Gerald Middleton is a wealthy and cultured professor of medieval history who, at sixty, feels both an academic and emotional failure. His broken marriage to the monstrous Inge has produced three children from whom he is estranged. Dollie, his best friend's wife with whom he had a long and passionate love affair, has disappeared from his life in a cloud of recrimination and alcohol. And Gilbert Stokesay, the best friend, long dead in the trenches of the Great War, continues to haunt and threaten his self-esteem as an historian - all because of the Melpham Idol, a pagan phallic figure found in the coffin of a disinterred Bishop. It is the most important archaeological find of the century, a discovery that changes the course of scholarship and sets the academic world in turmoil.

But is it a hoax? And if so who was responsible? And why? Dramatised in three episodes by Andrew Davies, from Angus Wilson's remarkable post-war novel, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes has a typically rich and interwoven cast of Wilson characters. It is a satire, a tragedy, a black comedy of manners and a deadly accurate examination of the loves, lusts and foibles of a middle-class family bent on self-destruction.