Bouquet of Barbed Wire

Most talked about show of the 70s being 14 I wasn't allowed to watch but bizarrely a schoolmate use to tell us what happened the next day watching it many years later what a let down was very wordy and very much a product of the times Consulting my nudity bible for research I see there was none and I wouldn't be surprised if we now have more shocking plots in daytime dramas.

I only came to watch this because I had seen that James Aubrey was in it. I'd previously seen him in the 1963 version of Lord of the Flies- a real baby, very innocent, but still a brilliant actor.

Bouquet of Barbed Wire is certainly not innocent. There aren't any full blown sex scenes, buts there's a lot of before and after. Though the racy stuff is what the series is famous for, it actually has quite a gripping storyline and convincing characters.

You have Prue (played by a Susan Penhaligon) who's pretty and spoiled. She has a disturbing manipulative streak, enjoying putting her husband and parents against each other, taking full advantage of the "little girl" act. You find out that she's went out to America, married a guy called Gavin, and got pregnant with his child.

James Aubrey plays Gavin. He's meant to be an American student, complete with fake American accent. It's pretty awful ('Gee, that looks good!" Was very cringe worthy) and I wonder why they didn't just cast a real American. But he's still a good actor and I really did believe in him.

That leaves Peter (Frank Finlay) and Cassie Manson (Sheila Allen) they're Prue's parents, and both hate Gavin, especially Peter. He has a very twisted obsession with his daughter, not just protective, but possessive over her. He absolutely loathes Gavin, blaming him for taking his daughter away. He's got his own problems too; cheating on his wife with a secretary being the main one. And poor Cassie is the neutral one in the argument- but she has a few secrets of her own.

Overall, it's all pretty good. The most cringe scenes are mostly in episode one, and they're not too bad. I'll warn you that the series gets darker and darker- a tangled mess of love and cheating, and manipulation from Prue that eventually leads to abuse.

It's all very atmospheric, and shows the less bright, "hippie" side of the seventies. I would recommend it to any one who can get into a series that's focused on family and sexual dynamics.

I first saw this as a small child (progressive parents or irresponsible ones? You be the judge) and have revisited it recently on DVD. Well...! What a carry on! What a palaver! What an outrage! What a great, glorious, steaming pile of melodramatic bilge.

I dare say that its upmarket target audience were flattered to see "their lives" being portrayed with such candour. Maybe so, but what they were actually getting was little more than a dramatised Woman's Own article produced, perhaps inevitably, in the style of Crossroads. Oh alright, not Woman's Own. Observer Sunday supplement to be fair.

Bouquet of Barbed Wire is a soap. Make no mistake. I expected something a little more philosophically lethal, perhaps along the lines of Potter or Pinter in "Betrayal" mode. Alas no. This was LWT mainstream peak-time television viewing, not a night at the Royal Court. Does that make it rubbish? No, not completely. I rather enjoyed it for it's slow, single-minded approach. I like verbose scripts and this had dialogue by the ton... hours and hours of it. And more hours.

Writer Andrea Newman displays a gift for reproducing the broken speech rhythms of people under intense emotional pressure. Other times she stubs her toe on the dramatic conventions of soap opera ie. spelling out EXACTLY what the characters are thinking and feeling at all times so as to not confuse an ITV audience. This is a prime example of over-writing, typified not only by the characters' continuous declarations of their states of minds, but also by the occasional "thought voice-over" - a device as blatantly literal-minded as it was crudely achieved. These are emotional shades of grey painted in very gaudy colours.

Such lapses of taste were, doubtless, symptoms of insecurity on the part of the producers - a lack of faith in their audience. Elsewhere, the dialogue is quite entertaining although perhaps not for the intended reason, and every character seems to be a tad more eloquent than is credible. These people should write novels!

Bouquet of Barbed Wire was a huge hit in 1976. White middle-aged, middle-class swingers and bed-hoppers had rarely been brought under such close scrutiny on UK TV. Yet, for all its supposed sexual candour (hints of incest and the endless confessions of sado-masochism) it's a deeply conservative piece at heart. The naughty girls and naughty boys get what they deserve in the end - misery and death. That'll teach 'em. It pretends not to pass judgement on the characters, but, really, their comeuppance is judgement enough.

The serial's sexual politics would rightly enrage even a mild feminist then and now. For example, a major character (pregnant) is beaten half to death by her violent husband and the police are NEVER mentioned, not even by the doctors who treat her! The assault is put down to everyday domestic strife. And besides, the couple have a sado-masochistic relationship, so that's OK then. Sorry but this degree of complacency is inexcusable, even by Seventies standards.

Elsewhere, Newman has her leading lady proclaim as fact that what all women secretly want is to be slapped around by their men. Not badly enough to end up in hospital, mind you, but enough to make it exciting. Uh-huh. I wonder if "Andrea Newman" isn't a pseudonym. Could there be an "Andrew Newman" who's fooled us all? Abysmal.

So, what's good about it? It's ludicrousness. Viewed by contemporary audiences, a lot of it is enjoyable on a trash basis. There are moments of unintended hilarity only appreciable thirty years hence eg. The leading lady's off-screen lover (a very lusty chap) is called Sven Erickson. I kid you not. Plus, our dysfunctional TV family's name is Manson. Geddit? And of course there's Frank Finley's wardrobe - a nightmare torrent of Burtons menswear. Frank's ties are... well, Bouquet Of Barbed Wire features the first known instance of a tie wearing a man (old joke but never more applicable).

The performers are actually damn good. Finley plays it for real, and Susan Penhaligon is authentically unsettling as his neurotic daughter. Everyone else is up to scratch.

Finally and sadly, I'm beginning to wonder if the golden age of television was all that golden. I've revisited quite a few of these old 70s shows on DVD lately, and a lot of them are actually quite bland, or, as in Bouquet, ridiculous. Incisiveness and credible emotional depth were not necessarily the norm. Perhaps writers like Dennis Potter really were one-offs after all.

The previous long-winded review completely misses the point about this series.

Andrea Newman first wrote this story as a novel in the early Seventies, and she has written many other novels and TV series on the same theme - that of the "generation gap" being manipulated by sexually active teenagers. The author is not writing from a "male" or "conservative" point of view, she has simply observed a lot of families and individuals under stress and accurately described a lot of the social neuroses of the Seventies,

(As a matter of fact, I heard Andrea Newman on the radio a few years ago saying that she also wanted to mirror the classic Greek plays such as Oedipus, which would explain some of the more lurid activities in her stories - men jumping into bed with their mothers-in-law, etc.) Certainly the sexual content (without actual nudity) in this series went well beyond anything seen on British TV before this point, but the sex scenes are realistic, not absurd fantasies. Maybe this is why the series made such a huge impact on the viewers. To even hint at incestuous feelings makes most viewers feel uncomfortable, and this had never been implied on TV before (and, come to think of it, few 21st century dramas would dare do this now).

I was very impressed by the acting in this series; this was made back in the days when most TV drama resembled stage plays performed in front of video cameras, and most of the cast are very skilled theatre actors. An exception is James Aubrey, whose "American" accent is hopeless - shouldn't the director have told him not to bother?

The overall message of the series - or at least the message that I perceived - seems to be that sex makes everyone unhappy. Which is rather surprising for the Seventies, but then good writers are people who don't just copy their contemporaries, but have the guts to say what they really think.

This TV series exposed the sexual tensions behind an apparently normal British middle class family. Mother and daughter enjoying being knocked about by their lovers. The mother having an affair with the surgeon saving the life of her husband. The series was a big thing at the time, and began the requirement to have more & more spicy story lines.