In 1981, three years after his experience with Despair, Bogarde was again tempted out of his retreat to work with Glenda Jackson in The Patricia Neal Story. Although he and Jackson thought the film excellent with its stirring message of human will, that opinion was not shared by enough television viewers. The ‘Press was enthusiastic in their praise’, (Backcloth, 207) but when the film was shown coast-to-coast in the US, viewers preferred lighter fare and quickly switched channels. In the UK, it was ‘buried’ by being slotted on New Year’s Eve, a time when few would tune in. (Bilbow, 222)

His final forays into television were to star in May We Borrow Your Husband? (1986), with a script Bogarde had adapted himself from the Graham Greene short story, and in The Vision (1987), which had a ‘literate, well written’ script. (A Short Walk from Harrods, 190) Considering it a lifeline at that point, Bogarde readily accepted the role of a washed-up TV presenter tempted by money to work for an ultra-conservative religious television network with sinister motives. Playing opposite Lee Remick, Eileen Atkins and a young Helena Bonham Carter was a decided plus. Director Norman Stone was in awe at Bogarde’s ‘astonishing ability to compress and concentrate emotion; you could feel it from a word, thudding somewhere in the soul.’ (Coldstream, 490)