Trivia

David Bowie was the first choice to play Martin Taylor.

This movie was not a box-office success. It only ended up being profitable because soundtrack sales and video rentals did well.

This movie was made first as Brimstone and Treacle (1976) by BBC1 as part of their "Play for Today" series, but the movie was banned and withdrawn from being broadcast because of a rape scene. The television play was eventually first broadcast in 1987.

Playwright Dennis Potter said of his play "Brimstone and Treacle" in 1978: "I had written Brimstone and Treacle in difficult personal circumstances. Years of acute psoriatic arthropathy-unpleasantly affecting skin and joints-had not only taken their toll in physical damage but had also, and perhaps inevitably, mediated my view of the world and the people in it. I recall writing (and the words now make me shudder) that the only meaningful sacrament left to human beings was for them to gather in the streets in order to be sick together, splashing vomit on the paving stones as the final and most eloquent plea to an apparently deaf, dumb, and blind God. I was engaged in an extremely severe struggle not so much against the dull grind of a painful and debilitating illness, but with unresolved, almost unacknowledged, 'spiritual' questions."

The character to which Martin Taylor is alluded, and suspected of being, is The Devil. However, at no time does the script state that Martin is The Devil. This is something that has been assumed by viewers and writers over the years. In fact, this is one several plays that Potter wrote which featured men who suffer the "delusion" that they have supernatural powers.