1 9 7 6 (UK)
7 x 60 minute episodes 1 9 7 7 (UK)
7 x 60 minute episodes
Andrea Newman adapted her steamy, sexy novel, A Bouquet of Barbed Wire, for this seven-part LWT drama series, which was essentially the story of a man’s obsessive love for his daughter – with Frank Finlay and Susan Penhaligon in the main roles.
Finlay played Peter Manson, a wealthy publisher living in ticketyboo Surrey, stricken with jealous passion when pouting Prue, his daughter (Penhaligon) got married.
Television had discovered incest – among the middle classes, too – and 20 million viewers were tuning in to see how miserable it made all concerned.
American James Aubrey (who played Prue’s husband, Gavin Sorenson) recalled; “I was introduced to the actress who plays my wife. About 30 seconds later I was in bed with her. Then I was beating her senseless and within a flash I was at her funeral”.
The all-purpose tease, Prue, was soon tagged television’s ‘right little bitch’, but unlike soap opera proper she died at the end of the first series (of a pulmonary embolism after childbirth) and the producers could find no way of bringing her back the following year. But they didn’t do bad considering.
In Another Bouquet in 1977, Sheila Allen – who played Manson’s wife and was about the only decent person in the cast – promptly took the grieving young Gavin as her lover and Peter then had a fraught affair with Gavin’s new girlfriend, played by Elizabeth Romilly.
Peter Manson Frank Finlay
Prue Sorenson
Susan Penhaligon
Gavin Sorenson
James Aubrey
Cassie Manson
Sheila Allen
Sarah Francis
Deborah Grant
Geoff Roberts
Eric Carte
Vicky Elizabeth Romilly
Rupert Warner
Roland Curram
Simon
Roger Rees Monica
Ann Beach
