The Impossible Dream is a darkly comic drama followings the events of a single night in the home of a long-suffering married couple as they try to pit their new guests against one another, luring them into a sordid powerplay.
On returning home after a funeral, attended purely to represent her husband, an aging and loveless wife draws her husband in to a regularly recurring battle of wits and words. As the insults and drinks fly, she eventually makes her final strategic advance, a late-night promise of guests, something her husband is desperate to avoid. The arrival of the guests silences the married couple for the first time.
As the married couple begin to pit the young couple against one another, the intentions of the wife become clear to everyone: to humiliate her husband at any and all costs. As she makes, not so subtle, advances of her young gentleman guest, her husband has no choice but to defend himself as a ‘real’ man, by making himself painfully available to their young female guest. When his wife succeeds in her advances towards the young gentleman, the husband forces himself on the young lady, but as things escalate further and further beyond any sign of return to normality, with his hands around the young lady’s throat, he feels the young guest breathe her final breath as her boyfriend returns from his activities with the wife.
Caught by the young gentleman with his trousers still down, the husband embraces the semi-dressed young gentleman as they celebrate their successful plan. With both female partners now dead at the hands of their lovers, It becomes apparent that the whole evening was a set up by the two men. In the hasty exchange of the two men however, the younger of the two seems unaware as the host pulls a gun from his draw and shoots the young man. The programme concludes with the host phoning the police claiming there has been a double murder and suicide involving his wife’s secret lover. The husband in final free.