Frederic Raphael, 94, recalls his hits Darling and The Glittering Prizes. By Simon O'Hagan.
Frederic Raphael’s hit BBC drama The Glittering Prizes was first broadcast 50 years ago, in January 1976.
Now 94, he remembers a party thrown by the publishing grandee George Weidenfeld when the series was airing.
‘So there was this guest who came up to George and made some excuse about having to leave early,’ Raphael recalls.
‘And George said to him, “Don’t be so silly. I know you just want to get home in time to watch The Glittering Prizes. But it’s all right – there’s a TV in the bedroom so you can watch it here!”’
Over six episodes, Raphael’s saga charting the progress through life of a group of Cambridge undergraduates – starting in the early 1950s and ending
in the mid-1970s – kept millions of viewers spellbound.
‘One of the most dazzlingly articulate and beautifully performed productions ever made for television,’ a critic wrote.
The series made a star of Tom Conti, playing the central role of Adam Morris. While Raphael had already hit the big time as the writer of film screenplays, The Glittering Prizes became the work with which he is most closely identified – in no small part because it drew so heavily on Raphael’s own experiences.
The central character, like Raphael (Charterhouse and St John’s, Cambridge), is a product of the English public-school system; and as a Jew, he is an outsider for whom the whiff of anti-Semitism is never far away.
Raphael, still working and still eloquent, looks back on The Glittering Prizes with a blitheness that characterises his attitude to success generally. ‘It was fun to do,’ he says, describing the series as ‘a satire on oneself’.
An almost mythic status attaches to The Glittering Prizes – partly because, other than a repeat later in 1976, it has never been shown again. Raphael’s explanation is that all the leading actors involved had individual contracts, which meant that renegotiating them for subsequent showings was just too complicated.
So – unlike I, Claudius, BBC2’s other great lauded drama from 1976, and often repeated – The Glittering Prizes has, in a way, risen into the ether, living on only in the memory of the people who watched it at the time. It’s an example of ‘event television’ so powerful that it was worth leaving a George Weidenfeld party early for.
How does Raphael feel about that? ‘Amused’ is his slightly gnomic answer. ‘I’ve always had more things to get on with in the present than any inclination to worry about things that have been and gone in the past.’
During a remarkably prolific career, the things that Raphael has always had to get on with have ranged far and wide and embraced a multiplicity of literary disciplines. He’s written novels, poetry, journalism, memoir and screenplays – ‘Entertaining myself by jumping from one stool to another, however clumsily or not’ – with an approach to the task in hand inspired by one of his heroes, Somerset Maugham.
‘Willie taught me to write, in the sense that you don’t wonder whether you feel like it today, you just go and do it. It doesn’t mean you don’t take care or try to do it better. But what you had to do was produce work.’ And that work continues.
Raphael has just submitted a screenplay for a movie that will be made in 2026 – a Second World War-set story of two sisters and their role in the Dutch resistance. This comes 60 years after Raphael’s screenplay for Darling (1965) – a scathing portrait of 1960s Swinging London, directed by John Schlesinger and starring Julie Christie – won him an Oscar and propelled him into the big league.
Darling’s re-release in the summer of 2025 delighted Raphael. It gave new audiences a chance to see what he describes as an ‘English dolce vita’.
Then, later in the year, with the death of Terence Stamp, attention was turned to the triumph Raphael had had in 1967 – his adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. That too was directed by Schlesinger, with Stamp in a starring role, and Christie playing another young beauty buffeted by love.
‘After Darling, there was an immense thrust to get us going on something again,’ Raphael says. ‘But thinking now of what happened, Madding Crowd was a backward move. Instead of making more daring films, we were pitched back into traditional English filmmaking.
‘It was very rewarding in many ways, but nonetheless we should have done something bolder. We retreated into safety. And part of that was casting Julie Christie again. That was what bought the ticket.’ Christie, Raphael, says, ‘never liked being a star, or liked London social life. She couldn’t help being good, but she didn’t enjoy it.’
It was Stamp, not Christie, with whom Raphael kept in touch. ‘We’d meet for coffee at Fortnum and Mason. He was a great Fortnum’s hang-outer.’
In addition to Schlesinger, the other film director Raphael formed a close association with was Stanley Kubrick. Raphael wrote the screenplay for Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999).
While Kubrick had a reputation for scaring people away, that wasn’t the case with Raphael.
‘We got on very well. One day, Stanley said to me, “Frederic, you don’t really think I’m an artist, do you?”
And I said, “Oh, Stanley. All I know is that for you to do your art, you need
50 million dollars and all these cameras and actors and so on – whereas all I need is a pencil and a piece of paper.”
‘And Stanley said, “Frederic, you sure know how to hurt a guy!” ’
My conversation with Raphael took place in the spacious ground-floor apartment in South Kensington he and his wife Beetle bought in 1982. When she died, in early 2025, they’d been together for 75 years, having first met at Cambridge.
‘To say I miss her is a ludicrous understatement,’ Raphael says. ‘She was a very clever and remarkable woman. She noticed the individuality of absolutely everyone.’
Raphael had two sons with Beetle, Stephen and Paul; their daughter, Sarah, died from pneumonia aged 40.
In many ways, it’s a melancholy time for Raphael, not least because of living in a country that has now become, in his description, ‘an island of antagonists’. And then there is the perennial question – right now in especially sharp focus – of the position Jewish people find themselves in.
The topic of Jewishness – a central theme in The Glittering Prizes – recurs throughout our conversation.
‘I at once feel different and at the same time find assimilation not very difficult,’ Raphael says. ‘I can be a toff with toffs, if I need to be. Whether I’m taken to be a toff doesn’t matter.
‘But one of the things about educated people – supposedly educated people – is that you’re careful which voice you use in which company. Perhaps Jews always did that. They’ve been pretty good at impersonations of one kind or another.
I hesitate to make that a racial characteristic, but there we are.’
In an article published in Radio Times at the time of The Glittering Prizes, one of its stars, Angela Down, wrote that changing a single word of Raphael dialogue ‘is not only unnecessary but positively damaging. It’s like hearing him talk. You marvel at his accuracy in expressing himself.’
Half a century on, that ability is very much intact.
