1 9 7 5 (UK)
5 x 50 minute episodes
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 committed suicide, 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