Green believes audiences embraced the comedy because it was a love story told with honesty.
"The themes were very adult. Decisions were made that were adult. It was never a scenario about an older woman and a younger man. It was about two adults making grown-up decisions."
After the first episode aired on British TV, Abbott got a surprising picture of who was tuning in.
"I expected that we would latch on to that classic female audience for romantic films, but it got a substantial male audience," he says. "Robson Green is very popular with all ages. He pulled in a new kind of age group for that kind of drama."
Eaton agrees that "Reckless" is more than a "chick flick."
"It's a wonderful conceit of a woman of a certain age falling in love successfully with a man so much younger who absolutely adores her and respects her," Eaton says. "I think that really got men and women. You could say it's a middle age woman's fantasy, but you could also argue that it is a younger man's fantasy to have such a fabulous woman give him that time."
And there has been a "Reckless" ripple effect, with the first installments turning the smolderingly sexy, blue-eyed Green into a TV superstar in England and the hottest heartthrob to hit the PBS airwaves since Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons in "Brideshead Revisited" 17 years ago.
"Everyone wants him," says Eaton. "[The British networks] are fighting each other over him."
Television: 'Masterpiece Theatre' updates its sexy, funny contemporary romance with a two-hour movie.
When we last saw passionate lovers Owen and Anna at the conclusion of "Reckless," "Masterpiece Theatre's" surprisingly contemporary romance in three chapters, the couple had thrown caution to the wind and run off together, much to the chagrin of Anna's jealous, but terribly unfaithful, husband Richard.
"Reckless, the Sequel," which premieres on PBS Sunday night, picks up the thread of that passion, which fortunately burns as hot as ever. The two-hour movie--a year has passed--finds the couple blissfully together in a small but attractive flat.
Owen (Robson Green) is eating breakfast as he silently and lovingly watches Anna (Francesca Annis) get ready for work. As she leaves, Anna smiles and, just before closing the door, says: "Yes."
Owen's reaction is anything but subtle, though there is much about this movie that is. Within a week, the two will be--well, leave it to Owen to explain.
The initial six-part "Reckless" certainly was a change of pace for the PBS series. For 28 years, "Masterpiece Theatre" has presented countless acclaimed, award-winning British period dramas.
In fact, "Reckless" may be the first "Masterpiece Theatre" series to feature a male lead who wears blue jeans and a leather jacket. Britches, hose and powdered wigs are more the norm.
Penned by Paul Abbott ("Cracker," "Touching Evil"), the romantic comedy has been a breath of fresh air for the series. A huge hit in England, "Reckless" also caught on with "Masterpiece" fans when it aired early last year.
Viewers and critics found much to like. "Reckless" was passionate, sexy, funny and steamy--and set in the '90s.
Abbott's sophisticated characters were wonderfully rendered by Annis as the beautiful, middle-aged and very married executive Anna and hunky Green as the young, sexy doctor who worked in a hospital run by Anna's ninny of a husband, Richard (Michael Kitchen), who, it so happens, had a pregnant mistress.
The sequel finds the insanely jealous Richard employing every dirty trick in the book to come between Owen and Anna.
Abbott believes that "Reckless" appealed to audiences because viewers were ripe for something romantic and funny.
"People seemed ready for something more life-affirming," says Abbott, who was once married to a woman 11 years his senior. "Though it had obsessional qualities about it and complicated emotional material, making that complex and funny at the same time was a real joy."
Even before the last episode of "Reckless" aired in England, Abbott was being bombarded to do a six-part sequel.
"I fought the sequel off for five big meetings," Abbott says. Finally, he adds, he agreed to do a two-hour movie.
"He's telling you lies," Green says, laughing. "They came to him with wheelbarrows full of money. I agree with Paul that he couldn't have had another six hours because watching people in love would be boring anyway. You have to do something immediate; they are going to get married, and there is a consequence to that marriage."
Though "Reckless" is not typical "Masterpiece" fare, it remains among the series' most popular and fits--even if not too tidily--all the dramatic requirements, according to series executive producer Rebecca Eaton.
"I think you can make a case that 'Masterpiece Theatre' was built on a bedrock of romance and that the [series'] stock in trade has been complicated love, as well as encumbered love whether it is adulterous love, fatal love or love on two sides of the political fence," she says.
Interview de Susan King
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First, there was Ian Ogilvy when the two appeared together in a West End production of Chekhov's The Three Sisters. And then came Fiennes, a betrayal too far for the long-suffering Wiseman. "The fault, of course, was mine," he said bitterly.
"She was not guilty of anything. Her children were informed that she had not left them, only me. She did, however, apologise to me for her behaviour over the past ten years."
