TV Review: Bouquet of Barbed Wire

Image from Bouquet of Barbed Wire. Photo / Supplied.

Incest drama is how Bouquet of Barbed Wire is marketed in some of the promo material. Oh, puhleeze. It's hardly about incest - rather a father's obsessive love for his daughter, which is not quite the same thing - but I guess you have to punch up the scandal factor because we're so blase about family dysfunction these days.

Author Andrea Newman, who wrote the original "Aga saga" novel on which the drama is based, said she hadn't intended the story to have any hint of incest: "I think a lot of people identified with the fact that many fathers believe no man is good enough for their daughters and that seemed pretty normal."

I have to admit I loved the original schlocky Bouquet of Barbed Wire, which screened in the late 1970s, was a huge hit and considered frightfully risque. As critic Clive James said at the time: "By the end, everybody had been to bed with everybody else except the baby." This new version is also fabulously watchable, and part of what has become quite a rare breed - the middle-class English adultery drama.

The New Statesman's Rachel Cooke has pointed out it is unusual these days to see a television drama about the rich, well-spoken, metropolitan middle-classes. "We're not supposed to care about such people any more, let alone to find their crises - our darling daughter would rather have a baby by her lover than go to university! - dramatic or involving." But we do.

This is a story about Prue (Imogen Poots), a young girl from a very "nice" family who becomes pregnant to an older man and the series of family upheavals it sets off, revealing that behind the prim facade they are all keeping secrets and shagging like rabbits. The premise was outrageously provocative in the 1970s, but in these "baby mama" days seems old-hat.

Since the shock value of the pregnant teenager has been lost, the makers of this new version have had to introduce a mystery element to make us give a toss. What has gone on between Prue's boyfriend Gavin (Tom Riley) and her father Peter (Trevor Eve) that has made them hate each other so much? No spoilers here, folks.

Waking The Dead star Trevor Eve looks emotionally constipated and is overshadowed by the gloriously restrained acting of Hermione Norris (Spooks) as Cassie, Prue's mother. "Nobody knows anything about other people's lives from looking at them from the outside," she says. That's what makes Aga sagas so riveting: nice people are not really all that nice.

Bouquet Of Barbed Wire screens Sundays on TV One at 8.30pm.