1974: WATERSHIP DOWN - Why is it so SUCCESSFUL? | Midweek | Writers and Wordsmiths | BBC Archive

"The book is fantasy stripped of sentiment, and children - anti sentimentalists, all - loved it."

David Jessel reports on Watership Down, the best-selling novel in which all the characters are rabbits. The enormous success of the book has taken seemingly everyone by surprise - not least the major book publishers, who turned Watership Down in their droves - before one-man London publisher Rex Collings gambled on it, and its first-time author Richard Adams. What is it about this story that has resonated with so many - predominantly urban - people?

Richard Adams believes that the book's strength may lie in its mixture of the fantastical and the realistic. Although ostensibly a fairy tale - a story of talking rabbits - it is grounded in the real world, a part of the world which Adams knows extremely well, and his attention to detail in recreating the topography of Watership Down lends his fantasy a credibility that heightens the drama for readers.

Though Adams created the story to occupy his children on a long car journey, Watership Down has a attracted a dedicated adult following, and there is much discussion in some literary circles as to the hidden allegorical meaning of the book. Is it an allegory, or just a straightforward adventure?

Clip taken from Midweek originally broadcast on BBC One, 5 September, 1974.

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