Frank Clancy (Robert Powell) is a superstar Fleet Street journalist and editor in the London of the swinging 60s.
Frank is appalled to learn that his lifelong best friend, Dick Holt (Keith Drinkel), has taken his own life, and searches for a reason by reflecting on their early lives, recreated in a series of flashbacks, starting in the 1930s when Clancy – the son of an Irish policeman – was a penniless working-class idealist growing up in Hoxton.
In dire need of money, he is given a job by a right-wing politician and seduced by his wife while her impotent Nazi-sympathiser husband watches kinkily through a trick mirror.
The characters develop against a social and political backdrop ranging from the General Strike to the Vietnam demonstrations of the 1960s and Dick Holt’s discovery of an atrocity committed by American troops in Vietnam.
This eventful and entertaining five-part dramatisation of Frederic Mullally’s novel was adapted for the BBC by Jack Pulman.
Frank Clancy
Robert Powell Dick Holt
Keith Drinkel Penny Clancy
Catherine Schell Helen Kohn
Caroline Mortimer Dai Owen
James Grout George Wells
Donald Gee Edna Malone
Cherry Morris Mr Holt
Michael Golden Madge
Mavis Walker Mrs Baker
Vivienne Moore Lucy Caldwell
Eileen Helsby Ted Shatto
John Blythe Marcus Selby
T.P. McKenna Eileen Clancy
Barbara Young Jim Clancy
John Junkin Aunt Rita
Rosemary Martin Gordon Clancy
Paul Aston Michael Clancy
John Nightingale Meg Mace
Gwen Nelson Grace Clancy
Brenda Cavendish Deirdre Clancy
Jan Francis
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Frank is appalled to learn that his lifelong best friend, Dick Holt (Keith Drinkel), has taken his own life, and searches for a reason by reflecting on their early lives, recreated in a series of flashbacks, starting in the 1930s when Clancy – the son of an Irish policeman – was a penniless working-class idealist growing up in Hoxton.