Annis wrings her hands. "It's like a nightmare, like being in an anxiety dream. You want to speak and you can't, and everything is going on around you. You feel the need for clarity and yet at the same time why should you justify your personal actions to people who don't even know you? In time, of course, you do wake up.
"I used to start each day thinking, 'Oh God, what's today's anxiety going to be?' But I'm not as anxious as I was. I've learnt to drop my shoulders." (Well, if she says so...) "Most things these days, I'm really not going to get my knickers in a twist about."
Three years ago, she paid her first visit to a therapist. "I was very, very low. I needed to say things to somebody that I didn't want to say to anybody else. I needed to let it all out. I found it tremendously cathartic." But the end, when it came, was wretched, she says, and no less so for the fact that she and Wiseman had never married.
"The sadness and the hurt and the fury and the confusion must be the same whether you are married or not . . . It hasn't changed my mind about being married. Patrick and I were together for 21 years. No one can trivialise that."
It is reckoned to be difficult for famous beauties to cope with the march of time. Annis professes to be unconcerned. "It's like a fire. It goes through a journey, and each stage is interesting. I don't regret the passing of time. I try to live in the present, which should mean my life's full. In my 40s, I didn't look back at missed opportunities in my 30s."
And in her 50s ? "I'll let you know when I'm 60. But I do find it interesting not being looked at all the time as a sexual object."
Is that really true? "Look, I've walked out of enough supermarkets in my time to notice how often people open the door for me. I'm conscious of a new canvas opening up. Actually, I've just discovered gardening."
So this is a good time? "Oh, I hate that. It's funny, this thing about happiness. It's a commodity that was imported from America in the Fifties. I see myself simply as living my life, just getting on with it. I'm not unhappy . . . But I feel it's pushing your luck to define how happy you are."
At the conclusion of Reckless: The Movie (if you don't want to know the result look away now), Owen and Anna do indeed get married. Does she believe that would have happened? Much shuffling and rearranging of outer garments.
Tinkly laugh. "Mmm. Well, yes. Didn't you? I did, because Anna was a very straight woman who believed in one-to-one relationships and in marriage."
And how does she view the looming interest in her private life? "I shall continue to buy the papers I always buy and then I won't have to read all the bogus speculation. I'm not," she says with some finality, "a masochist, you know."
"Never trust anyone who says 'trust me'. What I have learned is that when you become as popular as we were - and that's all we were popular - you become a commodity.
And there are a lot of sharks out there and they will exploit you to the hilt. It became ridiculous the way we were being exploited by people close to us. You have to have your wits about you so you can bite back."
He may be a star but he doesn't act like one - and he certainly doesn't want to be one.
"I hope I don't play the celebrity. I'll do an interview to promote a show but in terms of promoting my personality, I don't want to do that. I like fishing far better than pontificating about myself.'
It's the eyes you notice first. Twinkly blue, they're flirty and mischievous and dead sexy.
He's one of those men who makes you feel like the centre of the universe when you walk into a room, or in this case his trailer which is his base while he's away from home filming.
"I've got this really nice tiramisu coffee. You'll like it," he says boiling up the kettle and finding a clean mug. Coffee tasting of sweet spongy Italian dessert sounds suspiciously sickly. But it turns out to be surprisingly tasty. Rather like Robson Green really.
On screen the 34-year-old actor has a ladd-ish quality which appeals to the men and the ability to turn female viewers of all ages to jelly.
In the flesh he is relaxed and friendly, passionate about socialism, his home footie team Newcastle, fishing.
"Shame I haven't got me photo of the fish I caught with me... a 12 pounder" - and his family. And he's brimming with confidence and enthusiasm about his work.
Despite his slight build, he looks just as good out of his clothes as in them as is apparent when he strips off once again for the Reckless sequel.
"It wasn't steamy," he protests as I ask about the love scene where the couple are caught out by the builders. You're talking like it was on at 11 o'clock at night at some dodgy cinema in Soho. If people fall in love they get their kit off."
Interview de Maggie Brown
Interview by Richard Barber.
"I don't want three million people digesting my private life over their cornflakes. Yes, I can see that I'm playing with fire. But I maintain the rather old-fashioned view that this is my work and it's in the public arena, but that doesn't entitle everyone to know what happened at home before coming here..."
It's no mystery why Annis should exert such a strong hold over what used to be Fleet Street. With her olive complexion (a half-French, half-Brazilian mother), her slanting brown eyes, her creamy voice, her willowy figure, she has lost little of her allure over more than three decades as a highly respected actress.
She was recently chosen by Radio Times readers as the sexiest woman ever on television. It suits the media, she says, to have a middle-aged femme fatale. So she doesn't recognise this image of herself ?
"I don't really have an image of myself. I see myself primarily in a domestic setting." Perhaps, but she is being a touch disingenuous. In the final decade of her years with Patrick Wiseman, she had two high-profile affairs and there were strong rumours of a third.
