Showing results for "Lawrence" in Dark Humour

Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969) was an English novelist who was a bestseller in the mid-20th century. She published eighteen highly acclaimed works of fiction in her lifetime, inspired by her own tragic experiences of family life. Her works consist mainly of dialogue and focus on family life among the late Victorian or Edwardian upper middle class. They deal with money, power, status, incest, adultery, murder, homosexuality – about which she was years ahead of her time – and all the passions and stresses of family life, described with brilliant wit and perception.

In series 1 and 2, as his mum and wife, Mary, sit round his bedside and wonder how to wake him up, Ben’s mind is busy elsewhere. In his imagination, he lives with his two-year-old daughter, Blitz (now miraculously grown up), encounters celebrities such as Sue Lawley, Elvis Presley and Tom Paulin, relives memories from his past and gets into a compromising situation with a fellow inmate at a strangely familiar Torquay hotel. Meanwhile, an imaginary sitcom written by him, about coma patients in a hospital, plays in the background.