Apart from a few nips and tucks, age has not withered Bouquet of Barbed Wire. Anyone who can remember the original steamy adaptation of Andrea Newman’s fine novel will recognise the changes. Prue, no longer the manipulative cow who graced our screens back in 1976, has been made-over as an unworldly innocent, while husband Gavin – still a deeply unpleasant wife-beater - is now a chippy, working-class Yorkshireman rather than a chippy American. And Peter, the daughter-obsessed patriarch, appears to be an altogether more anguished soul - though one suspects this has more to do with Trevor Eve’s ability to play complex, nuanced characters far better than the stiff, granite-faced Frank Finlay.
There are other changes that give this three-parter a very contemporary, recession-hit 2010 feel. Peter is struggling financially with his architectural practice, and, since we live in post-feminist times, he is knocking off his sexy junior “associate” rather than his sexy secretary. And because we no longer feel that a quick bunk-up on the office desk after hours is particularly risqué behaviour (as a freelancer, I’m simply guessing from what I see on the telly), new taboos have replaced old ones: certainly, one feels that it would have been a controversy too far to have included the original masochistic element in the beatings that Prue - played as a kind of wide-eyed ingénue by Imogen Poots – receives at the hands of her older, new husband. On a more amusing note, Peter’s wife Cassie (Hermione Norris) is now a couples counsellor.
But updating social mores aside, compelling family dramas have tended to remain more or less unchanged from the Greeks onwards: intimations of incest, complicated sexual relationships, and a family about to be torn asunder by the resurfacing of ugly secrets are all pretty much staple fare. In any case, the family name is Manson, and that gives us a pretty good clue that this lot are bound to be dysfunctional (as the novel was written in 1969, one is tempted to think that Newman was making a jokey reference to the notorious Manson “Family”).
There’s some fine acting amongst a great cast. Eve was born to play lascivious, slightly unctuous characters who make a speciality out of preying on young flesh, but he can also do interesting shades of grey (though I do remember him in a similar role years back, where he seduced a best friend’s virginal teenage daughter, and he was out-and-out caddish in that one). Despite obsessively playing footage of his 18-year-old daughter whenever he is in front of a laptop, which is often, his face is wonderful at conveying the naked fear of sinking into a moral morass of his own making. And, what a bonus, he is still dashingly handsome, despite the years.
The equally watchable Norris (pictured right) plays his wife with a brittle, anguished restraint. When Prue introduces her parents to the repugnant Gavin (a convincingly horrible Tom Riley) she gamely tries to keep up appearances, trying to steel herself against each snarky quip as though she is taking a slap in the face. As we see next week, her brittle edifice crumbles – and she gives in to some pretty unsavoury longings herself. Do tune in.
- Watch Bouquet of Barbed Wire on ITVplayer
- Buy DVDs of the current and the original Bouquet of Barbed Wire on Amazon
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