Top TV writer is victim of 'dog rage'

Andrew Davies, the screen-writer behind some of Britain’s best-loved costume dramas, has become a victim of “dog rage”.

Davies, 71, was punched and headbutted while walking his puppy Daisy in a park close to his home in Kenilworth, Warwickshire. The Bafta and Emmy-award winning writer, best known for his BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, was assaulted by the owner of two Staffordshire bull terriers that were involved in a scuffle with Davies’s “timid” Alsation rescue dog.

“It was dog rage,” said Davies this weekend. Describing how the terriers had “terrified” Daisy, the writer said: “I drove one of them off. I shouted ‘Go on! Get out of it!’ and sort of aimed a kick at it, which was never really meant to connect, and didn’t. The dog got the message and went off. But his owner shouted, ‘Don’t you fucking touch my dog!’ and ran up and headbutted me and punched me in the eye. It knocked me clean off my feet. He was a big guy and I am quite little.”

Police said the 6ft attacker, in his early twenties, put up the hood of his black tracksuit before fleeing. Davies, who suffered a black eye, said: “I thought I was doing this guy a favour because he couldn’t control his dogs. It all happened so quickly I didn’t have time to be terrified. It was just such a surprise.”

Davies’s television credits include House of Cards, Sense and Sensibility and Tipping the Velvet, an adaptation of Sarah Waters's novel about lesbian love in Victorian times.

Davies is working on the screenplay for a Hollywood version of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, directed by Sam Mendes. His film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s sexually charged novel Brideshead Revisited will be released later this year.

Growing up in Cardiff, Davies had a natural instinct to be “a bad boy” and modelled himself on Dylan Thomas, the heavy-drinking Welsh poet. “I wanted to go to London, get drunk a lot and have loose women - there didn’t seem to be very many of them in Rhiwbina,” he has said. The writer has lived in Warwickshire with his wife, Diana, a retired teacher, since the 1960s.

A former English lecturer at Warwick University, Davies achieved fame late in life after struggling as a part-time writer. It was the success of his campus satire, A Very Peculiar Practice, that convinced him to take up writing full-time in 1986.

Davies has won five Bafta awards, the last of which was in 2006 for Bleak House, an adaptation of the Dickens novel for the BBC. The dog rage incident took place on March 31. Davies decided not to go to hospital after the attack.

The writer was in a reflective mood this weekend. “Oddly enough, it seemed to perk me up a bit - all the adrenaline flooding in,” he said. “You know what they say - a narrow escape from an accident, that sort of thing, can make you more alive. But also it’s not something I would go out seeking because I have got a bloody sore eye.”

Three children have been killed by dogs in the past two years, leading to calls in some areas, such as Wandsworth, south London, for the return of dog licences. This would require owners to register the details of their animals. Ministers, however, are lukewarm about the idea.