Pre-Production Unit

So, wanting to do an adaptation of one of my favorite author's books - Lesley Lokko's "A Private Affair", I am researching her and making sure that there isn't already an adaptation and researching the subject- wives of Army officers.


http://signaturespeakers.wordpress.com/speakers/authors-publishing/ said this about Lesley:


Bestselling novelist Lesley Lokko has done an awful lot of moving around. Born to a Scottish artist and a Ghanaian surgeon, she spent the first eighteen years of her life trotting back and forth between Africa and the UK, pretty much every year. After a handful of (mostly unsuccessful) careers – kibbutz worker, cocktail waitress and terrible telemarketer to name a few – she decided it was time to knuckle down and trained as an architect, gaining her PhD in 2007. After almost a decade of teaching and tramping around on muddy sites, she chucked it in and became a novelist instead. Six best-selling novels later, she’s pretty much decided ‘this is it.’ She now lives between London, Accra and Johannesburg, although not quite simultaneously, and sometimes escapes altogether to write (in deepest winter) in the Pentland Hills outside Edinburgh. Her Scottish friends think this is quite mad. For more information and detail on her novels (and the house she built for herself in Accra), please visit www.lesleylokko.com.


The Book

A Private Affair takes place all over the place – from gritty London to small-town Germany, from the Australian outback to war-torn Sierra Leone.

Synopsis
Abby Barclay is married – the perfect army wife, she comes from a long line of army wives and like her mother and grandmother before her, is accustomed to putting her husband’s career before everything else. Meaghan Astor is also an army wife, but from a very different background. A tough survivor from the Australian Outback, she takes a chance on a handsome young army officer and follows him half-way round the world to escape the farm where she grew up and the father whom she’d rather never see again. Dani Tsemo is also a survivor: beautiful, young, vulnerable, she grew up in war-torn Sierra Leone where conmen, soldiers and mercenaries hang out in the beachside bars, looking for girls just like her. But Dani’s different…
Sam Morland has it all – looks, a glittering career, two homes, a sports car and more money than she can reasonably spend. She’s single but doesn’t spend her days worrying about the fact – she’s too busy living life and loving it to worry about finding Mr Right. He’ll come along one day…and in the meantime, there’s plenty else to do.

Four women; four very different stories; four sets of dreams…and one man who will wreck them all.

Extracts:

MEAGHAN
Celle, Garmany, 2009

Meaghan Astor stepped gingerly through the doorway. Ahead of her, marching purposefully down the corridor, was the short, stocky figure of the estates manager, Warrant Officer Greaves. Tom, her husband, was outside, still piling suitcases and boxes onto the sidewalk. Alannah, their six-year-old daughter, was 'helping' him. She hadn't seen him for over a month and now clung to him like glue. She followed WO Greaves into the living room. The flat was uniformly dull in the way only army housing could ever be - magnolia-colored walls, mottled green carpets in every room, standard, regulation-issue furniture- in this case a mismatched assortment of floral curtains, lopsided, bent-out-of-shape couches and cheap, plywood-faced furniture. Her heart sank. It was exactly as she'd feared. Awful. As ever.

"Two bedrooms, living room, dining room, kitchen... bathroom's down there, separate loo. You'll find the inventory on the kitchen counter. I'd advise you to go through it quick as you can and let us know if there's anything missing. Flat was painted six months ago - it won't be due for another coat for at least a year - but it looks pretty clean to me. You'll find all the regulations on the notice-board outside - rubbish collection days, garden waste and all of that. Right, if you've no further questions...?" WO Greaves was in a hurry to leave.
"No, no... I think it's all pretty clear," Meaghan said slowly, looking round in dismay. It was dull. Dull and uninspiring. Just like the town. she felt the sharp tug of resentment rise in her throat. It was bad enough having to come back to Germany again without having to contend with a God-awful flat, too. Tom had just been promoted, for crying out loud!


