A Bouquet of Barbed Wire

Thursday 10th November

I watched the TV serial first, then ran out and bought the book, which was unusual for me as I was usually drawn to watching something because I had already read the book, and then feeling slightly let down, as the characters never quite lived up to my imagination of them. This time around I got hooked, line and sinker I might add, to Prue and her mother Cass, and her American Husband, the precocious Gavin, and her obsessed and lovelorn father Peter, played superbly by Frank Finlay.  It was amazingly modern and frank, very risqué for 1976, and terribly exciting, with its combinations of flirting and eroticism.  The dark undercurrent of mental if not physical incest of Peter for his daughter was quite shocking too.  But so brilliantly acted, and skillfully written that it teased you right up to the end.  It was written by Andrea Newman, a writer I was unfamiliar with, and though I loved Bouquet and bought the book and read it almost in one go, I never really liked anything else she has written.  Maybe it was just that the TV serial had so whetted my appetite for the characters that I just wanted to devour anything about them; I can remember the anticipation building through the week until it came on again, and there was a real buzz at work, as everyone talked about it, and had opinions about the morality of the different characters.  One of the themes was that Cass, Prue’s mother seems to be quite aware that Prue’s husband is trying to seduce her, and seems to be quietly encouraging him; at the time this idea, of a much older woman leading on, enticing, stealing a lover from her own daughter was really quite shocking.  Older women didn’t do that sort of thing did they?  Well, yes, they obviously did, and probably always have done in certain circles; you had just never seen it on TV before.

And there were only the four characters ever on screen, except another young girl, can’t remember her name, but she came in about half way through, otherwise it was just the four of them.  A clever device as it kept the whole thing ‘in the family’, so to speak.  And the strange thing is I cannot even remember the ending, and even though one was desperate to find out what would happen next, desperate almost to see who would be sleeping with whom next, the ending eludes me.  Maybe it never mattered really, it was just the being in the thing that mattered, being a part of it, almost as when one is caught up in an Agatha Christie film, the twists and turns in the plot matter not a whit, it is the world one is transported into that one loves; it really doesn’t signify which rich and scheming relative actually put the knife in, it is the telling of the story that one loves.

They tried in vain to write a sequel, Another Bouquet about a year later, but I only watched a couple of shows; the same characters, the same actors, but somehow I had moved on, or found it all a bit ridiculous a second time around.  It was a thing of the moment, it had truly captured the zeitgeist, and the imagination of millions of viewers, such was the power of the real golden age of television.

I think it was the last time I was really hooked on a television serial, with the possible exception of This Life, but that was twenty years later, and we had all moved on, maybe I will write about that another time.