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.
Debuting on ITV at 9.00 pm on 9 January 1976, Finlay played Peter Manson, a wealthy publisher living in ticketyboo Surrey, stricken with jealous passion when pouting Prue, his 19-year-old 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 – unbearably spoiled and manipulative – delighted in playing Peter and Gavin off against each other and was soon tagged television’s “right little bitch”,
But the veneer of upper-middle-class respectability that covered the family’s broiling desires and jealousies really began to crack when Peter embarked on an affair with his new secretary, Sarah (Deborah Grant), a woman of around Prue’s age whom he invited into Prue’s bed while Prue was away.
Sarah clearly had daddy issues, her father being a wastrel who scrounged money off her. She was also seeing two other lovers closer to her own age.
Peter’s wife, Cassie (Sheila Allen), meanwhile, had a guilty secret of her own. As The Observer‘s critic Clive James put it, “By the end, everyone had been to bed with everyone else, except the baby.”
Unlike soap opera proper, Prue 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 badly considering.
In Another Bouquet in 1977, Cassie promptly took the grieving young Gavin as her lover, and Peter then had a fraught affair with Gavin’s new girlfriend, Vicky, played by Elizabeth Romilly.
In 2010, the series was remade as a three-part miniseries starring Trevor Eve as Peter and Imogen Poots as Prue. But it didn’t capture the public imagination to the extent of the original, a true television landmark that paved the way for more explicit blockbusters to come.
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
The all-purpose tease, Prue – unbearably spoiled and manipulative – delighted in playing Peter and Gavin off against each other and was soon tagged television’s “right little bitch”,
