Hot Picks: Lord Of The Flies

There are some book adaptations that – pardon the pun – really do leap off the page when they’re announced. When it was revealed more than two years ago that the BBC would be adapting Nobel Prize for Literature winner William Golding’s groundbreaking 1954 novel for TV, it sent a palpable jolt through the global industry.

Lord Of The Flies has never been made for television before. It has twice been given the feature treatment, most famously in Peter Brook’s 1963 film, but no one has been brave enough to attempt it for the small screen.

Golding’s challenging, allegorical and highly philosophical debut work puts questions of human morality, child development and relationships at the heart of the story.

The action follows a group of young, pre-adolescent British boys, who – stranded on an uninhabited tropical island following a plane crash – make calamitous attempts to govern themselves, which descend into savagery. The myriad themes that emerge are underpinned by the constant line being walked between civility and disorder.

Despite its literary and thematic obstacles, commissioners the BBC and Australian streamer Stan will be confident. The adaptation is in the hands of Jack Thorne, who, besides his bibliography of hit TV screenplays, has won recent industry acclaim for Netflix’s ratings buster Adolescence – a story that broadly explores how young, pre-pubescent boys are impacted by their environment.

According to initial press, Thorne’s adaptation remains “truthful to the original novel – set in the early 1950s on an unnamed Pacific island – and delves further into the book’s emotive themes: human nature, the loss of innocence and boyhood masculinity”.

The episodes will be told through the lenses of the protagonists – Ralph, Piggy, Simon and Jack – offering a “subtly different perspective on their collective plight and the manner in which they cope with their predicament”.

Thorne previously worked with producer Eleven on C4’s Cast-Offs – also about characters stranded on a desert island – and the Sony Pictures Television-owned label has also helmed youth-skewing coming-of-age series including Netflix’s Sex Education and BBC3’s Red Rose, as well as survival dramedy Stags for Paramount+.

Joel Wilson, co-founder and creative director at Eleven, and exec producer on Lord Of The Flies, says the significance of making such a historic work for screen is not lost on the indie.

“We felt honoured when the Golding family entrusted us with the adaptation,” he says. “Then came the terror – what if we couldn’t do justice to this precious book?

“An abiding faith in Jack’s scripts steadied us all. His interpretation remains deeply faithful and, through its sustained focus on perspective, it draws out nuances and subtleties.”

Having watched Curio Pictures’ The Narrow Road To The Deep North sell to major players like Amazon Prime Video in the US and the BBC in the UK, SPT chair Keith Le Goy believes another adaptation of a highly prized literary work will resonate with buyers.

“This reworking of an incredibly famous book is something a lot of people are going to be talking about,” he says. “We’re confident of selling this around the world.”