Any Human Heart

Season

2010

7.8

A novelist's life ricochets from 1920s Paris to '50s New York and '80s London. Along the way he meets Ernest Hemingway, Ian Fleming and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor - the exiled British king and his mistress Wallis Simpson.

Episode List

S1 • E1

Episode #1.1

The elderly Logan Mountstuart recalls his life as recorded in his many journals. In 1926, as an Oxford student, he is keen to race his friends Peter and Ben to losing their virginity. However, his chosen girl, the feisty socialist Land Fothergill seeks only his intellectual companionship. Thus he spends illicit Sunday afternoons with Peter's girlfriend Tess until she becomes pregnant and marries Peter. Whilst promising his dying father and Uruguayan mother that he will carry on the family tinned meat business, he longs to be a writer. After meeting Ernest Hemingway in Paris, he publishes his first book, the sexy novel 'The Girl Factory', which becomes a best seller. Land is not impressed with his book, feeling it has no intellectual value. Feeling Logan is beneath her, she marries a Labour M.P., and goes on to stand for parliament herself. Logan, on the rebound, marries Lottie, the daughter of an aristocrat. They have a son, Lionel, but the marriage is not a happy one and,when in 1936, Logan goes to Spain to cover the Civil War, it is not Lottie who sees him off but the alluring BBC journalist Freya Deverell, who is carrying his child.

S1 • E2

Episode #1.2

In Barcelona Logan meets Hemingway who arranges for him to go the front,where he witnesses the slaughter of members of the International Brigade. He returns to England and divorces Lottie to marry Freya,who has given birth to a daughter, Stella. He is given limited access to his son,Lionel.Tess kills herself due to the infidelity of Peter,who converts to Catholicism as atonement. World War Two breaks out and Logan's friend Ian Fleming recruits him for Naval Intelligence. He is sent to the Bahamas to keep tabs on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor whose loyalty is in doubt but falls out with them after refusing to take part in implicating an innocent man in the murder of his wealthy father-in-law. Back in Europe he is interned as a spy,returning to London at the end of the war to find Freya and Stella have both been killed in an air raid.

S1 • E3

Episode #1.3

In 1955 Logan lives in New York,running an art gallery for Ben Leeping and married to American widow Alannah but the marriage is falling apart and he drinks heavily. On a visit to London following his mother's death he meets the seductive Gloria, third wife of Peter Scabius,with whom he has a highly sexual affair and,on his return to New York,shortly after he learns of Hemingway's death,Alannah leaves him for another man. Compensation comes when long estranged son Lionel turns up to see him but the boy dies of a drug overdose and Lottie,arriving in New York for the funeral,blames Logan. Logan has to flee New York after an affair with Monday,his son's girlfriend,who has lied about her age and is a minor,rendering him open to prosecution. Back in London he lives frugally in a basement flat where Gloria,divorced from Peter and dying of cancer,spends her last days with him. He inherits a house in the South of France and,returning from a visit there,is run over by a car.

S1 • E4

Episode #1.4

Logan recovers from his accident in hospital,being a very grumpy patient. On discharge he joins the Socialist Patients' Collective,believing it to be a hospital lobby group when it is actually an anti-capitalist cell with links to the Baader-Meinhof gang. On its behalf he travels to Switzerland,recalling war-time incarceration, but,on discovery that he has been sent to buy explosives,he ditches his purchase and quits the group. He retires to his house in France,befriending divorced local woman Gabrielle,who reminds him of Freya. With Peter and Ben now both dead Logan is the lone survivor of the Oxford trio and he will spend the rest of his days working on his autobiography,to be published as 'Any Human Heart'.