Frederic Raphael's series finds itself in much reduced circumstances
Fame and Fortune Radio 4
The sad thing about fame and fortune is that, like shares in Northern Rock, their value can go down as well as up. As Frederic Raphael says in one of the aphorisms he uses in place of dialogue in his serial Fame and Fortune (Saturdays from 3 November, 2.30pm), the bubble of reputation can burst and you end up as a wet drop on the world's dirty floor. The sad thing about Fame and Fortune is that it is being broadcast on the radio, whereas the work to which it is a sequel, The Glittering Prizes, was the must-see television drama of 1976. The author offered its successor to television and television passed.
Tuning in last weekend, I was naturally hoping to find Adam, Glittering's hero, to be struggling within a bubble of reputation that if it has not burst has considerably deflated. Perhaps his masterpiece had been belatedly reprinted not by its original publisher, Penguin, but by an outfit called JR Books because its sequel had been adapted by BBC radio rather than BBC television. But Raphael's saga, the media world's Dance to the Music of Time, has not yet reached the millennium, merely 1979, and Freddie - I mean Adam - is at the height of his fame winning Oscars for his screenplays and respect for his novels. His latest, The Vulture's Portion, sounds like a follow-up to his semi-autobiographical A Double Life, in which he worried that, at least half the time, his hero was a bad man.
The difficulty about joining in Adam's concern for his immortal soul is that, like the Jewish atheist himself, we do not believe he has one. Adam wears a metaphorical Star of David on his forehead not through any love of Israel but because he hopes it will bring out the worst in the upper-class English he encounters. Saturday's opener had him being slapped by one such, the sister of Donald, his roommate at Cambridge, a chap who would be ruling the nation by now had he not contracted leukemia and died before graduating from the city of perspiring dreams (the pun is a Raphael copyright). Francesca has not forgiven Adam for writing about her brother and family in a novel. That's fine, because he has not forgiven her for calling him "Jew" during a tennis match in nineteen-fifty-something.
Adam is not happy. We know this because his lovely wife Barbara has had a dream about Adam being happy and Adam asks what he was like in it and she says "unrecognisable". There is a suggestion that he feels some deep Jewish guilt at having lived while Donald died. We leave him at the end of the episode contemplating selling out by joining a consortium for a television franchise (oh the irony) and, it seems, adultery. If he succumbs to the latter it will be a shame because his fidelity to Barbara is the best thing about him.
Actually, the best thing about him is his wit. Barbara says: "You're not talking, Adam. You are writing. I can hear the typewriter clacking behind every word." But that is true of all the characters, including her. It is the glory of Raphael's script. He writes as coruscatingly as Wilde. His wordplay may not be Joycean but it is Cooperesque (as in Jilly). It is a little rough that he sends up Clive James so savagely in the character Alan Parks when Parks's sin is his own: garrulous, well-turned cynicism.
We hear Parks interviewing Labour's defeated stars on the 1979 election results programme. None of Adam's varsity contemporaries seem much bothered by Sunny Jim's ousting from No 10. Most are secretly pleased, especially the politics lecturer Tim Pope, who accurately predicts Labour will now suffer a sharp attack of the Trots. Raphael will presumably show his cast suffering for their flippancy into the 1980s.
Raphael's reputation has certainly suffered. The original Glittering cast has loyally followed the sequel to the radio and Tom Conti (Adam), Nigel Havers, Angela Down et al give his verbal sword fights their all. It is a pleasure to listen to. But you would never catch the telly these days devoting six hours to the lunching classes (they always lunch "about" something, so they can put eating against tax), particularly since the men tend to treat the women as objects or audiences. Thatcherism championed a new meritocracy and it left the Raphael set high and dry. Fame and Fortune is a guilty, nostalgic treat.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for The Times
Pick of the week
Paul Gambaccini’s Hall of Heroes
4 November, 4pm, Classic FM
The Gamb’s back, boasting how he made Gorecki a millionaire.
Can newspapers survive?
5 November, 11am, Radio 4
Or why our sleepy press barons are getting their just desserts.
Free Thinking Lecture
9 November, 9.45pm, Radio 3
Phil Redmond on ID cards and DNA databases in the age of Hollyoaks.
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