New role for Bowles

Press, 8 December 1987, Page 15

New role for Bowles

Peter Bowles — star of “Lytton’s Diary” (8 p.m. on One) — will be back next year in a new role with his old friend and co-star Penelope Keith. The dynamic duo of “To the Manor Born” fame will be the leading

couple in a new series of “Executive Stress,” with Bowles taking over Geoffrey Palmer’s part. When Bowles played Richard Devere in “To the Manor Born,” the news-hounds and gossipwriters were there, want-

ing to know what he had for breakfast and just how friendly he was with his charming co-star Penelope Keith. Bowles found a way of getting even. He devised his particularly devious character, Neville Lytton, who spends his time digging up dirt on the upper echelons of society. Through “Lytton’s Diary” he can show the gossip columnists just what he thinks of them. “I occasionally get into gossip columns,” he says, 1 “but only if I’m at some party or other — not for scandalous behaviour or drug-taking. “In fct I’m very straight — you know, happily married and all the rest of it.” Bowles and his real-life wife, actress Susan Bennett, have been together for 26 years and have three children, all in their twenties. Bowles admits, though, he has an avid interest in gossip, stemming from a childhood in which parents were valet and nanny to a gossip-con-scious upper-class household. Bowles’s commitment to “Lytton’s Diary” had ended by the time Keith asked him to step into the role of her on-screen husband Donald Fairchild in “Executive Stress” — and he jumped at the chance.