Derek Jacobi as Samuel Pepys
Narrator John Rowe
"About one o'clock my wife came to my side of the bed and drew my curtains open, and with the tongs, red hot at the ends, made as if she did design to pinch me with them..." Towards the end of 1668 Pepys fell in love with his wife's maid Deb, who was in her early teens. He himself was 35. The affair drove his wife into a state of near frenzy. As Pepys with his usual frankness describes the affair in his diary we come closer to him perhaps than at any other time. Compiled by Barry Carman