"I am writing this story about a detective who turns into a tree" was what writer Troy Kennedy Martin told his colleagues when asked what he was working on during the early 1980s. Kennedy Martin had become frustrated that "at the BBC there was no political dimension to their drama whatsoever" but had chosen to write a political story anyway, not really believing it would ever get made. The election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister and Ronald Reagan as President of the United States had brought about a major shift in the global political landscape. Kennedy Martin was motivated to write out of concern arising from such issues as the Greenham Common protests, the Falklands War, the Miners' strike and arising out of the escalation of the Cold War the fear that “born-again Christians and Cold War warriors appeared to be running the United States".