 Sex, adultery, betrayal, domestic violence, incest, revenge. 1976 was quite a
year for television drama, with audiences stunned by the BBC dramatisation of
Robert Graves' I, Claudius. But the year was barely a week old when winter-weary
viewers were gripped by a more contemporary tale of dysfunctional family life,
also classically influenced - allegedly by ancient Greek drama.
A Bouquet of Barbed Wire (ITV), adapted from her novel by Andrea Newman, attracted over 24
million viewers, and became a 'success de scandale'.
Newman's work as novelist and scriptwriter has always been an
intriguing mix of autobiography, biography and fantasy, and audiences enjoy
working out which is which. She has a knack of tapping into the zeitgeist - the
seismic changes in family life since WWII and people's anxieties about their
relationships, although if asked, most people would say she writes about sex.
Born in 1938 in Dover, Kent, she was an only child - and apparently a
grandniece of Elisabeth Barrett Browning. She began writing stories at 8 or 9
and once described the process as "acting for shy people". During the war years,
with a father in the Royal Air Force and a working mother, she was mainly
brought up by a grandmother. Following an English degree at London University,
she taught English in a grammar school until her first book was published in
1964.
A film based on another of her early novels, Three into Two Won't Go
(1968), was directed by Peter Hall, but her first real break came after
dramatising one of her short stories for television, with an invitation to write
two episodes of Helen, A Woman of Today (ITV, 1973). This was an early example
of the new feminist drama, in which the titular character, discovering her
husband's affair, chooses to leave him and start life again on her own, with her
two children. Unusually for the time, the story was told from her viewpoint.
Newman also contributed two episodes to Intimate Strangers (ITV, 1974), which
featured the effects of a man's heart attack on his work and family.
Two years later came her huge success with Bouquet, in which the
relationship permutations seemed endless. Newman was persuaded to write a
sequel Another Bouquet (ITV, 1977), but didn't write for TV again until 1980,
with an ambitious original 12-part series, Mackenzie (BBC), which followed the
fortunes of a womanising builder, his family and acquaintances over two decades.
Alexa (BBC, 1982), adapted from another of her novels, and Imogen's Face (ITV,
1998), an original script, were less popular, but she found success again
with two more series pushing at boundaries of taste and acceptability in TV
drama: A Sense of Guilt (BBC, 1990) and An Evil Streak (ITV, 1999), both with
Trevor Eve as a sexually manipulative anti-hero.
Newman has always divided the critics. Some have welcomed her questioning of
received ideas of morality and social behaviour, while others have complained of
weak dialogue and characterisation. Julian Barnes described her as "a chilly moralist",
adding, "the brutal side of loving is her speciality - the meanness, the possessiveness,
the envy and the spite." Hilary Spurling, in The Observer, called her "an off-the-peg Iris
Murdoch". Now in her seventies, she has written little in the past decade, but
A Bouquet of Barbed Wire was remade, with a different script, for
ITV1 in 2010 - starring Trevor Eve.
Janet Moat
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FILM & TV CREDITS
