The series wanted to go for a touch of glamour and Lytton being a gossip columnist certainly caught the Sloane Ranger set popular at the time before they morphed into Yuppies. Just look at all those long gas guzzling BMWs and Mercedes cars. No wonder there is a big hole in the ozone layer.
A party thrown in a mansion involving a banker's teenage daughter having a relationship with an older record producer gets in the diary pages. The girls father, a wealthy private banker invites Lytton for dinner. Lytton finds the father's obsessive behaviour strange and decides to look further into his late wife's death. He finds a story but more as to how the father managed to keep the bank afloat during some dark times.
In the 1980s the reputation of the tabloid press was in the gutter. Peter Bowles as co-creator of the series wants to make Lytton a bit of a crusader, a man with a good heart but also someone who will cynically lie for a good story which he does here to get someone on his side.
It is a fine line to tread especially as diary columnists of middle brow newspapers had only a slightly better reputation than serial killers. I am not kidding. The comedian John Cleese once said of Nigel Dempster that if it ever dawned on him why he did the things he did, Dempster would kill himself.
It is odd seeing the newsroom at work. Given this series was broadcast in 1985, everyone were using typewriters. Not a computer in sight. Also research consisted of phoning people you knew, contacting a friend of a friend or just asking a junior to do some legwork on your behalf. Nowadays, it can be done in 30 seconds using Google.
This is the problem with this episode. It all looks rather slow and you think what is so interesting about a rich teenager going out with a record producer.
A party thrown in a mansion involving a banker's teenage daughter having a relationship with an older record producer gets in the diary pages. The girls father, a wealthy private banker invites Lytton for dinner. Lytton finds the father's obsessive behaviour strange and decides to look further into his late wife's death. He finds a story but more as to how the father managed to keep the bank afloat during some dark times.
In the 1980s the reputation of the tabloid press was in the gutter. Peter Bowles as co-creator of the series wants to make Lytton a bit of a crusader, a man with a good heart but also someone who will cynically lie for a good story which he does here to get someone on his side.
It is a fine line to tread especially as diary columnists of middle brow newspapers had only a slightly better reputation than serial killers. I am not kidding. The comedian John Cleese once said of Nigel Dempster that if it ever dawned on him why he did the things he did, Dempster would kill himself.
It is odd seeing the newsroom at work. Given this series was broadcast in 1985, everyone were using typewriters. Not a computer in sight. Also research consisted of phoning people you knew, contacting a friend of a friend or just asking a junior to do some legwork on your behalf. Nowadays, it can be done in 30 seconds using Google.
This is the problem with this episode. It all looks rather slow and you think what is so interesting about a rich teenager going out with a record producer.
