From everyone who has made the Netflix series Obsession – the writer, Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, the leads, Richard Armitage and Charlie “Happy Valley” Murphy – I want to know the following: when did they read the book on which it is based, Damage, by Josephine Hart; have they seen the film, starring Juliette Binoche and Jeremy Irons; and did they spend the whole early 90s talking about it? Lloyd Malcolm loves the book and has never seen the film. Neither appeared on Armitage’s radar at the time. And Murphy, well, she was only three when it was published in 1991.
Damage was the 50 Shades of its day – propulsive, original and extremely widely read. It had a similar lightning-rod impact to 50 Shades, as a breezy, middlebrow way in to quite a big conversation about sex. The plot centres on a respected surgeon – a rounded, well-liked man, yada yada – who meets his son’s girlfriend and immediately starts having an affair with her, with appalling consequences. It was distinctly of its time: a world still suffused with HIV anxiety, trying to build back taboos around sexual transgression that previous decades had destroyed with their permissiveness, by creating situations so unforgivable, and imagining punishments so radically disproportionate, that somehow Old Testament values might be restored.
