She liked difference and edginess: hence her taking on Caryl Churchill, Edward Bond and Joe Orton. She famously fell out with Prick Up Your Ears playwright John Lahr about Orton. In the opening scene she has been up all night to go to a police station, where she obtained bail for one of her authors.
Set in the genteel town, next to Brighton, of Hove, we meet jaded GP Dr Arthur Wicksteed (the delightful Jasper Britton) aged 53. His wife Muriel (Catherine Russell) longs for the romance she had, before marrying Wicksteed. The beau (and I use the word loosely here) she rejected is Sir Percy Shorter (Dan Starkey), the five feet nothing president of the BMA.
In the debate scenes, the actors speak the words that Vidal and Buckley actually spoke. Outside the debates, they confer with their advisers about how to beat the other man, and – vain in a way that only television can make people – they protest to the network that the other man is getting more of the camera.