Customer Reviews

The Glittering Prizes

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The Glittering Prizes comes from a golden age of television, when the BBC made British dramas for a British audience rather than overblown costume nonsense for international consumption. This six part serial is television for grownups with realistic characters speaking witty and intelligent dialogue in recognisable situations. The story, or rather stories follow a group of bright young things from their days at Cambridge in the early 1950's to success, failure, or merely resignation in the mid 1970's. Along the way, we get to know them all and perhaps even learn a thing or two about ourselves.

The production is first-rate and the acting is uniformly excellent, but the heart and soul of The Glittering Prizes are its scripts, the product of novelist and screenwriter Frederic Raphael. Anyone who has ever seen the films Darling or Two For The Road will immediately recognise his style. Always articulate and revealing, sometimes cynical, occasionally hopeful, quite often so truthful that it hurts - the sort of drama that you find yourself thinking about for days or weeks afterwards. I first saw the Glittering Prizes on PBS in the late 1970's and have been waiting ever since to see it again. I'm amazed how some scenes and even bits of dialogue have stayed so fresh in my memory, while other parts I had completely forgotten. It's great to see it all again.

Raphael has always said that the main character of Adam Morris, brilliantly played by Tom Conti, is not autobiographical, but the facts and similarities suggest otherwise. At first, we expect this entire series to be his story, but soon a fascinating array of other characters slink their way onto center stage. In fact, Conti's character only appears at the very end of Part Two and is not in Parts Four and Five at all. This is very much an ensemble piece with each episode a kind of self-contained play, but one that is enriched by what we learn from the others. Some characters are clearly meant to be admired while other are just as obviously intended to be despised. But most are neither one nor the other, but a mix of both, just like real people. And each viewer will respond to them in their own way. As I said, all the acting is superb and it is interesting to see some now well-known performers in early roles. Everyone will have their own favourites - one of mine is Angela Down as Joyce, if only for her delicious voice.

With so many highs, it is perhaps to be expected that the series hits an occasional weak point. The most obvious of these is in Part Three when Adam (on behalf of the BBC) goes to interview a notorious British supporter of fascism. While providing the opportunity for a powerhouse performance by Eric Porter, the sequence sits uneasily with the tone of the rest of the series and goes on for far too long. It is uncomfortable to watch (and was probably intended to be) but adds little to the whole. Raphael dealt with many other issues - race, homosexuality, relationships, the media, his own Jewishness - much more effectively and succinctly than this episode. It's a relief (and a delight) for Adam to get back to London and to get involved with the film industry, for whom Raphael's wit is extra sharp. In one of Truffaut's Antoine Doinel films, Antoine's wife tells him that he cannot get revenge on people from his past by making them characters in his books. Raphael seems to have disproved that theory.

I said at the beginning that the BBC had changed since The Glittering Prizes was made. So has Britain. I almost wish that the show had been made years later so that we could follow the characters even further. Raphael did write a sequel - Fame And Fortune - but it only went up to 1979, the dawn of the Thatcher era. Britain has changed so much since then that The Glittering Prizes looks almost like a period piece. Not that its style or relevance or truthfulness has dated, merely its setting. There is an extra on the DVD, filmed in 1980, in which Raphael reflects on his time at Cambridge. He ends with the hope that the educational system he knew would not change into exactly what it has since become. Adam Morris, in the episode set in the mid-1960's, says that he doesn't much like England. What would he think of it now?

It's wonderful to finally have The Glittering Prizes on DVD (and a scandal that it was never released on video). It looks only slightly worse for wear (there is an onscreen apology for a particularly bad blip in Part One, fortunately not during a crcial scene). The running time of 80 minutes per episode still seems a bit strange. And the old BBC habit of using film for exterior shots and video for interior is much more noticeable than it used to be. But at least the series in preserved and available for repeated viewings. It is very British - anyone not familiar with The Goon Show will be confused by all the Bluebottle impressions in Part One, among other bits of slang and cultural references. The Glittering Prizes is the sort of thing that the BBC used to do so well but now, in the age of cable competition and political correctness, seems to have lost the knack for. I can recommend The Glittering Prizes to anyone who enjoys well-written, beautifully acted, subtly staged drama that never once insults or underestimates the intelligence of its audience. Now, Auntie Beeb, what other gems are you still hiding in your vaults?

