The Glittering Prizes

One of the best British mini-series ever. I've been trying to buy this series on VHS or DVD for the longest time. It's not available. I'm hoping someone from the BBC will read this and get the ball rolling. The Glittering Prizes is not to be missed. Tom Conti is terrific, but then again, so is the entire cast. It's a wonderful ensemble piece. The screenplay was written by the incredibly witty Frederic Raphael, who adapted it from his novel. Raphael is known for "Darling" and a few other British films from the 60s and 70s. He also wrote most of "Eyes Wide Shut" before Kubrick re-wrote sections of it. The most recent film I've seen written by Raphael is "Coast To Coast" directed by Paul Mazursky and starring Judy Davis and Richard Dreyfuss. "Coast To Coast" was not released in theaters, only on cable. It's available on DVD and is very funny. The Glittering Prizes deserves its chance on DVD, too.

It's a pity that this extraordinary piece of ensemble acting is currently unvavailable. It's a bittersweet piece, akin to Peter's Friends or The Big Chill, but more realistic (it's a set of scenes from lives, not a single short-term reunion). The acting is superb. Whoever has the rights: make this series available!

Totally engrossing series. Excellent cast, with a young Tom Conti particularly outstanding. Many mini-series have since come and gone, but very few match it in quality or in hauntingly evoking an era. A masterpiece.

None of the British mini-series that found their way across the Atlantic stand as a greater achievement than "The Glittering Prizes." Not "I: Claudius," not "Brideshead Revisited," none of them.

Frederic Raphael's script strikes just the right combination of warmth and acidity with a note of genuineness that we don't always associate with this writer. The performances are uniformly apt. Many of the young cast would go on to solid careers, yet few of them would ever give greater performances than they do here.

Undoubtedly the TV technology of the period may appear quaint, but that certainly hasn't held back "I, Claudius." I have seen this series again since the first American run in 1977, so I'm not relying only on dim memory. The writing and acting still hold up.

So many of these mini-series are really second-rate, sometimes dreary, but that's what average means, average. "The Glittering Prizes" is among a handful of really great pieces of television, and we are waiting impatiently for the BBC to complete excavation of the archives and place this wondrous series before a new generation of viewers.

The script's the star of this sprawling six-part series from Frederic Raphael: probing, caustic and matchlessly witty, particularly in the two most successful episodes, the Brideshead-esque 'An Early Life' and the frankly outlandish 'A Past Life', which features Eric Porter as a fascist sympathiser. The acting is variable (Tom Conti's bravura central performance is the obvious standout), the worldview sometimes unsavoury and the penultimate episode has passages that really drag, but it's a work touched with a rare brilliance and the dialogue is simply spectacular. I picked it up after hearing Nigel Havers (who has a small but memorable role) say it was the best script he'd ever read.