Saturday, June 18, 2022

Watch All Night and Barriers: Unscrambling my memories

Having more or less vindicated my memory of having once heard a purported real "stone tape" on the radio, let me confess to a less accurate recollection.

Take a look at these tweets.

October 7, 2021

Replies to them convinced me that I had run together two different serials screened by ITV on Sunday afternoons in that era.

The girl who met her father and was then told she hadn't (a plot that owes something to the early Dirk Bogarde film So Long at the Fair) came from Watch All Night.

But the boy with the flute had wandered in from another series altogether: Barriers.

You can see its opening titles above. I have watched the first episode and, with it scenes of the East/West border and public school life, it feels like John le Carré for teenagers. 

So it's appropriate that its star, Benedict Taylor, went on to play the young Magnus Pym in the BBC adaptation of A Perfect Spy.

There were two series of Barriers. Only the first is on YouTube and I think it was the second that I watched, which makes this last point hard to prove.

But could that haunting theme be the reason I am convinced that Fauré's Sicilienne was once used to introduce a period detective series?

A big of googling shows I am not alone in this belief, but if Taylor turns out to have played Sicilienne at some point in the second series of Barriers, I suspect that will clarify another of my unconfirmed memories.

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