Udayan Prasad, James Fleet & Peter Bowles
Running Late was the second film in the Simon Gray season for Le Cine Anglais. A film which could not have been more startlingly different in both tone and pace to the tranquil, poetic A Month in the Country. Peter Bowles is brilliantly cast as the selfish, paranoid and insufferably vain TV inquisitor George Grant, whose life literally goes to pieces in front of our eyes as he discovers that his wife has left him. Towards the end the film gets increasingly surreal, where Bowles drinks champagne in an obsequious bank manager’s office and is dragged off handcuffed by police across the mud flats of the Thames. And then we realize that it’s us who have been had all along.
Rowley & Prue Leith
Jonathan Margolis describes the film beautifully: “Death was [also] the theme of the brilliant Running Late, but you had to get to the last minute of Peter Bowles’s virtuoso performance to realise it. As this is a play which will be repeated endlessly, I don’t want to spoil it by revealing… This manic black comedy…which Bowles co-produced, showed how good a television actor he is when served by a script as fine as Simon Gray’s…The scene in the bank, where Bowles, an obsessive egomaniac desperate to get some cash and having failed the cash point challenge (he forgot his PIN number) was a masterpiece. [The bank manager (Roshan Seth)’s] conversation with Bowles on the subject of love is one of the most profound dialogues you’ll hear in a TV play.” Jonathan Margolis, Mail on Sunday, October 18 1992.
The Q+A hosted by Harry Burton with actors Peter Bowles and James Fleet and director Udayan Prasad gave a fascinating insight into the making of the film. The film took only around 23 days to make – the sense of speed and urgency being only too apparent. 
