So I became a sort of... whatever I became. I don't know. And then I thought – the movies were drying up – I thought I would write a series of plays about people at Cambridge and what happened to them later. So from 1972 on until '76, '75 actually, I wrote a series of plays which is called The Glittering Prizes. In those days the BBC was not the dirigiste place that it is now.

I met somebody who... through my friend David Deutsch I met the head of plays, a man called Gerald Savory, who had one hit in the West End called George and Margaret, who was head of plays. So Gerald said, what do you want to do? And I said, well, I'd like to do a sort of lifeboat series of people at Cambridge, some do well, some don't do well, sort of based on various people I know but not entirely, and he said, well, let's open some champagne, that's fine. Thos days are gone forever, but by God, I do miss them.

So I set about writing [The] Glittering Prizes, and then... and I did. I wrote them in France, and the first play we were going to do in England I came back for the read-through, and then I went back to France again, because by that time our son Stephen, I think, was going to school in France, because we had a... the teacher at the village school had been born in our house, so he said of course I'll take him, so...