Plum Sykes 2007. Some have seen Sykes' books as lying in natural succession to "Sex and the City", Candace Bushnell's column in the "New York Observer", which was the inspiration for a highly successful television series (HBO 1998–2004). Others remarked that the story was no less than the kind of offensive vapid claptrap you would expect from a dead-eyed rich girl. However, despite their satire, others have regarded them as too rooted in Sykes' own Park Avenue "set" to be reflective more generally of women's lives in post-9/11 Manhattan. Anita Loos' "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" (1925) is perhaps a closer, if incomparable, antecedent.
The Play What I Wrote Squeeze for the Scarlet Pimple", the "play within a play" (with a cameo by a mystery guest star) which formed the play's second half. It is named after the "play wot I wrote", the inept play supposedly written by Wise and featuring a celebrity guest which formed the finale to each Morecambe and Wise show. In "The Play What I Wrote", "Sean" writes a similarly inept play and is humoured by "Hamish" in the first half by having it performed. As in the Morecambe and Wise antecedent, the celebrity would play him or herself set up to appear, rather foolishly,