Malcolm Bradbury

It is described as an all-star satirical comedy thriller, which is true in decreasing order of accuracy. It is starry as a starry, starry night. Satiric, certainly. Funny, not really. Thrilling, hardly at all if you've heard it on radio or read the book.

The Green Man is not one of Kingsley Amis's better books but that may not matter as a writer's minor work quite often seems to televise better. Perhaps there is more room for television to move around.

The cast is as rich as the menu: Ian Richardson, Charles Gray, Griff Rhys Jones and David Jason, whose galvanic twitches of the head look like an attempt to screw his bowler hat on firmly without using his hands.

Blott, as the front titles and rude music attest, was intended to be a seaside postcard. It is extraordinary that rational people could have worked on this serial for months without feeling a frightful sense of premonition. The same sensation that swept Oates when he first clapped eyes on his spavined ponies.

The temptation to set off sideways like this suggests that I don't much fancy the way ahead. Blott on the Landscape is a brisk whisking of sex and violence, say Lady Chatterley's Lover and World War II, into heartless farce. I rather wonder if black farce is at home on television. The audience is, which may be the trouble.

I suspect the problem [is] the production. Producer Geoffrey Perkins, whose Hitch-Hiker's Guide did for radio what the slicer has done for bread, obviously knows about comedy. But this production of Patterson seemed to deaden what may well have been a promising script. The delivery of nearly all the actors (always excepting Richard Vernon) was wildly over-emphatic.