Lord of the Flies occupies a unique spot in the British cultural imagination. William Golding’s 1954 novel about what schoolboys become when there are no adults around has dominated the English literature syllabus for seven decades: doubtless, a large swathe of the country has already pictured the remote island on which the boys are stranded, the gleaming conch which is blown to call meetings, and the snub nosed, portly figure of Piggy.
Adapting such a thing for TV is a delicate task, bound to elicit mutters of “that’s not how it went in the book,” but screenwriter Jack Thorne has form for transposing the psyche of tweenage boys to the small screen. He wrote and filmed Lord of the Flies at the same time as his hit show Adolescence, which had him bouncing between Pontefract and a remote Malaysian island.