On the edge seems to come more naturally. Throughout much of our conversation, statements are made, then questioned and retracted. I lose count of the number of times she says something, stops short and asks herself, "Now, why do I say that?" At one point, turning herself in two to say something, anything, that she is happy to stand by, she looks at my tape-recorder. "Don't you want to check that's working?" she asks, in some desperation.
The reason Annis is so nervous is not difficult to understand. ITV is now rerunning Reckless, in which late-40s Anna (Annis, 53 in real life) is in the grip of a torrid affair with Owen (Robson Green), an early-30s surgeon. On Sunday, October 11, some 15 million viewers - the series was a thumping hit on its first outing - are expected to tune in to two-and-a-half hours of Reckless: The Movie, a glorious slab of high-class tosh in which all will be resolved.
This in itself would be insufficient reason to explain the leading lady's current state of high twitch. But as all the world must know, a little less than three years ago, Annis fell tumultuously in love with Ralph Fiennes: piquantly, she played Gertrude, mother to his Hamlet in an acclaimed production at London's Hackney Empire.
Fiennes, now 35, left his wife, the actress Alex Kingston, also 35, while Annis finally walked out on photographer Patrick Wiseman, 60, father of her children, girls of 20 and 17, and a l3-year-old son.
It was a watershed in her life which she has so far refused to discuss, but even she cannot resist acknowledging the unanswered question. "I suppose people must wonder why I'd choose a part where art could seem to be imitating life," Annis says. "But I was contracted to make Reckless before all the mayhem of the past two or three years."
In the circumstances, she concedes that her continuing affair with Fiennes (she has just returned from visiting him in Budapest on the set of his latest film) coinciding with her on-screen romps with Robson Green "must have been a publicist's dream".
She already knew how bad it could be. When she was 16, and cast as Elizabeth Taylor's handmaiden in Cleopatra, she witnessed how the encircling media could devour someone's private life - in this case, Taylor's consuming affair with Richard Burton. It taught her to be wary.
Even better, the four- part original, which ends on Saturday, was a warm-up for the sequel - Reckless, the Movie - which will be shown on October 10. A delicious week of speculation lies ahead. Can such mad love survive and lead to happiness ?
If the Reckless phenomenon has bypassed you, here's a catch-up. The ubiquitous Robson Green plays one of the nicest screen versions of his Geordie self; he's Dr Owen Springer, a rising youngish surgeon, who returns to Manchester from London to live with his ailing dad, played by that professional screen villain David Bradley. They live in a Victorian terraced house; pub on corner, betting shop next door. There's lots of working-class life, but Reckless moves effortlessly across the class divisions.
Springer falls head over heels for Anna Fairley (Annis), the sophisticated, cool, careerist wife of his nasty consultant boss, Richard Crane (Michael Kitchen). His attentions, initially spurned, are returned when Fairley discovers (thanks to some undercover work by Springer) that her husband is having a fling with a bitchy hospital manager, played brilliantly by Daniela Nardini.
The appeal of Reckless, besides a topnotch cast, is that it's based on an age-old truism, that faint heart never won fair lady. If you want something, you have to go for it. But, and here's the key: the chasing usually involves older men in pursuit of somewhat younger women, or at least their contemporaries. What's keeping millions of us pinned to our sofas is that a mature lady is being fought for here. Also, Robson/Springer is that rarely sighted creature, whether on television or in real life, a real man, keen on straightforward one-to-one hetero- sexual sex.
Okay, he's a bit short to be genuine heart- throb material, but we do see lots of his hairy chest. He plays football in his Newcastle United strip, can't cook anything more ambitious than Marmite toasties and bacon sandwiches - though he aspires - and sends gorgeous flowers to the woman he loves. He's not short of money, but he never seems calculating. Best of all - and this is the charm of the series - in a world of tricksy screwed-up men, you never doubt that this is truly love. He doesn't play hard to get, or indulge in any games. He never wavers in his goal: to be with her. He blurts out declarations of love, without reserve.
Paul Abbott, the writer, who learnt his craft on Coronation Street, deliberately constructed it this way. Springer is allowed to break all the rules in pursuit of the woman of his dreams. He courteously never inquires about Anna's real age. He doesn't talk about the difficulties of having children with a menopausal woman. He shrugs off the well-meaning warnings about Oedipus complexes from younger colleagues.
So when Fairley's marriage collapses, and Crane and Springer have a deeply funny and undignified punch-up over her, it is the bereft Springer who moves heaven and earth to pursue her to a Lake District hideaway when she tries to escape the pressure, wheedling the phone number from her secretary.
