To the Manor Born starts off in splendid celebratory mode. The Lady of the Manor, Audrey fforbes-Hamilton, is adjusting to a long-awaited better life. Her husband has just died, and she's relishing her new, unfettered opportunities.
But just when she thinks she's got rid of him, he's managed to leave her a nasty surprise. He was broke. Grantleigh Manor, the ancestral home of her husband's family for the past 400 years, is mortgaged to the last escutcheon. She has to sell, and start a new, relatively impoverished life. And, more significantly, a life when she is no longer running the Manor, its grounds, and pretty well the entire neighbouring village.
The Manor goes on auction, and the unthinkable happens. In as new owner comes Richard De Vere. With a name like that, he should be OK. But this is no real De Vere. His family name was Polouvicka. He arrived from Czechoslovakia in 1939. And although he now owns one of Britain's largest food conglomerates, and changed his name and accent, Audrey fforbes-Hamilton knows that, deep down, he's really still a foreign grocer boy.
Yes, To the Manor Born is totally snobbish and hideously class and status ridden. And it's just great fun from start to finish. Audrey fforbes-Hamilton is, of course, a total monster, and that fine British television actress Penelope Keith (the eternally memorable Margot in The Good Life) obviously relishes playing the upper-crust snooty bitch from hell. In The Good Life Margot was a snob of the first order. Audrey of course isn't a snob - she's the real thing, and won't let anyone forget it.
Opposite her, Richard De Vere, played elegantly with just the right touch of 'foreigness' by Peter Bowles, doesn't stand a chance. Each episode presents these two characters engaged in very polite social and class warfare. Sometimes Richard De Vere wins a skirmish - but deep down, you know Audrey will win the war.
This is the type of situation comedy of manners and characterisation at which the British excelled. I think this is partly because most of the great British comedy shows had a finite span - they wouldn't keep pumping out new episodes long after the well had run dry.
Think of Fawlty Towers with just 12 episodes. Or The Young Ones, also with a scant dozen. The creators of To the Manor Born were a bit more generous. But it still ran for just three series', with seven episodes in each - the perfect length to let a good comic idea run through to its natural conclusion.
This two-disc set, which brings us the first seven-episode season, also reminds us that part of the success of these shows was the resonant casting for even the smallest role.
The rector, for instance, is played in impeccable poncey Anglican High-Church manner by Gerald Sim. He rejoices in his quiet Christian way at being able at long last to say goodbye to Audrey fforbes-Hamilton - until he finds to his horror that she has only moved down the drive to the Estate's gate-house. And also deliciously delineated is the character of Audrey's bullied, submissive friend Marjory, played by Angela Thorne, who has to listen to every nasty thing Audrey has to say about Richard De Vere - but who really fancies him all the time.
Of course, while Audrey loathes and despises Richard De Vere, as she sets about her self-appointed task of teaching him his new duties as Lord of the Manor, you can catch in each episode the faint blush of romance, for we all know how this particular battle is going to end. For that we'll have to await the third series. In the meantime, these seven episodes are an absolutely splendid, totally tip-top way of renewing these old acquaintances.
The last word should come from the screenwriter of the series, Peter Spence. In a short interview accompanying the first series, he's asked whether he actually likes the characters he's created.
"Do you mean would I mix with them socially?" he asked, and then plunged straight into his answer... "Probably not".
