About ago, London Weekend Television issued a press release announcing a modern-language version of Othello, with the Moor of Venice reimagined as the first black Metropolitan Police Commissioner. Such is the interest in all things Shakespearean that the story prompted dozens of international inquiries. Trouble was, the foreign journalists all telephoned the press office at BBC Drama. The assumption was clear: if there's Shakespeare on the box, it must be on the Beeb. It was Aunty, let's not forget, that between 1978 and 1985 had broadcast studio-bound, mostly staid productions of all 37 plays, and the corporation remains the natural host whenever acclaimed stage Shakespeare is transferred to the small screen.
The new Othello stands out as an exceptionally bold ITV commission. To find the last ITV Shakespeare, you have to go back to Granada's King Lear in 1983, which enabled the frail, 76-year-old Laurence Olivier to give his last and perhaps greatest screen Shakespeare performance.
Against that historical background, and with responsibility for securing prime-time Sunday-night ratings generally shouldered by feelgood programmes such as Cold Feet and Heartbeat, Nick Elliott, ITV controller of drama, deserves credit for greenlighting this new vision of the Moor's bleak tale from British television's adaptation king, Andrew Davies.
Davies, director Geoffrey Sax (Clocking Off) and a fine cast, led by Eamonn Walker as Met chief John Othello and Christopher Eccleston as his duplicitous deputy, Ben Jago, have repaid Elliott's faith with a powerful and intelligent drama. It proves that, like Shakespeare, Davies is a master at reworking other writers' material.
In under 100 minutes (an uncut stage Othello runs to three-and-a-half hours), his screenplay distills the essence of Shakespeare's tragedy while jettisoning some characters, and skilfully reshapes the original storyline to fit a 2001 mould. A Stephen Lawrence-influenced subplot about police racism and brutality substitutes for the war between Venice and Turkey; instead of Desdemona's handkerchief as proof of alleged infidelity, we have DNA testing for 'sexual secretions'.
The project began life at a lunch meeting in 1999 between producer Jo Wright (then LWT's controller of drama, now head of drama at Talkback) and screenwriter Paula Milne (The Politician's Wife, The Fragile Heart) after their conversation turned to Clueless, the movie that successfully transposed Jane Austen's Emma to 1990s Beverly Hills.
'I said to Jo: "Wouldn't it be great to do something similar with Shakespeare?"' says Milne. With Milne fully committed on other projects, Wright approached Davies, whose first idea was to rework The Tempest , with Prospero as a new age guru inviting clients to his private Caribbean island. When Elliott decided this was not quite right for ITV, Davies hit upon the Othello and the Met idea.
Even so, LWT could only make Othello with co-production finance from WGBH Boston and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and Wright acknowledges that ITV's commercial obligation to secure a mass audience means she could never have raised the requisite seven-figure budget for a Shakespeare which used the original language. 'It would be great if a network had the guts to do Shakespeare in the original language in prime time,' says Wright. 'But if we can get access to a mainstream audience with Othello , using different words, then that has to be a good thing.'
With the Davies Othello joining recent or forthcoming modern-language television and film versions of The Tempest, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth and King Lear, it is clear that on both sides of the Atlantic, a boom in Shakespeare 'variants' (original plot and characters, updated dialogue and settings) has succeeded the 1990s cycle of Shakespeare movies kick-started by Kenneth Branagh's Henry V .
That film's critical and commercial success in 1989 led to a period of intense activity (14 new feature films using the original Shakespeare text were made in 10 years) that has now fizzled out following the disappointing box-office performance in 2000 of Julie Taymor's Titus, Branagh's Love's Labour's Lost and Michael Almereyda's Manhattan-set Hamlet.
Producers here and in Hollywood have decided that, instead of simply modernising the play's settings (as Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet did to such blockbusting effect), the LWT/ Othello formula may provide a safer route to Shakespearean profits. The formula dates back to the silent era, with Othello having served as the basis for a British melodrama, Carnival, in 1921. Dozens more genre movies owe their existence to Shakespeare, from westerns and gangster thrillers to the influential Forbidden Planet , the sci-fi Tempest in which Robbie the Robot replaces Ariel.
When Forbidden Planet was released in 1956, MGM would not allow its investment in what was then the most expensive sci-fi picture ever made to be jeopardised by featuring Shakespeare's name in the credits or publicity.
Almost half a century later, the same commercial logic obtains in Hollywood. When Touchstone Pictures promoted 1999's 10 Things I Hate About You, a bright and presumably Clueless-inspired comedy that transplanted The Taming of the Shrew to a Seattle high school, there was no 'Based on Shakespeare's classic comedy' tagline to deter the mall rats, and this low-budget feature helped itself to a tidy worldwide gross of $63 million.
The success of 10 Things inspired this summer's Get Over It , a lively teen reworking of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which was followed into American multiplexes by Tim Blake Nelson's O, the dark tale of Othello as a murderously jealous high school basketball star. Each took around $15m, paltry figures compared with those for American Pie 2, but still higher than the takes for most 1990s original-text Shakespeare films.
Waiting in the wings are the black comedy Scotland, PA, which retells Macbeth as a conflict between rival fast-food joints in 1970s Pennsylvania (look out for Christopher Walken as Lt Ernie McDuff), and the television movie King of Texas, set in the 1840s, with Patrick Stewart as an elderly rancher with three 'thankless' daughters. Let's hope this spin on King Lear improves on American television's last Shakespeare variant, NBC's laughable The Tempest (1998), which was set during the Civil War and starred Peter Fonda as Gideon Prosper, a plantation owner whose voodoo spells save his daughter Miranda from the unwanted advances of a bayou redneck, Croc Man (Caliban, geddit?).
If Davies's Othello attracts a sizeable audience and favourable reviews, there is every chance that Elliott will greenlight two more updates: Davies is keen to develop his Prospero-as-guru idea, and Milne has been developing a medical Romeo and Juliet in which the star-crossed lovers' fathers are feuding consultants caught up in a malpractice scandal.
Both are mouth-watering prospects, but, like all variants, they will boast great story and characters without coming close to matching the linguistic punch delivered by 'straight' screen Shakespeare or, of course, by stage productions. Significantly, theatre directors have long appreciated the value of modernising an Elizabethan text - but only in the rehearsal room.
Eavesdrop on an RSC company in the first phase of preparations for a new Othello and you will hear actors paraphrasing almost every line of Shakespeare's poetry into contemporary idiom. Ideally, this process enables them to communicate every emotional nuance when they have memorised the original lines. In rehearsal, the actor playing Othello might express his character's love for Desdemona using the same words delivered by Eamonn Walker in the Davies TV script: 'It scares me, all this feeling... I don't know if I could bear losing her.' In the theatre, we would hear: 'Perdition catch my soul/But I do love thee! And when I love thee not,/ Chaos is come again."
Multiply this example by a couple of hundred and you realise why even superb modern adaptations such as the LWT Othello will always rank as Shakespeare lite.
Othello is on ITV on 23 December. Daniel Rosenthal is the author of Shakespeare on Screen (Hamlyn)