filthy". This led disgruntled viewers to complain they'd been misled and it wasn't dirty enough.

What's not in doubt if Davies's entitlement to the crown as king of the TV adaptations. Further evidence is provided by a unique double next weekend. His version of Daniel Deronda begins on BBC1 on Saturday, with the first instalment of his take on Dr Zhivago on ITV the following evening.

The Beeb was forced to vacate its usual Sunday night costume drama slot after ITV bosses got in first to announce they intended to screen Dr Zhivago at that time. Before that, he's the subject of The South Bank Show tomorrow. "I'm delighted they're not going out on the same night. That would be very irritating for people like me who forget to set their videos," says Davies, following a preview of his Eliot adaptation.

"I've always been used to being on a Sunday night in November. I feel enormously proud to be dominating the weekend on two of the channels. I hope the people who like this kind of thing will have a ball, and I don't think that's necessarily a narrowly defined costume drama audience but people who like serious, challenging drama. They can watch one on one night and the other the next. That's what I'll be doing."

It appears that when a TV drama commissioner wants an adaptation, Davies is the man they call. His name, rather than that of Sarah Waters whose book he adapted, was used to sell Tipping The Velvet to audiences. He's pleased if the lesbian love story attracted a new audience for costume drama. He knows how to sex up a classic. Just remember how Colin Firth's wet shirt moment as Mr Darcy in Davies's Pride And Prejudice did much to widen the audience for Jane Austen.

He doesn't think any great harm came out of people watching Tipping The Velvet, although he says he must catch up with Waters to find out her feelings about the drama inspiring a Page Three featuring two topless pin-ups. "You can see the attraction, you get four nipples instead of two," he notes.

The series certainly made an impact, as he discovered while he was "thumbing through the sweaters" at his local Marks & Spencer store in Leamington Spa. "This woman came up to me and said, 'are you Andrew Davies?'. There she was, a middle-aged woman with two teenage daughters, and they were all saying they thought it was absolutely great," he says.

Daniel Deronda was a different, and difficult, proposition. After adapting another Eliot book, Middlemarch, for the BBC, he used the proceeds to go to the Seychelles and took with him a copy of Daniel Deronda, which he'd never read. On his return, he suggested as the book as a serial to the BBC and was commissioned to write it. That was in 1994. Somewhere along the way, he was sidetracked into writing a movie version. When that failed to get off the ground, the project returned to the BBC.

"It was always a problem getting the thing down to 125 minutes for a film script. It would have played at that, but it's better as a serial. You can get much more of the book in," he explains.

At one point, he was working on Deronda and Zhivago in tandem. He saw similarities in that they're both about a guy in love with two women and trying to choose between them. They have a leading man who's not an action hero, but who's sensitive and observes life.

"In a way, Daniel Deronda is a strange one because I'd been working on it for so long in so many different versions, short and long," he says. "The same bunch of actors and directors were being considered for both productions."

One actor, Hugh Bonneville, managed to win parts in both - a leading role in Daniel Deronda and a "very small but flashy" part in Dr Zhivago. He clearly likes actors too, describing Deronda's leads, Hugh Dancy and Romola Garai, as "exceptional young actors on the brink - I don't see how they can't have huge international careers".

"Daniel himself is problematic, too didactic and too conceptual. He doesn't come to life off the page as a character because there's a lot of very serious stuff about his self-discovery. The challenge is to make him interesting so that we involve ourselves with him, just as much as we do with Gwendolen," says Davies. "Hugh Dancy looks lovely. He looks like someone you'd like to have sex with, but also someone who could be your son."

Perhaps Davies's success as an adaptor is not treating the classics as untouchable. He regards them as revelant to today, and embellishes accordingly. "I like to think that with any script I'm speaking to a contemporary audience," he says. "We're not just doing this to churn out another costume drama. It speaks to our concerns as contemporary drama does. Directors and actors rise to that challenge as well.

"If you go back 20 years or so and look at the kind of costume dramas being made, they were very much about chaps buttoned up to the neck and girls buttoned up to the neck, in interiors, and speaking very clearly lines of dialogue. I try to write my scripts in a more filmic way. Apart from being too long for a big movie, my series look like big movies."

* The South Bank Show is on ITV tomorrow at 11.15pm; Daniel Deronda begins on BBC1 next Saturday (Nov 23) at 9.30pm. Dr Zhivago begins on ITV next Sunday (Nov 24) at 9pm.