The Wexford series (on TV and in book form) captures the atmosphere of ordinary English people leading ordinary lives in ordinary flats, houses, pubs, offices - lives that sometimes become less ordinary, or as in this tale, turn out to have been pretty extraordinary all along. I loved the stifling flat shared by Miss Flinders and the predatory and controlling Miss Patel. This episode scoops up several top notch actors to set alongside the dependable George Baker, Christopher Ravenscroft and Louie Ramsay. Imelda Staunton, Sylvia Sims, and isn't that Lesley Joseph? Niall Buggy does an excellent turn as a camp pub landlord (where is he now? Gone back to Ireland?). The self-contained plot is only marred by the format's need to add soapy details of the series characters' private life. We get way way too much of Wexford's daughter, who's quit her husband thanks to some ill-digested feminism. This is lifted from the book, where it also seems shoehorned in, perhaps in response to an editor's demand for moving with the times. Wexford and his wife Dora are appealing characters, but for me you could cut all the stuff about France, and oysters, and chablis. What's that all about? Eighties middle-class aspirational lifestyle?
Review of A Sleeping Life: Part One
