1971-79: TV: FATHERS AND FAMILIES (1977)

In 1977, TP appeared in the distinguished John Hopkins television drama, Fathers and Families. Directed by Christopher Morahan in six seventy-minute screenplays this taut and striking drama pulled down the facade and polite aspiration of middle-class family perfection to reveal a quintet of five fathers, each apparently doomed to fail.

The Writer: John Hopkins

Fathers and Families writer, John Hopkins was probably one of the the finest writers the medium has ever produced.

Originally a floor manager at the BBC he moved into production and then full-time writing, cutting his teeth on over fifty episodes of the police drama 'Z Cars' at a time when it was being widely admired by viewers and critics alike for its gritty and realistic dialogue.

His four-part play, Talking to a Stranger, which tells the story of a family weekend from four different perspectives is regarded as a highlight of 1960s television drama. George Melly reviewing it for The Observer descibed it as 'television's first authentic masterpiece'.

With Fathers & Families he returned to the realm of malfunctioning family life on a larger and more ambitious scale, this time featuring five families linked by the character of John Malory (Dinsdale Landen), a family solicitor.

Hopkin's writing for the drama was characteristically suspensensful while his dialogue was spare, but altogether human, as he depicted a group of men who were not inherently cruel but at times frighteningly cold. Trevor Grove previewing the series for the Telegraph noted Hopkin's 'sure use of artifice - a pause here, an unfinished sentence there, a cliche abandoned in mid flight ensures that dramatic tension seldom lapses into slavish naturalism."

The Cast

In the case of TP's character, a high flying tv executive, Charles Matthews, he is not a client of the solicitor's, but the married man that his young daughter is having an affair with. As 'glossily portrayed' by TP, this is a man with a core of icy cool who enjoys the attributes of a wife, children, and a mistress, but actually doesn't seem to care all that much for the humans in his life.

Also featured in the parallel storylines were Anton Rodgers, Gareth Thomas and Bejamin Whitrow, in chilling form as a wife-beating estate agent.

The Critics.

While Fathers and Families did not entirely make the mark of earlier Hopkins dramas, it did, however, garner TP some of the finest reviews of his television career including a mini-dissertation by Bevis Hillier in The Observer who wrote of 'McKenna's ... inspired villainy, [a] distinguished evil', while the Sunday Times referred to TP's 'grizzled lover Charles Matthews portrayed as a man instinctually, pointlessly, self-defeatingly evil as Iago.'