The tone of the series was set in the very first episode, when the bucolic and frequently borderline-alcoholic lifestyle of the Larkin family is interrupted by the arrival of a tax inspector, Charley, asking to see details of Pop’s income. Starring David Jason as Pop, Pam Ferris as Ma and a little-known actress called Catherine Zeta-Jones as eldest daughter Mariette, it was a ratings triumph and cemented Bates in the public imagination as an author of slight, sentimental and whimsical novels. Instead, HE Bates is little-read these days, his life’s work reduced to one inescapable association: The Darling bloody Buds of May.Īnyone over 40 knows the reason: in the early Nineties, an ITV adaptation of Bates’s novels about Pop and Ma Larkin and their many children living in rustic Kent in the 1950s had viewers glued to their screens. He was one of the leading English novelists of the mid-20th century and might have hoped to have earned a place at the top table alongside Waugh, Orwell, Nancy Mitford and Graham Greene.
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