Extract from Peter Fiddick’s review in the Guardian of a TV adaptation

I cannot think that I would have gone out and paid to see William Douglas Home's play, The Kingfisher, however glittering the stars who played it. In fact, I think if I had gone I would very likely have ended up feeling such doubts quite justified. It is a play not without some depth of feeling, but Mr Douglas Home having chosen to leave most of it beneath his characters' softly talcumed surface, the interpreters can do little more than glow discreetly by way of indicating inner turmoil.

It is, of course, a comedy, more concerned to observe the foolishness of human vanities than to probe the pain they provoke. The central characters are a successful even knighted novelist, who has never married, and the woman he failed to convince half a century earlier but is now set free by her husband’s demise on the golf course, not to mention the size of his will. She comes for tea after the funeral, stays for a drunken dinner, accepts him, spends what turns out to have been a chaster night than she might have fancied, dithers a little in the morning, but departs, leaving him to his anxious valet - the most appropriate sort of marriage, it seems, after all. It is a question of people actually caring for each other.

The point of The Kingfisher, in the play, as I take it, lies in a reference to his method of choosing a nesting site by flying headlong into the bank from across the stream, and if the terrain proves too hard for his beak, moving straight on somewhere else. Thus, Sir Cecil's way of love.