If you never had a chance to see this show when it was on PBS, do yourself a favor and buy it now. It is wonderfully well written and acted. Shows like this just don't seem to be made anymore or else they are remade and not nearly as well done as the original. I can't wait to see it again! Tom Conti is wonderful! And I am still waiting for The Norman Chronicles to be released on DVD - another great performance from Tom Conti!

I've waited more than 20 years to see the Glittering Prizes again. I saw the original on Dutch television when I was 17 years. I try to see an episode every other day. Just to enjoy each episode as much as I can. Superior acting. Great dialogue. Can it get any better than this? don't think so....

This movie was excellent. Paced at the right tempo, and moving forward through a period of time, from university days onward. I thought Tim Conti stole the movie. I feel the necessity to watch it again, as I will enjoy it even more and might have missed something essential.

I love a good script and food for thought as much as any serious film fan, but I must report that I found this series precious and dated. Only the first two episodes held my interest. After that all the characters except Conti-Raphael became progressively more repulsive as the writing becomes oversaturated with cynicism. Too many of them expatiate at length in an overly clever--but highly unrealistic--fashion until you want to shove a cabbage into their mouths to shut them up.

Some of the issues provide historical interest: For example, you'll find that (1) the purpose of most women in Raphael's view is to lie on their backs for their charmless lovers, (2) inexcusably rude professorial alcolholism and sexual harrassment raise nary an eyebrow, and (3) unions in 1976 refused to hire blacks for jobs other than janitors. And as you listen to Conti-Raphael and too many other male characters repeatedly remind you that they're the cat's meow, you will begin to wish more and more that Raphael had a greater variety of tone to leaven his moral morass, as well as a more genuine sense of humor. If you can't laugh at or pity his characters, why bother?

Recommended for social historians and fanciers of oh-so-stuffy nastiness.

I first saw this program in 1976, and have never forgotten it. The sharp dialog stayed with me all these years, along with hopes that I would live to see it again. Well, my lucky day arrived and the wait was worth it. The most interesting aspect is that the story ended in the 1970's but we can now look back 30+ years to see the continuation of what was begun. In 1976 I saw a series about a group of bright young things meeting at Cambridge and going on to follow their careers at a time when Britain was changing, but keeping in touch and occasionally meeting up again. In 2009 I saw a series chronicling the changes in Britain from the old order and class ridden society, to the current disastrous overbearing Nanny state where everyone is on CCTV and law and order seems to have broken down, at least for the victims. Episode 5, an Academic life dealt with a newly established concrete Lego box university in Lincolnshire, where rebellious young students on government grants were studying Marxist Theory as part of a social studies course and looking for a cause for which to agitate. These students moved on and are now the establishment. the original student group from the 50's have met with varying degrees of success, but have also experienced disillusionment.

Although you may not fully comprehend some of the stories at first viewing, you find yourself thinking about it and taking another look, sometimes rethinking it, and sometimes just plain 'getting'. It would be interesting to have another episode set in the current period when the original group has retired. A well worth series to own.

At long last, the BBC, in all of its 'lack of wisdom', has offered us this brilliant, brilliant series on DVD. Hooray. I am ALWAYS amazed by the 'lack of thinking' of those that run the BBC. They seem determined to ruin the reputation of that once fine organization. They no longer seem to be making QUALITY programming, as evidenced by the rubbish bought by PBS recently (with the exception of 'Lewis') and the 'really really' dreadful and 'of no value' BBC-America. Thank goodness for video: 'The Glittering Prizes' is a great book and an excellent series. The 'then young' actors perform well and the stories are interesting. I know that I am going to enjoy the witty dialogue again and again. Thanks 'Auntie BBC' for, at long last, doing the right thing.

