To The Manor Born
 After
encapsulating British middle-class snobbery as Margot Leadbetter
in The Good Life, actress Penelope Keith took a stab at the
stuffy upper-crust by stepping into the (sensible) shoes of
high-society widow Audrey Fforbes-Hamilton .
Keith had already proved adept at milking laughs out of snobbery,
and so was ideal in the part of Audrey, a well-to-do, upper-class
elitist who falls on hard times following the death of her
husband.
So desperate are her financial straits that Audrey is forced to
sell her husband's huge Grantleigh Estate and thus move out of its
stately manor house - the manor to which she has become accustomed
- and into the humble gatekeeper's lodge in the grounds.
Aristocratic Margot is further horrified that her country
estate is bought by nouveau-riche tycoon,
Richard DeVere - a man of distant Czech ancestry and the head of a supermarket chain called Cavendish
Foods. The two become uneasy neighbours.
Audrey tries to come to terms with her new social standing and
the real world of launderettes, buses and supermarkets, but her
deeply ingrained feelings of superiority, and her natural tendency
to want her own way, cause her many problems.
Slowly, however, loathing gradually develops into love, with more than a little
help from Richard's Czech mother, Mrs Polouvicka (Richard's
original surname which he changed to improve his business
dealings).
Other
regular members of the cast are Audrey's best friend, Marjory
Frobisher, and her faithful but decrepit butler, Brabinger.
 The series ends
when they tie the knot and Audrey finds happiness with Richard and
is once more the lady of the manor.
Peter Spence created the idea in 1968, for a projected radio
series to feature Penelope Keith and Bernard Braden - in this
first version, Braden played an American businessman, not a Czech
descendant.
But although it was recorded, the show never aired, and it was
only after the premise had been novelised that it finally arrived
on TV, with the American element dropped and Christopher Bond on
board to help translate the idea for the small-screen. (Bond
himself wrote the final episode.)
Although the TV production came across as twee to some viewers,
it struck a chord with a large section of the public, the
high-profile casting, allied to the British fascination with
class, proving irresistible; the series attracted huge viewing
figures, sometimes in excess of 20 million, and the final episode
was seen by almost 24 million, easily the biggest-ever audience
for a single programme on British TV, beaten only in 1996 by Only
Fools And Horses .
The exterior scenes were filmed on location at the
thousand-acre Cricket St Thomas estate in Somerset, with
Grantleigh House being, in reality, Cricket House.
To The Manor Born finally appeared in its originally
intended medium when BBC Radio 2 aired ten especially recorded
episodes from 25 January to 29 March 1997, six being adaptations
by Peter Spence of his TV scripts, four being written expressly
for the purpose.
Penelope Keith and Angela Thorne reprised their TV roles but
Keith Barron played Richard DeVere in place of Peter Bowles.
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