[1] Nice Work won the Sunday Express Book of the Year award in 1988[2] and was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Later, away from Vic, Professor Morris Zapp, a friend of Swallow's from the fictional American university Euphoric State (based on UC Berkeley), and a character from the earlier two novels in the Campus Trilogy, pays a brief visit to Rummidge on his way to a conference.

The uncertainty in Robyn's professional status comes from whether she will be able to find a permanent post anywhere, in the context of national budget reductions to the universities.

Robyn acquires insight into the pragmatic ethos whose encroachment on university culture she resents and about the physical reality of factories of which her only prior knowledge was literature.

[9] In his turn, Vic learns to appreciate the symbolic or semiotic dimension of his environment and discovers a romanticism within himself that he had previously despised in his everyday life.

Directed by Christopher Menaul, the series featured Haydn Gwynne as Robyn Penrose and Warren Clarke as Vic Wilcox.