The Roads to Freedom

I saw this series after reading the first book and found the whole series to be a wonderful viewing experience.

The theme song is excellent and I have wanted to find a recording for years.

If you are luck enough to see any episodes or hear the theme song then take the opportunity.

If anyone knows of video or CD recordings of the series or title song then I would be most interested. Paul Downing (paul.downing@ecsoft.co.uk)

This film seemed to me to be very close to the atmosphere of the books. The film characters of Mathieu, Daniel, Lola etc all seem practically perfect renditions of the book characters. The wretched TV company says it has no plans to repeat it.

Memory plays tricks! The title of the song is in fact "La route est dure" - based on a song of the French Resistance (So ignore my previous nonsense). I came across a copy on 7" vinyl. The performance by Georgia Brown is every bit as vivid as I had remembered, raw and impassioned, and way ahead of it's time as TV theme music.

Like all the other commenters, I would love to see this - I found it gripping, one of the consistently best dramatisations I've seen on television, and as one person said, it followed the books very closely. Acting, atmosphere, pace, costumes and settings were all superb. I thought Michael Bryant in the lead role was particularly good - he had the right air of worried intelligence. Rosemary Leach, too was good - earthy and vulnerable, and Daniel Massey - tortured and irritable. I've heard the BBC deleted a lot of their old television tapes so unless a private individual has recorded it we're all doomed.

In common with may other posters I remember this series during its original broadcast as being an example of the kind of TV that before home video and time shifting one would stay home to watch and look forward to. I was disappointed when it was over and there was no more. Even the theme tune haunted me and I have been looking for a copy for years. The excellent casting period atmosphere and tone are sustained throughout the series. Contrary to some posters memory this was produced in colour although that is difficult to tell from the opening credits over a shot of Rodin's "Thinker" which lacks colour. I am less pessimistic about the availability of source material for a DVD release than some others but suspect that the difficulty and expense of negotiating the many rights involved in a re-issue would prove prohibitive. Sadly it would be inconceivable for the BBC to produce something with the same scale and ambition today. Not just because of the costs but because it is a work that is a, Foreign and b, about ideas. We can only hope that the new markets for DVD Internet broadcast and niche channels will eventually make it worthwhile remastering this forgotten masterpiece. In the meanwhile and in the absence of the opportunity to see the series I have re-read the books several times over the years always imagining Michael Bryant as Mathieu.