After a chance meeting on a train, novelist, Michael Pearce is commissioned to write the family history of the powerful, wealthy and ruthless Winshaw family.

But whenever he feels stressed, Pearce turns again and again to view a clip of his favourite film, What A Carve Up!

Robert Bathurst stars in Jonathan Coe’s wickedly funny, black comedy, inspired by the immorality, greed, corruption and ambition of 1980s Britain – adapted by David Nobbs (The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin).

Coe’s cult 1994 fictional novel was inspired after he watched the old British comedy horror film, What A Carve Up! (1961) starring Sid James, Kenneth Connor and Shirley Eaton. Coe opted to borrow both the film’s title and the theme of a family — as a way of exposing foul play in the British Establishment – and the excesses and evils of all aspects of Thatcherite Britain during the 80s and early 90s.