The greater truth, of course, is that everyone loves a lover, especially one who is kind to old ladies (Springer is especially gracious to Anna's mother, who is suffering from Alzheimer's disease). We're presented with a portrait of an educated rough diamond with the kindest of hearts, a persistence that never gets stale . . . all combined with those devastating blue eyes.
All a fantasy staged for sad middle-aged women like me? Well, the interesting thing is that Abbott wrote this piece from experience. As a young aspiring writer fresh from university, he married an older, more educated woman (though they subsequently divorced).
And it's a fact that Annis herself is engaged in a well-publicised relationship with that much younger film-star hunk Ralph Fiennes. This all stokes up the watchability factor.
What I've also really clocked this time around is the genius of the wardrobe mistress. Anna Fairley is decked out in a range of subtle, glamorous everyday clothes. The series is an object lesson in how to look great without invoking the words mutton and lamb.
You could start a Reckless line at Marks & Spencer: millions of us would turn up for soft turtlenecks (no sagging necks), flattering autumnal-coloured skirts and versions of her soft leather coat with fur collar.
Cue Reckless, The Movie, which starts one year on and opens in the trendy warehouse flat they've bought together.
Can such a passionate pair live happily ever after ? Does everything, after all, have to extract a price ? Till Saturday the 10th.
Hearts are beating, ready for the sequel to Reckless.
Why is it the stuff of fantasy, asks MAGGIE BROWN, and not just for women of a certain age ? Dangerous liaison: Francesca Annis and Robson Green
Addicted to love 'Isn't it wonderful, Reckless is back," said a fortysomething divorced friend of mine.
"I'd forgotten how steamy it was." And we shared a private smile.
ITV has just repeated the series, a surprise hit with 12m viewers last year, starring the heart-throb Robson Green and glamorous Francesca Annis - recently voted "sexiest woman on television" by Radio Times readers - locked in a wild, passionate love triangle across an ominously large age gap.
Younger man hopelessly in love with older married beauty, a couple who behave so badly, they have it off in a car park under the stars while jealous husband throws tantrums.
It's enough to send teenagers running in disgust from the room and grouchy husbands out to the pub.
The TV critics didn't take much notice at the time and haven't troubled themselves with a repeat, naturally.
That's all right. It's just left mil-lions of the rest of us contentedly lapping up one of the most sizzlingly successful dramas of the 1990s.
Interview de Pam Francis, TV Times, 10 Octobre 1998
The love he's talking about is between his character, Dr Owen Springer, a thirty something medic living with older woman Anna (Francesca Annis) who is now divorced from her consultant husband Richard Crane, played by Michael Kitchen. He proposes marriage and it's a case of will they or won't they tie the knot.
Infidelity is a subject he refuses to be drawn on. "There are terrible consequences to it but I'm not going to moralise. I have no opinions on it. I'm not going to say it's disgusting and how dare you.
But there are terrible consequences to it and you will hurt people. If there is no hope in a relationship, what are you supposed to do? Suffer in silence?"
One relationship that hasn't played such an important role in his life recently is that between Robson and his showbiz singing partner, former Soldier Soldier star, Jerome Flynn. Considering how close they were it's extraordinary that the two men no longer see each other.
"We're still mates but I haven't seen him in nearly two years," says Robson, pouring some more coffee.
"They were asking us to do more singing and I thought 'I don't want to do it'. And then Jerome wanted to go in his own direction. It's a natural progression of people wanting to do their own things."
There's no doubt this cheeky, charming, talented Geordie with humble roots can afford to do whatever he likes in life. But most of his money these days is ploughed into his own production company, which has just made the eight-part drama Grafters, which is soon to be screened on ITV, with Robson and Stephen Tompkinson as two brothers whose business brings them to London.
On his own personal journey to the top as one of TV's highest paid actors, Robson has learned a valuable lesson.
She was recently chosen by Radio Times readers as the sexiest woman ever on television. It suits the media, she says, to have a middle-aged femme fatale. 'I can see that I'm playing with fire'
There are three of us in the discreet drawing room of the hotel in South Kensington, and Francesca Annis is the most nervous. By a considerable margin.
"I've been downstairs in the loo," she volunteers, "and I felt a bit agoraphobic. I had this image of trench warfare; I was about to go over the top and I knew I couldn't win. Down there, nobody could get me. Silly, isn't it?"
She flashes a hopeless smile, then embarks on what turns out to be the protracted business of getting herself comfortable for her imagined ordeal.
First she asks the television company's minder to sit in one chair, then another, then she decides she doesn't like her in silhouette against the window.
"No, look, I'm awfully sorry," she announces, her mind made up. "But would you mind frightfully leaving the room altogether? I just feel I'd be playing to an audience with you here."
The minder, politeness itself, melts away as Annis turns her attention to whether she should sit back in her chair or on its very edge.