The Ploughmans Lunch

by Ian McEwan

James Penfield is an ambitious London-based BBC radio reporter, from humble origins but Oxford-educated. He is commissioned to write a book on the Suez Crisis, claiming not to be a socialist; at that time, the 1982 Falklands War is dominating the British media.

He is attracted to Susan Barrington, an upper class, rather snobbish TV journalist, to whom he is introduced by his Oxford friend and fellow TV journalist, Jeremy Hancock. Although he is persistent, he cannot get further than a late night kiss from her and so Jeremy suggests that he contact her mother, prominent left-wing historian Ann Barrington, who lives in Norfolk and is married to advertising film director Matthew Fox. It transpires that Ann wrote an article on the Suez Crisis on its tenth anniversary and James wants to seduce the daughter by befriending the mother.

Claiming to be a socialist, James soon finds himself spending more time with the mother than her daughter; they have several long discussions and also take long walks on the Norfolk Broads. Meanwhile, his mother is dying and, having earlier said to Susan that his parents are dead in order to disguise his origins, he is forced to identify her only as a relative when his father contacts him while he is with Ann. Returning to London, he is forced to ask for help from members of a women's peace camp after suffering a puncture. Initially mistaken for another BBC man, he shows some feigned sympathy towards the group protesting against the use of force outside a Norfolk airbase. Visiting Norfolk again a week later with an uninterested Susan, James walks alone with Ann Barrington who kisses him and later enters his bedroom and has sex with him.

Caught up in this love triangle, James returns to his work in London. Over a beer and pub ploughman's lunch with Matthew Fox, Fox consents to James making love to his wife, given that they have slept in separate beds for the last three years. James refuses to take calls from the mother when she attempts to contact him at the BBC. He finally gets another Oxford friend and up and coming young poet to make a call to her ending the relationship, while he sits idly by reading advertisements in Exchange and Mart.

James, Jeremy and Susan cover the 1982 Conservative Party Conference and travel down to Brighton together in James' Jaguar. It is at the start of the conference that James first starts to get an inkling of something going on between the other two and directly asks Jeremy if he is up to something. Later, during the conference, he attempts to talk to Susan but she brushes him off and he then sees them caressing each other, having obviously returned from a hotel room. The Conference finishes with Thatcher's closing address as she rouses popular support following the Falklands War and afterwards James confronts his friend in the Brighton Centre conference hall, rebuking him for having betrayed him; he in turn is told by Jeremy that he has known Susan for fifteen years and that they are 'old allies'.

The film ends with James having a conversation with his publisher about the success of his first book. The closing scene is of James attending his mother's funeral, standing grim-faced and aloof at his father's side, as he impatiently checks his watch.