60
Popular Culture Review
“Fringe Banking” is of note primarily for what it says about Follett’s
development as a writer. The suspense writing techniques practiced for a
television show—the inter-cutting of scenes or the foot chase down narrow
streets—would be made more fully his own in later works such as On Wings o f
Eagles and The Key to Rebecca. And as a story of fund manipulation, “Fringe
Banking” demonstrates Follett’s early interest in writing about banking capers,
heists, and financial double-dealings, as evidenced by several books published in
the 1970s: The Bear Raid (1976), Paper Money (1976), and The Heist o f the
Century (1978).3
“Numbers Man,” the last project he would attempt with a series hero, is
described as “a television series in fifty minute episodes devised by Ken Follett
and Gerard Glaister” (1), who at the time was considered a foremost British
television producer. The script, while again quite unremarkable, is nonetheless
perhaps of more than passing interest, mostly for what it reveals about British
social anxieties in the 1970s and ambivalence towards change. “Numbers Man”
was to be a series about white collar crime and the adventures of a brilliant
financial detective, Richard Liddell, who is termed “superficially. . . , very
respectable and conservative in a dark suit” but at home a “relaxed bohemian”
(1). This split between establishment and counterculture worlds is underscored
by his domestic arrangement: Richard is cynical about the business world and
lives with a bright women’s editor of a weekly paper (1-2). However, as modern
and open-minded as the character (and his writers) might wish to be, the script
inadvertently expresses a lingering conflict over new cultural attitudes in the late
1970s. The women’s editor, Nutsy, is described as “liberated in an attractive
way: braless and self-sufficient rather than tedious and shrill” (2). This
ambivalence towards traditional versus progressive attitudes is also reflected in
the description of Nutsy’s editor, “a likeable bigot in his fifties .. . [who] has
little time for students, blacks, hippies, gypsies, socialists or women, but calls
himself a liberal” (3).
Other anxieties reflected in the script include a fear over increased Arab
financial control in Britain. “For instance,” notes one of the characters, “if one
of my Arabs wanted to buy into a particular British company, and we had our
doubts—you could look into whether they were overvaluing their assets, and so
on—” (6).
This passage, along with many others in the script, points to a rather
garrulous quality overall. The script seems to contain a great deal of dialogue for
a television show, much of it resulting from the need to dramatize conflicting
social attitudes: Nutsy is concerned with justice, Richard with legality, and a
central ingredient in the proposed series is the ongoing contrast in values
expressed through domestic banter. By comparison, Follett’s previous effort,
“Fringe Banking,” seems much more tightly wrought, with a sparseness of
dialogue appropriate to a police drama. Although the final draft of “Numbers
Man” is somewhat improved, with livelier and fuller scenes between Richard
and Nutsy, much of what passes for “witty” repartee in both drafts seems to be a