I remember seeing Glittering Prizes on BBC television in the early 1980s and loving it. I was teaching history and always looked forward to lunch with a colleague from the English Department who also watched this series. Our discussions were so enthusiastic that another teacher was envious that she had not gotten into this series! I tried to find this series on either video cassette format or DVD for years. The thirty years or so that have passed seem more like 30 days...

Glittering prizes is essentially a portrait of a small slice of intellectual life in Britain in its darkest political and social hours in the 50s through to the dawn of Thatcherism in the 80s. The six-part series provides a glimpse of a Britain mercifully dead or dying: the Marxist sensibilities so common in British and American academe has largely dissipated with the fall of the Soviet empire, though we can recognize the nonsensical, anti-capitalist blather even to this day. Episode Five is particularly pungent in its portrayal of Red Brick universities of 70s Britain, recruiting grounds for Lefties of every bizarre stripe.

The first and last episodes, centering on Conti's Adam Morris, are the most interesting as character portraits, while the other four episodes are Raphael's treatment of the influence of the BBC on Brit consciousness of the time, wrapped in vignettes of the characters working out relationships and career paths. The series explores roads not taken and relationships lost with great skill.

Tom Conti tends to dominate the acting, though his mugging style can be wearing. However, the writing glitters, with fast-moving dialogue almost breathless in its pace, and so full of wit and cynicism that it dazzles. Everyone is so verbally clever that you come to recognize Raphael's pen in every utterance. Conti carries a subplot of Jewish intellectualism through the story, and his relationship with his family is beautifully touching. While other characters are well-drawn and ably acted, some are too broad, and their motivation hard to credit. The music is touching. They don't make this sort of drama any more? Too bad.

Fredric Raphael's account of a group of Cambridge undergraduates affiliated with a student theatre troupe, both during their college years and in the twenty-five years thereafter, has not been available in more than three decades since it was first broadcast on the BBC2 and then for PBS. It's had such a reputation that Raphael produced a novelization and then two sequels; finally it's available on DVD, and those of us who missed it the first time around get a chance to see the original episodes in more or less their original glory. (Though the restoration for DVD has been fairly thorough, there's a blip in the first episode for which the producers are careful to apologize onscreen.) The six episodes are fairly self-contained eighty minute pieces, often without all the characters appearing in any of them; the central character of Adam Morris (played by Tom Conti), an obviously thinly disguised version of Raphael himself, more or less holds the thing together, occupying center stage in the first, third, and last episodes.

The writing in the episodes vary greatly in quality, and anyone wanting to get the full flavor of the thing should be careful to watch through the second episode, following a large group of the characters through their Tripos exams. The first episode derives far too heavily from BRIDESHEAD REVISITED, with Adam being introduced to the glamorous university life by a doomed Roman Catholic roommate dominated by his aristocratic mother back in her great country house. The finest episode may well be the fourth, "A Country Life," spotlighting the divergent paths of one character who became a David Frost-like interviewer (John Gregg) and his former romantic attachment (Angela Down) who has married another classmate and settled to a quiet family life near a school where her husband teaches. There are far too many male characters in the series who indulge in near-constant badinage with one another; though this is certainly a feature of the highly educated worldwide (and particularly in Great Britain), and the wordplay is fairly brilliantly polished, it also gets to be something of a drag after a while and you may find yourself wishing to tell these characters (especially an alcoholic played by Dinsdale Landen who becomes a university sociologist by 1970) to shut up. The acting is consistently superior, with high marks especially to Conti, who makes the Fredric Raphael character far more lovable than Raphael himself (who comes off as a pompous bore in the short nonfiction piece accompanying the DVD set), Down, as the brittle and quietly seething Joyce, and Suzanne Stone, who as Joann gets the only opportunity for a female character to come across as verbally clever as the men. The thing is worth seeing if only for its portrayal of a different era with its different mores. The fifth episode, "An Academic Life," is so of its time in its portrayal of university professors getting away with rude public drunkenness and explicit sexual harassment and being ethically bullied by their own students that it seems nearly unimaginable today.