H. E. Bates Lydia". His most popular creation was the Larkin family in "The Darling Buds of May". Pop Larkin and his family were inspired by a colourful character seen in a local shop in Kent by Bates and his family when on holiday. The man (probably Wiltshire trader William Dell, also on holiday) turned up to the shop with a huge wad of rubber-banded bank notes and proceeded to spoil his trailer load of children with Easter eggs and ice creams. The television adaptation, produced after his death by his son Richard and based on these stories, was a tremendous success. It
The Darling Buds other members being dark-haired males) along with the likes of The Primitives and Transvision Vamp, but also referenced the C86 scene of a few years earlier. The Darling Buds formed in Caerleon near Newport, South Wales, in 1986 by 19-year-old Andrea Lewis Jarvis. Their debut single, "If I Said", was released on February 1987 and was well received. The group re-released the single on an established label, Native Records, receiving radio play on John Peel's BBC Radio 1 show. Signing with Sony in 1988, several singles preceded their critically acclaimed 1989 debut LP, "Pop Said...". The album, described as "relentlessly