Extract 2

ABBY
Dhekelia, Cyprus, 1993

Army life had become more complicated than she ever remembered it as a child. In all the places and bases they'd ever lived in, she couldn't recall a single incident in which the very nature of what the army did had ever been called into question. Honor, discipline, fair play... those were the qualities she'd always associated with the army and with her father in particular. Just thinking about him now brought a lump to her throat. He'd seemed to her to embody the very best of everything, including Britain. The moral compass by which he set his life seemed so clear... now, with Ralph unable to talk about his job and what he was being asked to do, the murder of that poor young girl by their very own soldiers and a war in Bosnia that no one seemed to understand or explain, her unshakeable belief in the rightness of what they were doing suddenly felt misplaced.. She forced herself to stop. She knew Ralph and doubts; there were nights when he lay beside her, unable to sleep. She could read it in the faint lines of worry on his forehead and the frown he wore when he thought she wasn't looking. But if he had doubts, she also knew that she couldn't afford to. That was part of the deal. As an officer's wife, she had to be strong - if not for herself, then for him. She simply couldn't afford to voice what she felt and neither could he.


Extract 3

RALPH
17 15' o" N, 88 46' o" W, Belize, 2000

The thick curtain of trees suddenly ended; as they pushed and hacked their way through the last wall of green, the ground fell away before them and there was a sudden opening out of thick, long-stemmed grass and, in the distance, the glint of silver that marked an expanse of water, pushing the horizon even further away. Sweat was running off his face and body in streams. The soft, shape-shifting buzz of flying insects that had accompanied them everywhere for the past ten days abated abruptly, carried away by the breeze that the end of the forest had brought about.

‘Fuckin’ ’ell.’ One of the lads behind him spoke, echoing the sentiments of most of the platoon.

Ralph grinned to himself. He took off his glasses and the shimmering, wavering world receded even further in front of him. They were on the edge of a ridge, high in the central plateau of the country. The names on the map he consulted from time to time were quaint – Crossing Landing Bank; Dry Creek Bank; Cotton Tree, Roaring Creek . . . there was even a little village named Meditation. But there’d been nothing quaint about the fortnight he’d just spent with his first platoon of twenty four squaddies. In his new post as the CO of Panther Cub, the British army’s jungle-training programme, it was his job to take the men of his regiment out into the dense, almost impenetrable rainforest surrounding the capital. After his own, week-long induction, he’d spent ten days on base preparing for the expedition and then they were ready. They’d flown in one of the new Gazelle helicopters along the Macal River, glinting steel as it snaked through the dense, dark-green carpet of trees. They’d landed at the Guacamalo Bridge after one of the most turbulent flights he’d ever taken. Several of the lads were already green around the gills by the time they had their faces streaked with camouflage paint.

Now, after nearly a week in the semi-darkness of the jungle, to be standing on a ridge overlooking a grassy steppe was to feel relief permeate their bodies as well as their minds, to take in the sense of space and light and freedom as a physical release. As they emerged out of the jungle one after the other, the men fell silent. In another month or so, they would be shipped out to the Balkans for an operational tour that would last four to six months, depending. Their ability to survive it depended on their ability to survive what he had just put them through, and would continue to for the next few weeks. They were a good bunch; morale was high and the way they looked out for and after one another was exemplary. He couldn’t have asked for a better platoon on his first trip out. God knew they would need each other in the coming months. He knew from his own tour in Bosnia a couple of years earlier that it would be tough. Their rules of engagement for the theatre they were about to enter were murky. What worked on the streets of Belfast wouldn’t necessarily work in Pristina, yet the army was a slow, ponderous machine and it took time for changes to work their way up the operational chain, and then back down again. He was proud of the company and knew from the way they addressed and listened to him that he’d already won their respect. He’d learned from his father that a strict hierarchy lends itself to a better command situation. He never addressed his men by their first names and they were only ever to address him as ‘sir’. Respect was more valuable than popularity. He knew from experience that nothing could bring down the morale of a unit faster than a commanding officer who didn’t declare where he stood. His men knew exactly where he stood and that in itself was half the battle won.

‘Right, lads,’ he turned around. Twenty-four blacked-up faces looked expectantly at him. He glanced at his watch. It was nearly five o’clock in the afternoon; in just under an hour, the sun would begin its rapid descent towards the horizon and the blanket of darkness would fall. He grinned. ‘Tea time.’






MY AIMS

Looking at the book cover, it does look like a typical airport novel, but it does deal with some really serious themes and I find the lives of the wives very interesting, it's nice to hear it from the person in the backgrounds point of view.
It can be quite 'glam' at times, but I would focus and deal with the gritty themes, stripping away the glamourous aspects. Maybe even losing character Sam all together.

It would be a 4 part drama series on channel 4 or ITV at 9pm. As the book covers a time span of 1987-2010 I need that amount of time to fill it.