Saigon: Year of the Cat was the product of two periods of Hare's own life as an expatriate. He was in Vietnam in 1973 on an aborted commission for the BBC and, in America in 1979, during a selfimposed exile after the writing of Plenty, he found a country reappraising the inheritance of the Vietnam war through films such as The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now. They were not, he believed, true to the Vietnam he had known.

Saigon was one of the most expensive television films to date and its making was prolonged and difficult. After failing to interest an American network, it was finally screened on Thames Television on 29 November 1983, some four years after the script was completed. This delay explains its thematic similarities (a war, a love affair, a betrayal) to Plenty and Licking Hitler, while its moment of screening reinforces its position as a hinge between the history plays and Hare's drawing of a new Map of the World, when he put aside questions of class for those of nationality, and historical in favour of geographical distance.