First viewed : 8 October 1986
This is one of those where I can't quite put my finger on why I stuck with it - apart from the boredom of being on the dole of course - despite finding much of it unpleasant and distasteful. It was a four part adaptation of a Fay Weldon novel about a large, unattractive woman who executes a long and elaborate revenge plan against her husband and the woman for whom he abandoned her . I haven't read the novel so I don't know if its clearer there whether she actually makes a Satanic pact to achieve her ends as suggested by the series or merely takes on a new personality.
Newcomer Julie T Wallace played Ruth with Patricia Hodge as the scarlet woman, romantic novelist Mary Fisher. The husband Bobo was played by Dennis Waterman with such a lack of charm or personality that you couldn't understand why either of them wanted him . It was hard to know where your sympathies were supposed to lie in the series. Ruth's revenge plan involved such cruelty to innocents. including abandoning her own children and making Mary's mother ( Liz Smith ) appear incontinent in order to ruin Mary's idyll, that the latter seemed sympathetic by comparison. The plan also involved extreme personal degradation including a naked beating from a kinky judge ( Bernard Hepton ) in order to get Bobo a lengthy sentence after she frames him and then bonking with a priest ( Tom Baker, someone I never wanted to see naked ) before sending him on to Mary. In the final act she has extensive plastic surgery to look exactly like the now deceased Mary and moves back in with Bobo prompting the obvious question, what was it all for ? The series was also entirely filmed on VT giving it a suitably harsh look.
I did like the theme song, Warm Love Gone Cold by Christine Collister and took an interest in her career for some time afterwards. The series went down well both here and in America and there was a considerably bowdlerised film version starring Roseanne Barr and Meryl Streep in 1989.
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