The Party author Elizabeth Day on adapting her thriller: 'Luke Evans made it happen'

After a wait of 10 years, Elizabeth Day’s bestselling novel The Party has been turned into a five-part ITV thriller. “It’s an unspoken dream of so many authors to get their work adapted for TV, because TV has become such a cultural epicentre,” says Day, brimming with excitement.

The adaptation was propelled, in part, by its star, Welsh actor Luke Evans (Beauty and the Beast, The Hobbit, Fast & Furious). Day explains: “He read The Party during the pandemic and said, ‘This is the thing I want to make next.’ I wouldn’t allow myself to believe it. And I didn’t, until the day of the first read-through. And then I saw the script with my name on it. Shiveringly exciting!”

Evans plays Martin Gilmour, a working-class boy who is propelled into high society with tragic consequences. The adaptation, written by Sarah Solemani, is considerably more dramatic than Day’s original. “When you write a novel, you have the privilege of writing the interiority of your characters. An adaptation is a completely different creative iteration,” she explains.

Both book and series represent a critique on the immorality of the British upper classes, as seen in operation at public school and Oxbridge, and on the job circuit or dancefloor. Obviously, appalling posh people can be fun to dramatise, and the cast, which includes Lindsay Duncan and Douglas Hodge, does not hold back. But thanks to the script – and, it must be said, Evans’s measured performance – the series has you properly rooting for the underdog.

“What I was writing was a combination of political satire influenced by classics like Brideshead Revisited and The Talented Mr Ripley, which deal with the theme of the outsider,” says Day. Not that Day, who describes herself as “upper middle class” is one (private school, Cambridge), but perhaps decades in journalism, plus her How to Fail podcast, in which she grills successful people about their bad times, has unshackled her from the chains of privilege.

“One of the things I look at in The Party is the fact that we are so accustomed to seeing prime ministers, senior politicians and experts look a certain way. White, privately educated, Oxbridge men. A lot of them have never lived a day in the skin of an ordinary person, and when they are elected into power, they’ve got no clue. They don’t care how their policies might affect someone and they treat politics like a game.”

Like my husband, for all good things you have to wait

Impressively, Day has already spoken to our new prime minister on How to Fail. How did he fare? “He ticked every single box. He didn’t demand pre-approval of questions. He seemed incredibly open and honest and really believed in what he was saying. And for me, that’s a different kind of prime minister.”

While The Party depicts politicians as coke-sniffing rats, journalists come off as truth-seeking missiles, which is certainly an unusual (and welcome) change. “I think there are some terrific political journalists out there doing a hard job with an enormous amount of expertise and talent,” says Day. “Tim Shipman is one. Matt Chorley is another. They are passionate about understanding the political systems and communicating that reality. Of course there are going to be people who have less integrity and lower ethical standards. But I feel unfashionably optimistic. Maybe it’s because I was a journalist and I worked with so many terrific colleagues.”

Day was also married to a pretty significant one, I remark, referring to her relationship with Kamal Ahmed, former BBC economics editor (and incoming face of Sky’s new Sunday morning show). “Well, I’m sure he’ll be thrilled to hear you call him that,” remarks Day crisply.

She is now married to Justin Basini, CEO of ClearScore (a service which provides credit scores and affordability guidance). “I met him on Hinge,” she says. “Just to give hope to all the single people out there.” A dating app for a famous writer? “Well, I wasn’t known then. This was before I launched the podcast. It was one of many apps I went on. But Justin is a deeply ethical, integrity-filled person, and I love the chance to speak about him.”

Plenty of people question how Day can present How to Fail, because she never seems to have done so herself (double first from Cambridge, Young Journalist of the Year aged 26, Betty Trask Award for first novel etc). She deals with this rather well. “I feel like that’s like saying Agatha Christie should be in prison for murders, or Lauren Laverne should be on a desert island. I have failed in multiple ways, as has everyone, and I think it’s one of the things that connects us all. And I’ve devoted a lot of my life to understanding what failure is, how we can learn from it and how it can help us sometimes towards a path of eventual success. Failure and success are shadow twins, intertwined.”

She is upfront about the ways in which she considers she has failed. The divorce from Ahmed is one. “We were together for seven years, and we didn’t have children, but for me there was a sense of failure and shame. I was the one who left. Now I’m a big believer in the fact that a relationship isn’t a failure simply because it ends. It has given you something incredibly meaningful that will shape the rest of your life, and it’s given you an experience of love, hopefully.

“But I felt I had failed, and I felt real shame at the idea that we would have to say to everyone who had come to our wedding, ‘Oh, we didn’t make it, by the way, and I’m so sorry you gave us a nice gift, and you probably had to book a hotel.’ I felt so bad about it.”

Not having children is another. “I thought for a long time that in order to have meaningful legacy, you had to have a child, and in order for me to have purpose, I had to be a mother in the conventional sense. When you have put in the effort, and it still doesn’t succeed, there is this embedded sense of ‘I failed’. It struck me one day that maybe my purpose is to speak for those women and men who have tried and failed to have children in the biological sense, and I got an enormous amount of community from that.

“I know I’ve created meaning by giving voice to an experience that so often is swept under the rug, or which people feel misplaced shame over. I’m at peace with where I’m at now. But going through unsuccessful fertility treatment, and miscarriage, it was one of those experiences that will forever change me, and I’m grateful for it, even though it was incredibly sad and difficult at the time.”

Day now filters the whole celebrity circus through the How to Fail lens. “We look at these shimmering gods on the red carpet, whether it’s Luke Evans or Lindsay Duncan, and it feels like they must have it all together, and actually they’re probably going through something we don’t know about.”

Keen-eyed viewers will spot a smiling Day doing a Hitchcock turn as an extra at the start of The Party. Was it worth waiting for? “Like all good things, including my husband, sometimes you have to wait for the right person or place to find you, and I could not be happier with my husband, and the actors and the director that we have.” A pause. “Although, thank goodness Luke Evans is gay, otherwise I would have to leave my husband for him, he is so gorgeous.”