This is a clever remake of the story of Piers Gaveston, gay lover of Edward II.

Set in a current-day university not unlike Oxford, it features Gaveston as a new TV-savvy lecturer brought in to drag it into the 21st century. Edward is a media baron and university benefactor, the uncle of the narrator, a research student. He encourages Gaveston to woo his neice so as to direct public gaze away from the homosexual lovers. The heroine naturally falls in love with the beautiful but doomed megastar, and Merritt keeps the sinister atmosphere bubbling with menace, right to the denouement.