Program Title
Cakes and Ale

Based On
The novel by Somerset Maugham

Adapted By
Harry Green

Number of Episodes:
3

Description
'Cakes and Ale' follows the story of barmaid Rosie Gann--beautiful, vivacious, with a history and a heart of gold. Ted Driffield is a struggling young novelist, and Rosie marries him because he needs her. Years later she deserts him and elopes to America with the most faithful of her lovers, 'Lord' George Kemp, because his business has crashed in ruins, and his need for her is greater than Ted's. After a serious illness Driffield, now famous, marries his nurse and, with his wife's help, establishes his reputation as the Grand Old Man of English Letters. After his death, she wants to preserve this image through a biography designed to minimize the importance of Rosie as his creative inspiration. It is Willie Ashenden, now a successful writer and once Rosie's love, who provides the final twist to a warm, affecting, and immensely entertaining story.


Original broadcast date
1976-04-04

Cast	Characters
Judy Cornwell	Rosie
Michael Hordern
Peter Jeffrey
Lynn Farleigh
James Grout
Mike Pratt
Ken Wynne
Diana Lambert
Madge Ryan

Credits

Producer: Richard Beynon
Director: Bill Hays

Intro
CAKES AND ALE/Episode 1/Intro by Alistair Cooke

Good evening, I'm Alistair Cooke.

Tonight we begin a series that runs in three parts. It is based on a short novel called Cakes and Ale, and it was the favorite work of its author, William Somerset Maugham.

I'm not sure, come to think of it, that anybody ever saw Maugham sweat. He was a fastidious, unflappable, beautifully organized total professional. A pro–I take it–being somebody who can do his best work when he doesn't particularly feel like it. In late middle age–he lived to be ninety-two–he was asked by a guest at his sumptuous villa in the South of France how he had produced such a formidable body of work of novels, plays, essays, and travel books. It's a question that might occur to any guest, because Maugham led a smooth but active social life. He burned no midnight oil. He didn't scribble by dawn's early light. He never missed his cocktails–he took a social lunch and a social dinner--and was usually free in the evenings for long sessions of bridge. But he gave the pro's classic answer. After breakfast, he went to his desk, seven days a week. And nothing interfered with his writing for the next three hours. That was enough, he said, if you wrote every day as a cabinet maker saws and planes every day–enough to fill more shelves than are ever threatened by a tousled antisocial genius who waits for the fit to take him. Maugham was born in Paris, the son of a lawyer attached to the British embassy. And he learned to speak French before he learned English. But when he went to school in England, he was ridiculed for his mispronunciations. And the steady ridiculing of a small boy took its toll in a lifelong stammer.

It also may have helped to sharpen his talent for irony and strengthen his sympathy for simple or rebellious people who found themselves up against confident social types. That was Maugham's meat. The drama we are going to see is a splendid case in point. It is about an old curmudgeon, a rough countryman who was a sailor who then turned to writing and became–even as Maugham became in old age–the grand old man of English letters.

Now, Cakes and Ale, episode one.





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