Reception
The Lost Boys was first aired on BBC-2 television in three weekly 90-minute episodes, beginning 11 October 1978. Reviews were highly favourable. The critic Sean Day-Lewis wrote in The Daily Telegraph, 'I doubt if biography has ever been better televised than in this sensitive and beautifully crafted masterpiece, and I am quite sure such excellence is beyond any other television service in the world. ... The entire House of Commons should be required to view it before voting on the proposed increase in BBC funding.' Janet Dunbar (Barrie's 1971 biographer) called it 'a brilliant achievement ... a classic in the television medium - one of the finest pieces of television drama I have ever seen. ... I had the experience of watching, not Ian Holm playing J M Barrie, but Barrie himself ... the definitive recreation of J M Barrie in dramatic terms.' Nancy Banks-Smith wrote in The Guardian: 'Andrew Birkin's convincing and compelling biographical trilogy is most beautifully and sensitively done. ... There is a nice ambivalence about The Lost Boys as there is about The Turn of the Screw, an ambiguity and sense of menace. A delightful frightfulness. The rich sets, the allusive, elusive script which always suggests more than it says. ... The Lost Boys is a gift, a present, a parabola of pleasure to me, something to be unwrapped and tasted and rewrapped and saved until later.' Michael Church wrote in The Times: 'Andrew Birkin's superb and haunting trilogy ... something quite out of the ordinary ... Desire, devotion, disease and death loom out in disturbingly intimate close up. ... Ian Holm, physically Barrie to the life, rules absolutely.' Chris Dunkley wrote in the Financial Times, 'It is only very rarely that a television drama comes along in which every constituent manages to provide a flawless contribution. The Lost Boys has been such a production.'
The film was cited in several annual round-ups, including Benny Green in Punch: 'Best Original Drama: The Lost Boys, which advanced from competence to brilliance to deep compassion and mastery of touch, and which, for intensity of characterization and economy of writing, was a masterpiece of the televisual form.' In the Daily Mail, Elisabeth Cowley voted 'My Pick of the Year: For sheer delicacy, The Lost Boys. A lovely, disturbing production, not quite of this world - indeed, no more of this world than the bewitched and lonely writer at its heart. Ian Holm never put a foot wrong in his stunning portrayal of J M Barrie.' The BBC’s Director-General Sir Ian Trethowan called it 'a landmark in television drama'.
The BBC published the full scripts when the series was repeated in 1980, The Spectator calling them 'a priceless addition to a corpus of literature of coherent television drama.'
Read more about this topic: The Lost Boys (docudrama)
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“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
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