prevailing mood. It's like Graham Greene's novels, the ones he differentiated from his entertainments. From the start we're in Greeneland. No escape. A vulture lands on a roof in the opening page of 'The Heart of the Matter.' You can see where that one's going. Thomas Hardy falls into the same trap with those last two novels of his. Once the horse dies in, what, Chapter Three? it's all downhill for Tess. But these things are, finally, matter of taste, and let's finish this line of 'argument' by saying, with current crop of grim cop dramas (and others), that I blame Scandi-noir for all this.

There may be a correspondence between the prevailing fashion for dark drama and the times we live in. And maybe I'm nostalgic for a(pictured here: he wasn't as well known as he should have been) is another of my early writer heroes. He may well be at his best, I sometimes think, with his prose memoirs of disasters than with the (stage) plays themselves. I prefer his television work (among a number, 'After Pilkington' and the early 'Spoiled' – a big influence on me) to those stage plays. I wish he’d done more. I once met him at a dinner to which I was invited at an Oxford College. Drink had been taken and I gushed (a fan, at heart) how I admired him. Later, after he began his series of published diaries, I was a bit worried I might appear in a caustic footnote: ‘Like that terrible creep who came