“Pride and Prejudice” Fans Are Flocking to Budget Remake of the Iconic 1995 Series

The BBC’s iconic 1995 TV adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice reportedly cost roughly £1 million per episode (about $9.6 million) to make. And it shows. The attention to period detail earned the series BAFTA nominations for costuming and hair and makeup, and is just part of what has made it perhaps the most beloved version of Austen’s novel ever produced.

Nearly 30 years later, Ben Fensome is getting by on a much tighter budget. His popular “Budget Pride & Prejudice” videos feature the U.K.-based actor performing every role — from Colin Firth’s rigid Mr. Darcy to Barbara Leigh-Hunt’s imperious Lady Catherine de Bourgh — lip-synced to dialogue from the series, while wearing hilarious DIY takes on the original’s sumptuous costumes.

“It’s whatever I can find around the house,” Fensome, 38, tells PEOPLE, estimating that he’s spent a grand total of £10 ($12) making the clips, which have been viewed by hundreds of thousands of fans around the world on TikTok.

In Fensome’s version, multicolored socks stand in as cravats, doilies take the place of lace caps and — in perhaps his most notable innovation — safety-pinned T-shirts recreate Elizabeth Bennet’s regency-period neckline. (Since he officially began the series last August, Fensome reckons he’s ruined at least three T-shirts — though he’s managed to stab himself with a stray pin only once.)

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“There’s people who say, ‘This really made my day,’ or ‘I’m in a really tough time and this made me laugh,’ ” Fensome says of the overwhelmingly positive response to the project. “As soon as I post one, people are like, ‘Oh! My show’s on! My show’s on!’ So, it’s just great to know there’s people that are waiting for it. Because I wouldn’t do it if people didn’t want it. But people do.”

The will-they-won’t-they, opposites-attract dynamic between Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth (played in the 1995 series by Jennifer Ehle) has made Pride and Prejudice one of the greatest love stories of all time. But Austen’s 1813 novel is also the template for the modern romantic comedy. It's rife with hilarious social satire and screenwriter Andrew Davies’s pitch-perfect rendering of the author’s broadly ridiculous characters like Mr. Collins (David Bamber), Mrs. Bennet (Alison Steadman) and youngest Bennet sister Lydia (Julia Sawalha) is what Fensome says he responded to — as Mr. Darcy might say — most ardently as a child watching his family’s VHS copy of the series.

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“I think I just liked the funny bits as a kid,” he says. “There’s a lot of kind of very big outlandish characters which are very funny, so I think that’s what I responded to. As I got older, then I sort of liked the story a bit better.”

The BBC series, which first aired in the U.S. on A&E in 1996, was neither the first, nor the last adaptation of Austen's novel. This year, director Joe Wright’s 2005 film version starring Keira Knightly and Matthew Macfadyen is celebrating its 20th anniversary. But Fensome says the BBC series has stood the test of time and managed not to be eclipsed because “it has complete trust, more or less, in the source material.”

“It’s just the mix of all the things,” he explains. “It’s the perfect casting, they really have trust in the source material, and particularly with the dialogue as well. A lot of the dialogue is from the book. They take liberties, of course they do, here and there. But by and large it’s very faithful.”

“Also, you know, there’s the wet Colin thing,” he adds.

Fensome, of course, is referring to an infamous scene, added by Davies, in which Firth’s Mr. Darcy encounters Elizabeth after having taken a dip in a lake on his estate. The image of the strapping Firth in a wet white shirt caused a sensation at the time. Writing about the series as it was airing in her "Bridget Jones's Diary" newspaper column, author Helen Fielding had her fictional alter-ego repeatedly turning to the wet-shirt-scene in moments of emotional turmoil, and later based Bridget's main love interest, Mark Darcy, on Firth's Mr. Darcy. In 2003, the Guardian called the scene “one of the most unforgettable moments in British TV history.”

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The scene, which Fensome has recreated twice, may seem quaintly tame now. But, says Fensome, “When you watch it from the start, you get the societal mores and all the kind of very prim and proper things all the way through. It makes it more of a big deal when it happens, because obviously they haven’t slept together, they haven’t seen each other naked. And whilst that bit isn’t in the novel, they don’t overdo it. Like, he is fully dressed and he’s just wet. That’s all it is. And I think there might be a nostalgia making it as big as it is. Because I think the intention with that is to make it a bit awkward. It’s not sexy, it’s just awkward.”

Fensome currently has no plans to mark the BBC series’ 30th anniversary in September. “Hopefully I’ll be done by then,” he says. “I’m just sort of taking every video as it comes.”

As of January 2025, Fensome has posted 44 installments. He recently announced that he would be taking a short break while traveling to London for work, with regular posts resuming in February. And for Americans currently unable to download TikTok in the wake of the enactment of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act on Jan. 19, Fensome also posts his "Budget Pride & Prejudice" clips on Instagram and YouTube.

“People really want it to be stitched together into one big thing," he notes. “You can’t really do that on YouTube because of copyright stuff, so I don’t know where or how I’d do that. But maybe I’ll do something like that.”

Fensome also recently completed another Austen-adjacent project: narrating the upcoming audiobook version of author Brandon Dragan’s recent novel Mr. Bingley: Just As a Gentleman Ought to Be. And while Fensome says he’s “eyeing” director Ang Lee’s 1995 film version of Sense and Sensibility, don’t expect a follow-up to “Budget Pride & Prejudice” anytime soon.

“I think I would have to have a big ol’ break before I do all that,” he says.

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