Kingsley Amis wrote an episode of Softly Softly: Task Force and it was about his relationship with his son Martin

Well here's something I didn't know, even though I've seen the episode on YouTube before and even remember watching it when it was broadcast in 1974. 

Kingsley Amis wrote for Softly Softly: Task Force.

If you click on the picture it will take you to the whole episode. Many thanks to John Salisbury for posting it on YouTube.

That picture, incidentally, doesn't show Kingsley's son Martin Amis, though it looks uncannily like him. It's actually Simon Fisher-Turner, who we've come across before in Tom Brown's Schooldays.

But if you read this 2006 Daily Mail account of Kingsley Amis leaving his wife Hilly for Elizabeth Jane Howard, it's hard not to see him and the teenage Martin in this script:

When they arrived - at midnight because their plane was delayed - Amis opened the door in his striped pyjamas, 'rearing back from us,' as Martin recalled, 'in histrionic consternation.' The telegram Hilly sent announcing their visit hadn't arrived.

'It wasn't just that he was surprised to see us. He was horrified to see us. We had busted him in flagrante delicto.' Amis's opening words to the boys were: 'You know I'm not alone.'

Martin describes Jane looming behind Amis 'in her white towel bathrobe, with her waist-long fair hair, tall, serious, worldly, already busying herself, cooking eggs and bacon, finding sheets, blankets, for the beds in the spare room.

'It would have been an impossible heresy for me to admit any woman was more beautiful than my mother. But I could tell at once that Jane, while also being beautiful, was certainly more experienced. I acknowledged the appeal of that with simple resignation and I did not feel disloyal.'

Philip's first impression of Jane was that she was 'obviously someone who didn't like children'. She watched the boys warily, while they watched her, she says. 'We were all trying to conceal our shock - they hadn't known I'd be there, and we'd had no warning of their arrival.'

There then followed a week of what Jane calls 'grandiose treats' (mostly visits to the cinema) and 'long and often tearful sessions spent by the boys alone with their father'.

Martin remembers Amis being 'outwardly calm, unusually quiet voiced' during these sessions, patiently taking 'whatever we threw at him', including, 'incredibly', Philip calling him 'a c**t'.