Story and characters
The series, created by John Stevenson and Julian Roach, was about two feuding families—the wealthy Hardacres and the working-class Fairchilds—who lived in a small terraced house rented from the Hardacre empire. The Hardacre family was headed by the ruthless self-made businessman Bradley Hardacre and his glamorous, alcoholic, aristocratic wife Lady Patience. Bradley spouted Thatcherite rhetoric, while coming up with harebrained schemes to make his businesses more efficient so he could sack workers. The head of the Fairchilds was the stern "Red" Agnes, who spread militant socialist rhetoric around the Hardacre mine, mill and munitions factory and her doltish, forelock-tugging husband George who is dominated by his wife and his boss. Agnes was also Bradley Hardacre's mistress.
Other characters in the series were the children of the families. The Fairchilds had two sons—Jack, a defiant miner and Matthew, a sensitive clerk who wrote very poor verse. The Hardacre children were Bentley (deceased; his memorial stone is featured in the first episode), glamorous, nymphomaniac Isobel, innocent budding feminist Charlotte, ambitious heir to the Hardacre empire Austin and Morris, a gay Cambridge student with a fondness for teddy bears (cf. Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited ). Bentley, Austin and Morris are named after British car manufacturers; Jack and Matt were named after terms used in the game of bowls.
Not only were Bradley and Agnes lovers, with Bradley being most likely the father of Matthew but Isobel and Jack were also lovers and afterwards it was revealed that Charlotte was not Bradley's daughter but the result of an affair between Lady Patience and the elderly Lord Mountfast, whom Isobel married. Charlotte married Matthew, to whom Morris Hardacre had at one time been attracted. To complicate matters Lady Patience also had a brief fling with Matthew Fairchild.
Despite his wealth and social connections, Bradley had been brought up in the Utterley Cottage workhouse and had made his money himself, obviously not legally or fairly. Apart from the Hardacres and the Fairchilds the most significant other character was the Scottish idealist, Dr McDuff, played by David Ashton and satirising Dr Finlay of Dr Finlay's Casebook .
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