Angus Wilson (1913-1991) wrote his novel "Late Call" in 1964, and 20 years later, Anthony Burgess ranked it as one of the 99 best novels written since 1939. This led to its inclusion in the rec.arts.books compilation list of the 425 "Greatest Books of All Time." The central character is the elderly Sylvia Calvert, and Wilson wanted to "find a way of suggesting the absurd and the compassionate at the same time in Sylvia's story," and with her son, "the sudden, incidental and completely horrible in the deadly respectable world." Adapting Wilson's novel into four episodes (each approximately 50 minutes in length), Dennis Potter expanded Wilson's prologue ("The Hot Summer of 1911") into the drama's centerpiece, intercutting between past and present as he probed spiritual desolation in the English Midlands.